A very large number of engineers were dedicated to building out the radio and television technology platforms over decades. Was it all just to deliver ads? Trivial then right? Well that's what paid for a lot of it. It delivered community, it delivered news, it delivered entertainment, it connected people to the rest of their nation.
Making it remotely accurate? Wiping out infectious diseases? Providing a billion people access to a healthy, nutritious diet? Saving the planet from ecological devastation?
I can think of a lot of very hard problems that have far more value than delivering advertisements packed into clickbait and fake news.
I'd agree with them, by the way. I don't think we really have that many solved problems. I'd consider that to be hubris and see many things that can be improved on, across the spectrum of ideas and implementations.
In fact, I'm hard pressed to think of much of anything that is a solved problem. Most everything can be improved.
You might want to find ways to optimize it form non-technical aspects, such as, how to get more users, how to write better titles, etc. But there's nothing that is technically challenging about it.
I'm sure there are even more technological advancements that can be made - and I suspect there always will be.
I'm not saying that it is currently ineffective, just that it isn't solved - meaning that there are still solutions to improve efficiency and efficacy. I actually see 'solved problem' as a kind of defeatism.
In reality it's mostly just dark pattern marketing.
But, yeah, it can be used for nefarious purposes. In fact, it probably will be. Hidden under that will be good uses.
I suspect there's going to be constant innovation. There are people who thought that personal transportation was a solved problem back when we rode animals. These days, we are looking at an EV revolution and SDV somewhere in the not-too-distant future. Along the way, it hasn't been a solved problem, even though it looked like it was.
I guess that's what I've been clumsily trying to say.
If the media landscape isn't well organized across such a large society, or particularly when you have a massive new audience to introduce to news systems (China has gained what, 600 million new regular Internet users in the last seven years?), there's an amplified benefit to aggregation / managing all of that information. Which explains the seemingly crazy $2.5 billion in revenue.
Doing that service well, is every bit as valuable as something like Twitter or YouTube. It's about communicating valuable information to an extremely large audience. Why shouldn't that be quite valuable?
It only seems trivial because the eg US and European media landscapes are well established / entrenched, the audience is stagnant (there's little to no growth in the news business in the US or Europe) and the consumers are relatively experienced at mass societal consumption.
Consider the value of portals to early US Internet adopters for one example of how this concept works. Why were AOL, Yahoo, Netscape's portal, and numerous other portal-like services, so frequently used and valuable back then (but no longer)?