Did Google make any money before ads by just innovating?
I was around 20 years ago when all these companies were losing money. Twitter was a prime example of taking years to land on a business model. They all landed on ads. Consumers wouldn’t fund the company via subscription to cover the obscene engineering and operating costs. They would probably need to lean up the way X did and Google is starting to do anyways.
google was the good exception. while everyone was just dialing ads to the max and turning into portals... google was at least churning new products and buying interesting ones to diversify ads. on their heyday they had some ads on search, some on youtube, some on apps, some on maps etc... now they've killed search by making it two page full of ads. they are in the process of killing youtube by showing more ads than daytime tv. and will soon show ads on android lock screen if this continues.
but this started on the last year of Schmidt. when he gave up to Icahn and other zombies on the board.
I was around 20 years ago when all these companies were losing money. Twitter was a prime example of taking years to land on a business model. They all landed on ads. Consumers wouldn’t fund the company via subscription to cover the obscene engineering and operating costs. They would probably need to lean up the way X did and Google is starting to do anyways.