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Comment by dleslie | Hacker News Reader

It plays out with Amazon absolutely crushing Google when it tried to be a consumer marketplace, and even trouncing Google at providing web infrastructure services.

If, somehow, an antitrust ruling split ads from the rest of Google the non-ads remainder wouldn't last more than a few years.

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Alphabet as a whole is an organization built by the immense money that comes from monopolizing digital advertising (through some very... unscrupulous means) and then run by people deluding themselves into thinking they can do anything else. There's a reason everything is "killed by google" - I'm not exactly sure anyone there knows how to do damn near anything that isn't propped up by investor hype and the money they make from ads and other strictly profitable ventures such as GCP. Alphabet only has the ability to do immensely stupid things because their core business gives them damn near infinite money to play with.

You are 100% correct in that ads are the ONLY thing propping up google as a business. This is probably a very bold prediction, but I think that when money starts getting more expensive, when rich billionaires are more reluctant to just throw money at inane, borderline speculative bullshit, there will be a massive hemorrhaging of unnecessary business. And maybe this is a little out there but... you know how YouTube doesn't actually make any fucking money?

Interesting things to think about for sure.

The YouTube thing is false as of a few years ago. If you have noticed, they've crammed it full of ads.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/27/22596592/google-q2-2021-r...

I think it's projected to earn 20 billion this year.

Thanks for this. I've heard recently that, in its current form, digital advertising is extremely overpriced and propped up by misleading metrics [1] and might take a downturn in the future, but I also don't really know much about it and and that point it's just speculation.

[1] https://hbr.org/2021/02/what-digital-advertising-gets-wrong

Not sure about that... It could be a blessing for the tech community if that happens. Let's consider 3 parts: Ads, Cloud and Labs. Alphabet could fund Labs as research arm (basically what it is anyway, with all the exploratory projects) and could like see a revival of the golden days times of Bell Labs, Xerox Park, etc.

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