[echelon]

Google uses their insane ad revenue to subsidize the Xerox Parc / Bell Labs of the current generation. Waymo, DeepMind, Gemini Robotics. They're killing it and leading the entire market.

It's not just researchers. Engineers at Google get to spin up products and throw spaghetti at walls, too. Google has more money than God to throw around.

Google's ad dominance will probably never go away unless antitrust action by the FTC/DOJ/EU force a breakup. So they'll continue to lead as long as they can subsidize and outspend everyone else. Their investments compound and give an almost unassailable moat into deep tech problems.

Google might win AI and robotics and transportation and media and search 2.0. They'll own everything.

[tsunamifury]

Google has been looking for post-ad post-search revenue for almost a decade now. They certainly won't dominate forever and have several signals flashing red for a few years now.

[orangecat]

Google has been looking for post-ad post-search revenue for almost a decade now

With a reasonable degree of success. In their last quarter (see https://abc.xyz/investor/earnings/) 25% of their revenue was non-ads, and that percentage has been consistently increasing.

[throwaway2037]

That is much higher than I expected. Thank you to share the link. Can you imagine anyone saying "Media company XYZ has been looking for post-ad post-search revenue for almost a decade now"? It makes no sense. To me, Google is like a post-film/TV/newspaper media company that, unsurprisingly, makes most of its money from adverts.

[echelon]

YouTube has bigger revenues than Netflix. While the majority of that revenue is from ads, they get it by providing immense value in the form of near-unlimited entertainment.

That's just one of their many business units.

[tsunamifury]

Ok. Do you always make these non value comments?

[riku_iki]

> Google's ad dominance will probably never go away unless antitrust action by the FTC/DOJ/EU force a breakup.

chatgpt has good chance to kill google search -> kill google.

[IX-103]

If Chatgpt replaces Google search then it will be effectively signing it's own death warrant.

ML models like chatGPT rely on the open web for training data, particularly for information about recent events. But models like chatGPT are horrible about linking to their sources. That means that sources that rely on ad revenue or even donations to exist will effectively disappear as chatGPT steals all of the traffic. With no cash flow, the sites with current data disappear. With no new training data, chatGPT stagnates.

ChatGPT is basically a parasite on the free and open web - taking content but not giving back.

[riku_iki]

sites which survive will charge them for access to data, like reddit and wikipedia are already doing.

[kevinventullo]

It's not just researchers. Engineers at Google get to spin up products and throw spaghetti at walls, too.

This might have been true 10-15 years ago. I assure you it is not the case today.

[happyopossum]

Yup, it still is. Maybe it was more prevalent or expected 15 years ago, but it still happens all the time today.

[jcims]

Google is not a monolith, both can be true.