Not really. There is a niche of social companies (twitter,facebook,google search engine) that make money from ads. There is a niche of media companies (youtube)

Not really. There is a niche of social companies (twitter,facebook,google search engine) that make money from ads. There is a niche of media companies (youtube) that make money from ads. There is a nice of startups which make money from Funding/IPOs. These niches are a focus of HN and get talked about way out of proportion of their representational percentage. Most most tech companies make products and get funding from sales (netflix, amazon, apple, ibm, microsoft, 99% of the Enterprise and 99% of small-medium market).