I think as a child I got viruses from one of the ads, you know, the ones would put on the side of the site. We had to call in a guy, to clean parents’ computer. I felt really guilty and never touched those ads again.
So Google’s and Meta’s main business are ads. And recently I felt confused. Do people click on ads? Don’t these ads feel phishy to them?
Alphabet (Google’s parent company) made $224 billion on Google ads in 2022, and $58 billion on everything else put together (according to page 31 of their annual report). They do lots of stuff, but Google ads have always been over 80% of their revenue with everything else just noise around the edges.