The model is not the issue, all of these make great profits. The issue is that companies don't just pursue making a profit they pursue making ALL the profit, ie growth. If growth does not exist then investment in a company is not very attractive and investors leave, lowering company value.

The problem is that they reach a growth saturation point, and when they have reached that point what they do is self-cannibalise by making their services worse in order to continue the "growth" (in total revenues). This continues to happen until they kill themselves by making the service so shitty the users leave.

It's a system that is not trying to make anything sustainable. Under capitalism everything is trying to pursue infinite growth and that inevitably results in this outcome.

[–] Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If ad companies would be paid according to customer conversion rate instead of how many ads they spam everywhere, it would collapse within a financial quarter.

Thinking that people support a brand or product that constantly annoys them is next-level stupid, but it's their main strategy. Google's conversion rate is less than 4% and instead of realizing that spamming trillions of ads on every site is causing that abysmal rate, they double down and get off to bigger "reach".

Also, Google lied to customers of their TrueView ads and just presented people muted autoplay ads instead. Here's an analysis about that.

https://adalytics.io/blog/invalid-google-video-partner-trueview-ads

tl;dr the only one benefitting from ads is Google.

[–] csolisr@communities.azkware.net 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

As aptly explained by writer Cory Doctorow:

Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.