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No Amazon, really? Amazon ships physical goods to your house in exchange for money--they aren't dependent on advertising. Even Google landed on advertising as
by philwelch 5y ago
No Amazon, really? Amazon ships physical goods to your house in exchange for money--they aren't dependent on advertising.
Even Google landed on advertising as a monetization technique but existed before it and easily could have been a sustainable business without it (though not the behemoth it has become).
- jedberg 5y agoGoogle existed before ads but had no revenue. Ads are the only thing that kept it alive other than investor money.
- philwelch 5y agoI might have overstated a bit. Ads were obviously a sufficient revenue source, but provide far more revenue that is necessary for the core search engine. It’s possible some other revenue source might have been sufficient to support the search engine, even if not as lucrative.
- asciimov 5y agoNot the amazon of today at least. I had supposed without Ad's you wouldn't have had the dotcom boom of the 90's. No dot-com boom means venture capital wouldn't have flowed as readily. Amazon still would have started, but they burned a ton of cash in the late 90's. Without burning so much capital I don't believe they would have become as huge or if they would have even survived. I remember old amazon being cheaper than retail most of the time, they must have been eating that loss. In the end it worked out for them.