There’s a big “yet” attached to Apple not profiting from the proliferation of ads - from what I’ve read, since they pushed the “ask app not to track” change, Apple has been pushing hard for more widespread adoption of their own advertising platform.
Make no mistake, Apple does not care about your privacy — only about moving the ad money out of Google’s pocket into their own.
I sort of see it the other way around. To me Google is an advertisement company first, and if you use Google products then you know your privacy data is how you pay for those products. With Apple and Microsoft you're paying for the product, but you're now also getting your privacy data sucked into their growing advertisement business.
I personally think the use of privacy data is a waste of resources, and that companies like duckduckgo have the longer end of the stick. Because it makes more sense to me, that I get advertisements for a robot vacuum cleaner when I'm searching for one, and not the 3 months after I buy one, but then there is a trillion dollar advertisement industry to prove me wrong. So who knows. But what pisses me off is that companies sell you a product, and then also include advertisement and privacy data harvesting in it, like that Samsung TV article that was on here recently. Or how Windows "home or whatever the non-enterprise edition is called" now sometimes installs pre-installers for things like candy crush or Minecraft without asking you to do so... Like what the hell?
I don't want you to read this as a defence for google, but at least they are sort of honest about the evil they do.
I'm not sure any of these sleazy moves will have the desired outcomes for these companies. I don't want to use linux, I did once, but I like my technology to work right out of the box with no effort to make it so or to maintain it, which is why I'm in the Apple ecosystem these days, but the ways things are heading, I think the only future will be linux, and trying to find appliances that aren't add-infested.
"I was factually incorrect Apple generates about 1% of their annual revenue from ads"
Why play silly games to make 4 billion dollars seem small?
I could play this game in the other direction and say "Apple generates more money from ads now than 99% of the companies ever make over their entire existence"
In truth, 4 billion dollars is a lot of money.
More to the point of this discussion, when you ask them, they want it to be a very significant part of their business. They talk about it on earnings calls all the time!
It's not like they are hiding it!
Which sort of totally blows up the idea that they don't care.
We're talking about whether they profit, and whether it matters to them and the business.
You said they do not.
"One of these companies profits by the proliferation of ads and the other does not."
That was wrong. They make a lot of money from it and they have said it is an important part of their future.
Rather than just say you were wrong, you instead try to paint it as not mattering by using percentages, when again, it is a lot of money and apple themselves say it matters a lot
Just accept that what you said was mistaken, and do better next time. What you are doing now just makes you look bad and unable to learn and grow.
I admitted that my original comment was factually incorrect. It was wrong. I said that.
However, the point has always been about the comparison between Google and Apple. Given that their total revenues are of different size, how can we reasonably compare them?
What if we add a 3rd competitor to the arena? Let’s look at Outbrain. They’re a digital advertising marketplace w/ $256M annual revenue. By your argument, $256M << $1B — therefore we should take Apple to care more about their advertising business than Outbrain do about theirs?
Percentages are important because a company is less likely to risk 99% of their business to double 1% of their business than to risk 33% of their business to double the other 66%
While the orders of magnitude here are evocative, it's worth noting that Apple has a pervasive culture of "we deserve our cut of any transaction that goes through any of our platforms, and we will (mis)use our power to enforce that" stemming from when Jobs had to bring the company back from the brink of bankruptcy. See current battles on allowing alternative payment processors in iOS apps (to the point that even when ordered by courts to allow them, they added a 27% commission on alternate payment processors)
Apple is rapidly running out of growth room in new physical people to sell phones to, and is starting to significantly switch focus to new ways of extracting rent from existing customers through "services" and similar.
Both companies profit from ads when you claim one did not. If you’re looking at the percentage revenue projections from ads Apple’s has been growing faster than Google’s.
