
Tech Rout Sinks Stocks as Lines of Defense Crumble: Markets Wrap - zitterbewegung
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-01/asian-stocks-set-for-muted-start-to-second-quarter-markets-wrap
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commandlinefan
I honestly still can't wrap my head around how (most) tech companies are
actually supposed to be making money. Nobody (including advertisers) seems to
be willing to pay for any of this stuff, but it still costs a fortune to make.
Some of the big players like Netflix and Amazon seem to be making real money
from real customers (but still don't appear to be that profitable?) but
Twitter? Facebook? Even Google? Where the hell is the money actually coming
from? Google has massive operating costs - are there really enough online
advertisers to subsidize an operation like that? I've often wondered if the
investments in tech have been coming from speculative investors who were
hoping to get in on the "ground floor" of something that would eventually
become profitable.

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nostrademons
You very much underestimate how large the size of the advertising sector of
the economy is. It's over $550B worldwide [1], 5x Google's total revenue, and
enough to pay every current Alphabet employee roughly $6M yearly. And Google
and Facebook together are taking up 99% of all _new_ add dollars spent (i.e.
all the growth in advertising is going to those two).

In 1988 TV & radio broadcasting (all ad-supported) employed close to 400K
people, which is roughly 3x what Google, Facebook, and Twitter combined do.

Remember that these companies are all effectively B2B companies - their
customers are other businesses, and their product is access to consumers. If
you've ever worked on the sales & marketing side of a business, you'll know
that a.) companies are willing to spend _a lot_ to gain new customers and b.)
spending that money with Google or Facebook is a no-brainer today. These facts
are largely hidden from the general public, though, because the average person
doesn't like being thought of as a product and wants to believe their
consumption choices actually belong to themselves.

[1] [https://www.statista.com/topics/990/global-advertising-
marke...](https://www.statista.com/topics/990/global-advertising-market/)

[2]
[https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2000/08/art1full.pdf](https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2000/08/art1full.pdf)

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Hydraulix989
If there were actually legitimate causes of concern for the market crashing
other than Trump trolling on Twitter, then I'd be worried and sell off my
stocks. But there's not.

