Many publishers are already motivated to generate as much content as possible, for as low a price as possible, for the largest audience possible. They also might not work very well: Studies suggest that most users ignore them, and roughly a third of display-ad clicks are believed to be accidental.īut the ad-supported internet is about to get worse. Users hate them, they’re easily exploited in fraud schemes, and they encourage controversial business practices such as tracking. That’s a problem, because digital ads are terrible. Companies that traditionally opposed advertising are looking for their way in too: After resisting ads since its inception, Netflix introduced an ad-supported version of its streaming service last year, as did Disney+.Īs so much of the internet is changing-social media feels less relevant than ever generative AI threatens to disrupt everything-advertising remains its inescapable business model. All told, outside of China, the online-ad industry was worth about $500 billion last year, according to data from Omdia, and Google, Meta, Amazon, and Apple are believed to have taken some $340 billion of that. Advertising makes up close to $4 billion of its annual revenue, according to the research company Insider Intelligence. And although few people think of Microsoft as a company that benefits from digital ads, it, too, makes billions from them every year.Įven Apple, which foregrounds user privacy as one of its selling points, is in on the ad game. ad market, thanks to what it charges independent retailers for placement on its site. Amazon has the third biggest share of the U.S. Meta makes considerably more than 90 percent of its billions in revenue from advertising. About 80 percent of Google’s revenue comes from the ads it places next to search-engine results, on sites across the internet, and before YouTube videos.
Microsoft is all about business software.īut under the hood, they are united by advertising, referred to as the “dark beating heart of the internet” by the author Tim Hwang in his book Subprime Attention Crisis. At a glance, the tech giants don’t seem to have a lot in common.
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