Or eeking out more dollars per ad through better targetting, or through diversifying the business and scaling new revenue streams, or ...
I think it's reasonable to expect Google to grow faster than general internet usage. Believing otherwise means you believe Google is in maintenance mode, incapable of improving their existing product or unlocking new revenue streams through innovation. Given the sheer size of Google, that's quite a bold belief to hold.
- unlocking new revenue streams. Some success here, but modest, going from ~90% of revenue from ads to ~80%. But it all moved to GCP, which still operates at a loss. That doesn't take any pressure off the ads.
- revenue gains with targeting or other things that don't push real content down. It's pretty easy to find historical screen shots of how much the organic content gets pushed down below the fold. Today, most of the lucrative queries have almost nothing but ads above the fold. ("iphone", "vegas hotels", "robot vacuum").
Unreasonable shareholder expectations of continued double-digit percentage YoY growth. Growth that exceeds internet usage growth in general.
The only way that happens is more ads displacing content, or appearing in formerly empty spots. I would guess at this point, they've hit the wall on alternatives like better targeting, placement, etc.