[lgl]

Google

Before: “Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased toward the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”

After: ~75–80%+ of revenue comes from ads

Facebook

Before: “Facebook is not about making money… it’s about building something cool.”, “We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.”

After: ~97%+ of revenue comes from advertising

Twitter

Before: “We want to figure out a way to monetize that doesn’t interfere with the user experience.”

After: ~68% of X’s total revenue comes from advertising (~85–90%+ of revenue pre-Musk)

OpenAI

Before: "Something something AGI"

After: "But first, Ads!"

[exolymph]

Even Amazon has substantial ad revenue now, and it does in fact undercut customer obsession by polluting search results.