Anything besides ads that actually make them money ? I am honestly curious if they still cannot find a way how to make money with anything else besides ads
Google - like Apple, Berkshire, and several other companies - suffers from the curse of too much capital. I would love to have a business with $3.4B in revenue - it actually puts you in the Fortune 1000 at around #675, right alongside Urban Outfitters and Citrix and slightly ahead of Diebold, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Warner Music Group. But when your other business is AdWords and makes about $90B a year, it doesn't really move the needle.
Both companies need diversification. I’m with Google with this one long term because I think their bets are more interesting.
But if you want diversification, their cloud services are growing quickly and they seem very committed to growing their hardware revenue.
As the world moves into virtual space, nothing is as valuable as attention. Storage and Processing power are commodities.
I would say owning the worlds attention is enough of a business model.
They don’t own it. They only provide a way for advertisers to make an appeal for it.
Sounds like a quibble but their entire business model can come crashing down in enough people start using adblockers which is already happening organically by word of mouth with little noise.
Ownership would mean they can force your attention on anything they deem fit.
Plus fastest growing is the business not using an ad based business model.
It is like saying CBS needs to diversify. Well if they only had 1 popular show then a need to diversify.