Meta's survival is fascinating to me. They dumped money in VR, their AI is not as good as their competitors and now they are dumping money on this glasses thing. They keep on getting caught doing shady things too.
Along with small Indies as stated, a lot of the ad market is controlled by large agencies like WPP.
State departments are also one of the biggest spenders (some say that's how the 'deep-state' maintain control of the media...). All those 'stop smoking' and other health ads all add up!
i think honestly it’s the opposite. it still confuses me why meta invested so much in their pointless experiments (think any of their AR ventures) when their main source of revenue was, and continues to be, their boring advertising on consumer apps
It's one of Microsoft under Ballmer biggest victory, and one that's proving to be harder than you would think for tech behemoth: when you have one product that's so overwhelmingly dominating and raking unlimited money, diverting into other product lines seems to be almost impossible, either they don't make enough money, or you don't have enough focus, or enough need for survival and such need for it to succeed.
Despite everything Google is still the Google Ads company, Meta is still the FB/Insta company, etc ... I would even add Intel in there, they're where they are in part because every new thing they made they killed off right away because it wasn't "a money printing large margin xeon with no competition".
Apple, Amazon and Microsoft are the big ones that got out of that trap. Though with Apple I would say it's more limited than it looks, it's just that their "product" is the ecosystem they build around, so while they have lots of lines they're all linked together and feed off each other with iPhone at the core.
On the other hand some would say, Ballmer decoupled Microsoft survival from Widnows survival so much that it leads to what's happening to windows those past 5-8 years, and that's not a plus for its users.
Their ad revenue is $243.46 billion annual, so not sure why you mention survival.
If a company making money spends that money internally on projects that is ok, it's when they borrow money that survival becomes a risk.
It's not Meta's survival that is fascinating, it's Zuckerberg's ongoing survival as CEO!!