The technical terms you're looking for are demand generation vs demand fulfillment. The former is that pepsi ad where you suddenly feel thirsty, and the latter

The technical terms you're looking for are demand generation vs demand fulfillment. The former is that pepsi ad where you suddenly feel thirsty, and the latter is the coupon in your spam snail mail. Facebook is the former and Google is the latter. What you might not know is that demand generation spending is 10X demand fulfillment. You should definitely take that into account when assessing facebook. Also, the reasons users like facebook is unrelated to their ad platform. I would say that alone makes it not a ponzi scheme.