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by 1vuio0pswjnm7 1061 days ago
Even with all that data/information, Google still cannot find a more sustainable business model. Despite the countless number of sustinable businesses humanity has produced, so-called "tech" companies just cannot find one. These are not creative people. "We'll just keep on playing eavesdropping intermediary ("middleman") until we have undermined every business, every government and society along with it." Sounds great. Good luck.
3 comments

Advertising is in itself a sustainable business model, hovering around 1% of US GDP for the past century[1] (p.37 figure 3). Google really just needs to defend their position within the ad market to remain sustainable.

[1] https://www.bea.gov/index.php/system/files/papers/WP2017-9.p...

That’s the case mostly for Twitter, meta and google that only/mainly live based on as revenue.

Amazon, Microsoft, Apple are more diversified.

With those companies, even with their non-data collection, non-advertising services business units, they continue to move more and more into personal data collection and advertising services.
Of course they do, soulless investors see monetisation options and go “free money when?”

They don’t care about good name and long term viability. As far as they’re concerned they can just sell when the stock tanks.

Id argue that advertising is am emergent side effect of money/commerce. Once you can produce goods for money you need people to be aware you are selling that product.

That being the case unless we stop using money their business is quite sustainable.

Right now we have a push-based ad model with a low signal to noise ratio. People are force-fed garbage in the off chance that in a moment of weakness they might accidentally make a purchase not in their best interests. The mutually beneficial aspect of what you're describing (informing people of goods and services at some Pareto optimum which they would actually benefit from) could just as easily be satisfied with a pull-based model, and the low SNR is an artifact of letting de facto scammers pay for the privilege of scamming people.