> So who is actually seeing these ads? How can those numbers be going up? Advertising spend could be going up without more people seeing the ads. Since busines

> So who is actually seeing these ads? How can those numbers be going up? Advertising spend could be going up without more people seeing the ads. Since businesses compete for limited advertising space, they are likely to keep increasing the size of their bids for click. Alphabet's revenue could be growing as a result of eroding the margins of other businesses, who are now forced to spend more money for the same amount of clicks. I don't claim this to be the exact scenario that reflects reality, but it is a very plausible scenario nonetheless. A nice little lesson in why lots of things are zero-sum (even though we'd like to pretend they aren't)