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Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

nytimes.com

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Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#341

Post by rguzman »

xp84 wrote: post #87

> Google’s ad tech business brought in $30 billion last year, or about 8 percent of the revenue for its parent company, Alphabet. Its ad tech revenue has declined for 16 straight quarters, and analysts estimate it accounts for less than 1 percent of the company’s profit... “This is a business no one cares about" Can someone closer to GOOG explain this? The phrase "ad tech" seems to have a very specific meaning here.…

i think the distinction is between ads that google sells vs software infrastructure for 3rd part ads (ad tech). ie the revenue's from google's ads on search, maps, youtube, etc are still huge and important -- that's google's advertising business, the eyeballs they sell, if you will. ad tech is google's business brokering ads on other sites, helping others sell their eyeballs.

at least this is how i understand it currently, but i don't know very much. happy to be corrected by someone who does.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#342

Post by bluefirebrand »

sawjet wrote: post #258
dylan604 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People used to joke that W was the bottom of the barrel, then the GOP did a hold my beer and dug a little deeper.

Crazy to think that, despite trump existing, the Democrats still lost two elections to him.

If the democrats were serious about winning they would be putting forward candidates that actually have a chance of being popular

Hillary and Kamala were just really bad choices

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#343

Post by tzs »

newtwentysix wrote: post #237
crowcroft wrote: post #209

They lost in court, and were found to be a Monopoly. The solution is they tell the court, "sorry we will stop abusing our behaviour now", and then it's just all good?

all the "donations" are working, hence this. same with the meta case too.

Meta just had to make a settlement in a major case that is bad for them. That doesn't look like the "donations" are working very well.

And yes, that settlement is bad for them. What nearly every commenter here in the threads about it overlooked is that it is not the only case against Meta. There are still several cases from governments below state level against them, and several thousand individual cases.

Almost all the vast amounts of material the plaintiffs used in the recent case, including a massive amount of internal Meta documents plaintiffs got in discovery, material from depositions, material from experts, legal arguments, and more can now be used in those thousands of other cases.

Thousands of small plaintiffs have just been handed a fully loaded anti-Meta weapon built using the vast resources of 47 state Attorney General's offices. Meta season is now open and they are going to be trying to doge Meta hunters who just got a big upgrade from the bows and arrows they hunted with before.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#344

Post by tzs »

jordanb wrote: post #2

That "Lake America" is doing a hell of a lot of work for Google

They didn't do anything special for "Lake America". Google's long standing maps policy is to show people the names that their government says they have. As soon as that name showed up in the US government's database it showed up for people in the US on Google Maps.

In Canada it shows up as "Lake Ontario" because that's what their government says it is. In the rest of the world it gets both names because the two governments whose territories it is in call it two different names.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#345

Post by tehlike »

jojobas wrote: post #305
als0 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is the new IBM. All the signs are there.

IBM is more than 100 years old, has defined a huge part of how we think about computers, made plenty of its employees and workers of the wider field rich, has sold many businesses it considered distracting, and is still worth $200B+. Anyone saying "IBM" in the sense of "stagnant failure" is delusional.

I don't think this is what I respoded to. We cannot deny IBMs contribution, just like we can't deny google's.

But where they are in their life as a company is a different question. IBM is beyond growth phase. May even be on the decline phase.

My point is Google is still in its growth phase, still inventing, growing, etc.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#346

Post by saturn8601 »

Panzer04 wrote: post #288
londons_explore wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real benefit of a merged company is that where the two original companies were competing in the same market, it would be illegal for them to collude to set the same prices as eachother. However, when merged, they can do exactly that - which allows them to extract more profits. Rather than denying mergers, I suggest merged companies have an extra sales tax for ever on all goods they sell where they used to be comp…

Merged companies are more able to compete. Combining duplicate corporate structures let them save on costs, etc. It's not a strictly bad thing - iirc spirit? Airlines? Wanted to merge with someone, got denied, and went bankrupt anyway, depriving people of any competition at all.

To be fair, Spirit suffered from multiple reasons and a merger with Frontier may have just delayed the inevitable.

Note: I was very emotionally invested in Spirit because they made possible many fascinating trips that wouldn't have happened so my take may be biased. I can only think of a handful of companies that clearly positively impacted my life and Spirit was one of them.

1. Post COVID, the structural costs went up: pilots, flight attendants, suppliers demanded more money. Spirit paid decently well, had decent benefits from what I heard. When you are Spirit...to attract good people you gotta pay. It really showed in their operations, they had 0 crashes during their 34 years and had notable excellence in their maintenace operations. People thought they flew rickety junk planes. The reality was that they had a stellar run.

2. Pratt & Whitney GTF issues: Spirit actually had quite a young Airbus only fleet. Great for lowering costs through fuel/maintenance savings, customers enjoy the newest best planes...the downside is that if a major issue comes out, it could spread across the entire fleet. Thats exatly what happened: They leased brand new planes and then a serious engine issue occured that forced grounding of many new planes for 1+years....while they are still paying the leases on those planes.

3. The bigger competitors are really just credit card companies that fly planes as a hobby on the side. That gave them the financial ability to siphon off customers by introducing a barebones tier. Spirit customers aren't really the type to play the credit card points game so they couldn't copy what the big guys do and despite travel increasing after COVID, people decided to pay a bit more to not have the barebones experience.

4. Spirit was in the process of revamping their entire offering to better compete. More simple tiers with things baked in and less extreme customization that they used to offer. Makes sense: 9$ fares were gone for good so maybe they could compete as a solid basic tier. They did not move fast enough to turn things around. Its a bummer because it looks like they had an interesting plan after the second bankruptcy but we never got to see it fully play out.

5. The final nail in the coffin: The Iran war took out any remaining breathing room. They were just coming out of their second bankruptcy. I personally feel they had a viable plan to try and turn things around but the Trump admin just let them die without really trying. From my understanding(and I could be wrong) Trump pulled some nonsense where he wanted like 90% of the airline for peanuts, they would support ICE transport operations etc. The owners of the debt obviously said no and that was the end of that. Great job losing 17k employees their livelihood. Since this is a tenure based industry, many end up starting from scratch at another airline. A emergency merger or something would have had better consequences for the employees. Will be interesting to see how this affects the midterms since Spirit was based in Dania Beach, FL (Miami area)

The idea behind a Frontier + Spirit merger makes sense. The airlines combining together can cover a greater network, Spirit was getting rid of its poor leases through bankruptcy and maybe they could have been a major airline in the low end. The argument against is that Frontier is not doing too well either so should you really combine bad + bad?

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#347

Post by saturn8601 »

ungreased0675 wrote: post #316
Panzer04 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Merged companies are more able to compete. Combining duplicate corporate structures let them save on costs, etc. It's not a strictly bad thing - iirc spirit? Airlines? Wanted to merge with someone, got denied, and went bankrupt anyway, depriving people of any competition at all.

Not exactly. Competitors like Breeze and Allegiant filled in some prior Spirit routes. Those are better budget airlines. Poorly run companies are supposed to go bankrupt, that’s the feedback loop keeping management in check.

Companies that have massive startup costs (Automakers, Airlines) are harder to replace. This is a failure of the system we are in. Seems like the free market cannot properly evaluate value when all the cash is going into nonsense like Bitcoin, NFT and now a lot of the AI.

Allegiant is an old Airline that has had a lot of problems. Breeze is new but both are starting super small and are not planning to really cover Spirits extended network anytime soon. The result of Spirit dying is alot of that prior investment in second tier cities/airports is just gone for the forseeable future. The potential value that could have generated will now not come to pass.

>Poorly run companies are supposed to go bankrupt, that’s the feedback loop keeping management in check.

The problem that is occuring in my opinion is that Spirit is a symptom of a greater problem. The "K shaped" economy is not only segregating groups of people into haves and have nots, its extending into regions of the country. Losing major airlines access is the precursor to entire regions declining, and ultimately dying completly. If the AI robot world comes to fruition maybe many humans just have no economic value at all.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#348

Post by schmidtleonard »

pocksuppet wrote: post #251
schmidtleonard wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Progressive corporate taxation would give the market an incentive to do spinoffs and undo the merger wave. Or we could just roll antitrust policy back to what it was before Ronald Reagan and Robert Bork installed the Consumer Welfare Standard, the idea that companies must be allowed to merge if they can scribble a tall tale with crayons on butcher paper about how the merger will benefit consumers, for sure, pinky pro…

Progressive corporate taxation would lead to every company splitting its revenue and expenses across 50 shell companies, without actually splitting operations.

Not if the gaggle of shell companies was difficult to invest into or had enough rights to make it a strategic threat. But sure, wave those infomercial-hands some more and maybe you'll convince me that I can't use a screwdriver.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#349

Post by schmidtleonard »

briandear wrote: post #282
schmidtleonard wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Progressive corporate taxation could make it happen for reasons other than dodging the ghosts of chemical sins past!

Can we stop with taxing everything you don’t like? Taxes should be equal and used to fund the government, not as tools to make people do things you like.

Can we stop with pushing all of the taxes into the work-consume economy and out of the invest-return economy? The latter is eating the world, would it really hurt it to help clean up its own messes for once?

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#350

Post by tucnak »

bigfatkitten wrote: post #313
tucnak wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention they are still at the forefront of materials science and industrial design, and just so happen to manufacture bespoke CPU & server platforms that run circles around all the hyperscalers...

Though of late, IBM has apparently decided it should be just another Indian outsourcer.

Google will do the same eventually.
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