Makes me think of my days working on a facebook app in 2007-8... every single app had the same revenue stream - selling installs to other apps. The price per install was crazy high, and this was before Facebook started enforcing rules about shady practices, so every app would do things like "Install this other app, and we give you these perks in our app"
It was ridiculous. There was no real money, just app developers paying each other for installs.
The same thing has been true of mobile games for a while. A lot of the ad inventory displayed in free games is ads for more free games -- sure, there's some real revenue from in-app purchases, but there's also a lot of money getting passed from hand to hand for ads.
I think that 'some' real revenue probably dwarves most industries tenfold. Look at what something like Candy Crush makes in IAP, the top 5 players could probably support the entire ad industry themselves in perpetuity without breaking stride.
Re:Uber Lays Off 400
by mrnobody_67 on Monday July 29, 2019 @07:07PM
(#20560426)
40% of all invested VC dollars go to Facebook and Google in the form of customer acquisition costs
90% of all new ad spend goes to either FB or Google because they actually work for acquiring customers at scale. Every other ad provider squeezes into the last 10%.
Not sure this is true anymore. The market is so big, those two can't cover it all.
Re:Uber Lays Off 400
by pandapower2 on Monday July 29, 2019 @10:09PM
(#20561505)
Curious what percentage goes to AWS...
If you look at Uber/Lyft, quite a lot...
Re:Uber Lays Off 400
by scarface74 on Tuesday July 30, 2019 @12:05AM
(#20562059)
This is no different than what happened with Yahoo and AOL before the dot com bust.
Most modern ad spend is tracked to ROI. Yahoo and AOL was not.
tracked to does not necessarily imply "limited by."
Source?
By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto Ponzi scheme. Investors were excited about the Internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo's revenue growth. So they invested in new Internet startups. The startups then used the money to buy ads on Yahoo to get traffic. Which caused yet more revenue growth for Yahoo, and further convinced investors the Internet was worth investing in. When I realized this one day, sitting in my cubicle, I jumped up like Archimedes in his bathtub, except instead of "Eureka!" I was shouting "Sell!"