The $300B Google-Meta Advertising Duopoly is Under Attack (yahoo.com) 34
The Economist notes this business cycle is hurting ad revenue for Alphabet's Google and Meta's Facebook."Last quarter Meta reported its first-ever year-on-year decline in revenues. Snap, a smaller rival, is laying off a fifth of its workforce." But for both companies, "the cyclical problem may not be the worst of it," since they're finally facing some real competition.
"They might once have hoped to offset the digital-ad pie's slower growth by grabbing a larger slice of it. No longer." Although the two are together expected to rake in around $300bn in revenues this year, sales of their four biggest rivals in the West will amount to almost a quarter as much... What is more, as digital advertising enters a period of transformation, the challengers look well-placed to increase their gains. The noisiest newcomer to the digital-ad scene is TikTok. In the five years since its launch the short-video app has sucked ad dollars away from Facebook and Instagram, Meta's two biggest properties. So much so that the two social networks are reinventing themselves in the image of their Chinese-owned rival.... But Meta and Google may have more to worry about closer to home, where a trio of American tech firms are loading ever more ads around their main businesses.
Chief among them is Amazon, forecast to take nearly 7% of worldwide digital-ad revenue this year, up from less than 1% just six years ago. The company started reporting details of its ad business only in February, when it revealed sales in 2021 of $31bn. As Benedict Evans, a tech analyst, points out, that is roughly as much as the ad sales of the entire global newspaper industry. Amazon executives now talk of advertising as one of the company's three "engines", alongside retail and cloud computing.
Next in line is Microsoft, expected to quietly take more than 2% of global sales this year — slightly more than TikTok. Its search engine, Bing, has only a small share of the search market, but that market is a gigantic one. Microsoft's social network, LinkedIn, is unglamorous but its business-to-business ads allow it to monetise the time users spend on it at a rate roughly four times that of Facebook, estimates Andrew Lipsman of eMarketer. It generates more revenue than some medium-sized networks including Snap's Snapchat and Twitter.
The most surprising new adman is Apple. The iPhone-maker used to rail against intrusive digital advertising. Now it sells many ads of its own.... As digital ads work their way into more corners of the economy, "a new order is going to materialise", believes Mr Lipsman. He thinks Amazon will overtake Meta in total advertising revenue, possibly within five years.
"They might once have hoped to offset the digital-ad pie's slower growth by grabbing a larger slice of it. No longer." Although the two are together expected to rake in around $300bn in revenues this year, sales of their four biggest rivals in the West will amount to almost a quarter as much... What is more, as digital advertising enters a period of transformation, the challengers look well-placed to increase their gains. The noisiest newcomer to the digital-ad scene is TikTok. In the five years since its launch the short-video app has sucked ad dollars away from Facebook and Instagram, Meta's two biggest properties. So much so that the two social networks are reinventing themselves in the image of their Chinese-owned rival.... But Meta and Google may have more to worry about closer to home, where a trio of American tech firms are loading ever more ads around their main businesses.
Chief among them is Amazon, forecast to take nearly 7% of worldwide digital-ad revenue this year, up from less than 1% just six years ago. The company started reporting details of its ad business only in February, when it revealed sales in 2021 of $31bn. As Benedict Evans, a tech analyst, points out, that is roughly as much as the ad sales of the entire global newspaper industry. Amazon executives now talk of advertising as one of the company's three "engines", alongside retail and cloud computing.
Next in line is Microsoft, expected to quietly take more than 2% of global sales this year — slightly more than TikTok. Its search engine, Bing, has only a small share of the search market, but that market is a gigantic one. Microsoft's social network, LinkedIn, is unglamorous but its business-to-business ads allow it to monetise the time users spend on it at a rate roughly four times that of Facebook, estimates Andrew Lipsman of eMarketer. It generates more revenue than some medium-sized networks including Snap's Snapchat and Twitter.
The most surprising new adman is Apple. The iPhone-maker used to rail against intrusive digital advertising. Now it sells many ads of its own.... As digital ads work their way into more corners of the economy, "a new order is going to materialise", believes Mr Lipsman. He thinks Amazon will overtake Meta in total advertising revenue, possibly within five years.
Plenty of other data brokers to take their place (Score:3, Insightful)
As much as I'd love to see both Meta and Google's personal data marts crash and burn, there is a long line of companies that are more than happy to fill their shoes.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yeah, and part of me is unsurprised one of the contenders is Apple. When people were raving about how good Apple was at protecting privacy a year or two back, I have to admit I found it didn't sound right. Apple is user hostile in the same way Oracle is business hostile. And now we know.
Apple is far from perfect, but some of the ways they protect privacy hurts them as much as anyone else. Much of what happens is done on-device and not sent to Apple. All the health data, for one example. That's a gold mine for advertisers and yet they went out of their way to not be able to see it.
It's still the least-bad mainstream option, and it's not even close.
Re: Plenty of other data brokers to take their pla (Score:2)
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If people actually cared about their privacy enough to abstain from buying fancy toys, then Apple would have a real incentive to actually respect and protect the privacy of its users. That would be a major market-differentiator.
As it stands, people these days are completely and utterly convinced they cannot survive without a smartphone. They can easily give you a list of apps that they use all the time every day and how much easier it makes their lives and how they just can't live without them. And its f
Read all about it (Score:1)
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Absolutely insane that Tiktok has not been banned from the west yet. Letting our data be uploaded directly to the CCP database and paying them to do it.
Only for morons using it?
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Absolutely insane that Tiktok has not been banned from the west yet. Letting our data be uploaded directly to the CCP database and paying them to do it.
Worrying about TikTok is just fucking stupid. OH NOEZ!! TEH CHINEEZE!! What useful information are they going to get from a bunch of teenagers making stupid videos.
There's such a thing as metadata [wikipedia.org]. So unless those "tupid" teenagers are living in their own Lord of the Flies island [wikipedia.org], there's quite a bit of information you could learn about the persons they live with and the places they live in.
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Re:Ban Tiktok now (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely insane that Tiktok has not been banned from the west yet.
A big difference between the West and China is that the authorities can't just ban stuff they don't like.
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And other news (Score:2)
Facebook has seen its stock dropped 60% in the last year though. I don't think the competition is the cause I think it's the threat of government regulation and new privacy regulations. Coupled with Apple implementing a bunch of new features to restrict the data Facebook can access.
Google is in a little better shape because they don't realize heavily on tracking everything you do see or think about.
Re:And other news (Score:5, Insightful)
Are species spends nearly 1/3 of a trillion dollars every year on advertisements that don't work.
This is the dirty little secret that NOBODY wants to talk about. 60-70% of all money spent on advertising is completely wasted. Maybe more. Everyone knows it.
The problem is, the likelihood that reducing advertising MIGHT result in lower revenue is not zero. And so, NOBODY wants to be THAT GUY - who cuts ad spending and then has to explain to the boss/board of directors why sales and revenue went down.
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Are species spends nearly 1/3 of a trillion dollars every year on advertisements that don't work.
Why do you think the ads don't work?
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Hate to blow my mod points but...
Because research shows they dont?
https://www.london.edu/news/re... [london.edu]
And of course, in my personal experience, I no longer even see ads on youtube on my phone (they are their- I just focus 100% of my attention on the 5.4.3.2.1 button and if it starts a second button without giving me a chance to skip ads, I *often* just leave the video.
Ads are also why I finally left Netflix after a decade.
Ads are why I watch almost *no* modern TV. 18 minutes of ads for 42 minutes of programmi
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Why do you think the ads don't work?
No doubt they work, but not to the extent the marketing droids want to believe.
Harvesting data is very profitable only because it can be sold to ad agencies for a profit who in turn sell it (possibly broken down) to other ad agencies again for a profit, and so on down a long chain until some part of it is eventually used to tailor and target ads for particular sellers of actual goods. What most of those sellers pay for those ads no doubt greatly exceeds the worth to them - they are the greatest fools at
Weird Compliance with Big Tech Rebranding (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Weird Compliance with Big Tech Rebranding (Score:4, Informative)
The situations are not the same.
Alphabet is a parent holding company. Google is a subsidiary.
Meta is the new name for Facebook. It is a renaming.
So the press still refers to Google as Google because Google is still Google. They refer to Meta as Meta because "Facebook" is no longer the name of the company.
Re:Weird Compliance with Big Tech Rebranding (Score:4, Insightful)
That, plus "Meta" is also a creepier and more dystopian name than "Facebook". It sounds like the evil corporate protagonist from a bad episode of "The Outer Limits".
So it just seems to be an all-around better fit for the company and its CEO.
It's a mad world (Score:2)
It's a sad world where everything revolves around advertising and shoving unwanted products down our throats. Because, ultimately, everything on Internet always comes down to advertising. Where have we gone wrong that such a wrong success model became the most important metric in everything we do online?
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It's a sad world where everything revolves around advertising and shoving unwanted products down our throats.
The olden days were worse. Ads were impossible to skip on live TV, and my classmates would sing advertising jingles on the playground.
Ads are much easier to avoid today. I have eight browser tabs open. Seven have no ads. The other has an unobtrusive panel ad that I hadn't even noticed until I checked.
OnlyFans model: How much you'll pay for slashdot? (Score:3)
It's a sad world where everything revolves around advertising and shoving unwanted products down our throats. Because, ultimately, everything on Internet always comes down to advertising. Where have we gone wrong that such a wrong success model became the most important metric in everything we do online?
Ads are very much the lesser of 2 evils. You either pay a monthly fee or you look at ads. How much will you pay for slashdot? I know of 2 systems: either look at ads or every website becomes like an obnoxious OnlyFans model on Reddit flooding with teaser content hoping you'll pay for a subscription.
Without ads, information becomes a lot less free. Do you want every useful article behind a paywall? Do you remember expertsexchange.com? You'd google an error, in my case, typically an Oracle RDBMS or
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Ads are very much the lesser of 2 evils. You either pay a monthly fee or you look at ads.
Missing option : Use an ad blocker
I see no ads unless I deliberately look at a merchant's website if I am actually looking to buy something. Better still, I use AdNausium https://adnauseam.io/ [adnauseam.io] which automatically sends a click to every (unseen to me) advert on every website I visit but blocks any return. According to my AdNausium log it has sent about 6000 clicks in the last 6 months and earning those websites about $9500, assuming a probably optimistic value of $1.50 per click.
Re: OnlyFans model: How much you'll pay for slashd (Score:2)
You mean FACEBOOK (Score:2)
Everyone still says Google, despite the name change to Alphabet, but suddenly a dumb website named Facebook is now called Meta? I don't think so.
Facebook is Facebook in every way a Facebook can be.
Apple couldn't resist (Score:2)
There is so much money in advertising, Apple finally overcame its marketed position that they don't track or advertise, and now they do just that, to the tune of $4 billion a year. https://www.axios.com/2022/08/... [axios.com] That may not be a major chunk of the $300 billion market, but it's growing, and it certainly gives Apple more motivation to track its users.
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The way I understood it is that Apple are not tracking users, they are tracking marketing IDs that are not associated with any names, devices or accounts.
It sounds like a small thing but makes all the difference compared to all the other companies. And it's also the small detail that everyone never mentions when comparing Apple to the others, just to make Apple look as bad as the others.
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they are tracking marketing IDs
This is precisely what Google and Facebook do. In any case, even if all they have is anonymous data, it's trivial to take that anonymous data and turn it into identified information. Police, and hackers, don't restrict themselves to information gathered from only Apple. Once combined with other sources of information from less scrupulous sources, it's not hard to figure out who you are.
David Bowman: (Score:1)
"My God, it's full of spam!"