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What was the last time you clicked on an ad? (lemmy.blahaj.zone)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I think as a child I got viruses from one of the ads, you know, the ones would put on the side of the site. We had to call in a guy, to clean parents' computer. I felt really guilty and never touched those ads again.

So Google's and Meta's main business are ads. And recently I felt confused. Do people click on ads? Don't these ads feel phishy to them?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Google's and Meta's main business are ads?? I do doubt this! Their main business is hoarding data about you and everybody and selling that data to anyone willing to buy it.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago

Alphabet (Google's parent company) made $224 billion on Google ads in 2022, and $58 billion on everything else put together (according to page 31 of their annual report). They do lots of stuff, but Google ads have always been over 80% of their revenue with everything else just noise around the edges.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

80% of Google's revenue is from ads. They horde data to build personalized profiles for ad targeting.

I'm sure they sell some data wholesale, but very few organizations actually want that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Neither Google nor Meta sell data. The data is what makes the company valuable, so it doesn't make sense for them to sell it (otherwise, competitors could just buy their data). They keep all the data for themselves, to improve their ad targeting algorithms.