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by matrix_overload 1379 days ago
They are a de facto monopoly on online advertisement networks worldwide. Unless the management deliberately pilots the company into the ground, their cash cow will outshine the competition out of sheer inertia.

The quality of decision making is seen when the rules of the game change and the companies are forced to adapt. This may or may not happen this cycle, depending on what happens to interest rates.
1 comments
riku_iki 1379 days ago
> They are a de facto monopoly on online advertisement networks worldwide.

that's not true, there are plenty of competition, meta, tiktok, reddit, display exchanges, amazon, apple. If they will deliver better ROI from ads, advertisers will be happy to switch budgets from google.

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indecisive_user 1379 days ago
You can compete with Facebook by creating another social media site, as TikTok and Snapchat have demonstrated.

Google search has 92% market share. It is an ad monopoly in the areas it controls.

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riku_iki 1379 days ago
> Google search has 92% market share.

its generic search, when you go to vertical searches, say Amazon may beat google for shopping searches. Reddit can build good search one day, and many people including me will switch to searching inside reddit, instead of adding "reddit" to google search query.

You are right, google is currently generic search monopoly, but we were talking about ads, and there are plenty of other ads verticals.

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yakak 1378 days ago
I think the discussion was any monopoly that serves as a cash cow to enable poor management.

For comparison, AT&T had a monopoly only on long distance, so people could choose drastically different behavior if they wanted to defund AT&T. I.e. you didn't need to move out of the region where most of your relations lived but it was a better deal to pay AT&T's tax (and regional monopolies charged more than true long distance on many regional calls). Potentially making a lot more money and having an entirely different life out weighed higher than market phone rates that made AT&T a successful cash cow.

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riku_iki 1378 days ago
Ok, but rant above was about decision makers, and looks like decision makers did just fine in building monopoly, 10 years ago google had 60% of search share, with Y and B another 15% each.

Also, it is not clear how much money google makes from search specifically, and how much from other verticals where there is stronger competition.

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Arnt 1378 days ago
I think that's true. But I think you may be jumping to an unwarranted conclusion.

Google has a number of advertising businesses, largely distinct. I think Youtube, adwords and adsense are the names of the three big ones. Adwords is a monopoly (that is, only Google sells advertising on www.google.com) and Youtube is too. But you didn't mean to to say that Google has a monopoly on selling ads on google.com and youtube.com, did you?

I think you had the third business in mind. That's the one that serves ads on third-party web sites. And what does Google's 92% market share for search have to do with its market share for that business? Or, put differently, how does Google's 92% market share help sell that product to more web site owners?

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dzhiurgis 1378 days ago
Can anyone but google scrape the web? No. Tons of websites won't let you unless you are googlebot.

Can anyone put serve ads on Google SERPs? No, only Google. We don't even have any transparency how it works.

Google is turning into utility and should be regulated as such. At the very least we should regulate how their support is done.

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riku_iki 1378 days ago
> Can anyone but google scrape the web? No. Tons of websites won't let you unless you are googlebot.

I though cloudfare has some way to onboard other bots too.

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