7 ms·

Snap and Meta are getting their lunch eaten by TikTok. Google Apple Amazon are fine.

bushbaba 4y ago
Google still is an ads company. It’s not as well diversified as apple (hardware, services, ads) and amazon (cloud, retail, consumer electronics, logistics, healthcare,…etc)
- paxys 4y ago
  iPhone hardware sales account for 50% of Apple's revenue, and that number goes up significantly when you allocate revenue from Apple Care, services, ads, App Store and more that are directly driven by iPhone. The entire company is reliant on that one device, so not quite as diversified as people think.
  - wiremine 4y ago
    True. I think it's also fair to say it's more of an ecosystem than a single product. The switching costs to another similar ecosystem are high.
  - matwood 4y ago
    It's better to say Apple is becoming less reliant on selling every iPhone user a new iPhone every year.
  - asdajksah2123 4y ago
    Apple can deploy several levers to increase non-iPhone revenue which they haven't yet. First party games. Ads. Increase first party paid app costs (final cut pro goes back to being a pro service). Developer services. All on the mac side. They also have cloud infrastructure they haven't focused on yet, but can potentially be a major source of revenue with the right hires and focus.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  Is Google trying to be anything other than an ads company? If so, what? I know they are famous for spinning up projects and killing them super quickly. If not, what are they doing? They have 140k+ employees worldwide. Is that what is needed to maintain their core ad business without focusing on growth of any kind (ad related or not)? If not... how many engineers/managers/whatever positions could they afford to "layoff" if we were to see US recessionary pressures/consumer spending pullback?
  - colinmhayes 4y ago
    Google is putting a lot of resources into enterprise productivity software with gsuite. Google's strategy there largely revolves around letting students use the software for free and giving away chromebooks to school districts so that ten years from now every college graduate will be more comfortable with gsuite than microsoft office, so a bit of a long game there. This is basically microsoft's entire business, so there's definitely a huge market there. They also have GCP which is chugging along I guess.
    - xapata 4y ago
      To some extent, that was Microsoft's strategy in the 90s and 00s.
    - substation13 4y ago
      They sure missed boat with Teams / Slack.
    - paganel 4y ago
      MS also famously has lots and lots of pretty decent re-sellers all around the world, which re-sellers have their own very deep lists of business contacts. Afaik Google has tried to get something out of the enterprise space for a good 5 years now (I'd say), ever since they launched GCP, but it's just not in their DNA to do and especially to maintain business sales.
      - Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
- sanedigital 4y ago
  Google is in all of those areas as well, they're just minor plays. Last quarter, ~10% of Google's revenue came from non-advertising Services and ~7% came from Google Cloud. The ~82% that comes from ads is split between Search, YouTube, and the Network. Amazon by comparison is 83% dependent on Amazon retail. Cloud fills the remaining 17%. They're not any better diversified, by revenue.
  - mh- 4y ago
    I don't think you can look at Amazon's "dependency" on revenue through that simplistic of a lens. AWS is purported to be much more profitable than their retail operations.
  - MuffinFlavored 4y ago
    What are the margins on Amazon's retail revenue after all logistics costs versus the margins on Google's advertising? I'm going to take a guess and say retail probably breaks even (almost by design by Amazon but not sure if it'll ever be more than a 10-20% margin business because by design they are offering traditionally expensive services like fast shipping, very lenient returns at very low cost/price to the end user) whereas advertising is probably... 80% margin? I know there are server costs, engineers to maintain them, but if Google stopped investing in growth as far as diversifying/expanding advertising services goes engineer/developer/management wise... how lean could they run? Could they support Google's current ad offerings with a core team of... 1000 engineers? 500? 200?
    - bushbaba 4y ago
      Amazon doesn't want to show profit in retail. It instead re-invents much of the profit into their logistics and technology. Buying all those 747s for prime air these past few years wasn't cheap. Amazon go wasn't cheap. Alexa sure ain't cheap. That all comes out of the margin of retail. Amazon retail isn't just getting revenue from e-commerce sales. There's multiple diversified business units part of that division. For example people pay for amazon logistics, amazon warehousing, etc.
  - master_crab 4y ago
xtracto 4y ago
Just yesterday I got contacted by a Google recruiter through LinkedIn asking me whether I was "interested in discussing our current remote opportunities!" . Given the infamous Google 5-7 stages interview process I promptly rejected the offer. IMHO It's just not worth it for an employed person to go through that hell...
- temp_praneshp 4y ago
  I applied at google the last time I looked for a job (dec2020-jan 2021). The 5-7 stages interview process isn't even the worst thing about it. Unless you disagree in principle, it's basically a day's worth of time. After confirming that the hiring committee had said yes, and a level, the recruiter found some teams that were atrocious (either they were looking for a completely different skillset, or so far out from my stated preferences). We then did a 2nd round of interviews and did a level jump (mid Feb-2021), and found a team in mid-March. After okay-s from both sides, it took them till mid-April to come up with an offer. My entire h1 transfer for the company I chose took less than how long google took for the last step.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    The top-end players operate way outside the norms for mid-market (as in, the "trimodal" software developer comp graph). Among the 8 or so software job offers I've accepted in my career, I don't think I've ever had one take more than 7 calendar days from initial contact to an offer. I do see some paying mid-market rates and taking a month or more for their process. I bet they believe it's very hard to find software developers.
    - xtracto 4y ago
      I had a thought around those lines. I am sure Peter Norvig didn't have to go through 7 asinine whiteboard coding questions to get hired into Google. Now, I am way way way far away from being Peter Norving, but in my 15 years career, I have found companies that value my experience enough so that they treat me well during the hiring process. In my last 3 jobs (10 years) I didn't even have to do "interviews" for the places I got into. I have been spoiled...
kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
Amazon's gonna bleed the quarter after they introduce ads.
- peppertree 4y ago
  Amazon already has ads.
- skinnymuch 4y ago
  Amazon is massive in ads. I believe they are 3rd now. Even ahead of Microsoft+LinkedIn
- Brystephor 4y ago
  According to the Amazon recruiter that reached out to me for Amazon Ads, their growth has been significant and they're now one of the largest sources of income for Amazon at $30B+ a year in income. All the Amazon devices are likely whats being targeted for Ads. Kindles, Amazon Prime, Audible, alexa, firestick, and now that Prime has access to Thursday night football they'll get some of that ad revenue too. TLDR: Amazon is going big on advertising.
  - coffee_beqn 4y ago
    Also notice when you search anything in the store you always get a bunch of Sponsored results at the top. This is almost exactly like AdWords for search
ronnier 4y ago
Amazon was hurt deeply by TikTok. TikTok pushed Shein which is now the top shopping app. shein is direct from china sales and is now insanely popular for cheap fashionable clothes. TikTok is eating many. https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/18/shein-overtakes-amazon/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/18/shein-overtakes-amazon/
- eunos 4y ago
  Also I read that Tiktok e-commerce is now home to brands that were delisted from Amazon.
  - coffee_beqn 4y ago
    So aliexpress garbage? Wow they must be scared
- fomine3 4y ago
  It's interesting but App store ranking for shopping app isn't good metrics.
collegeburner 4y ago
Anecdotally as the target demographic of short video, i'm starting to have friends send around the occasional insta reel not just tiktoks. I think they're making up some ground.
duud 4y ago
TikTok had $4.6 billion revenue in 2021, Meta had $117 billion. TikTok has stolen some fries but Meta still has a huge juicy steak.

Google still is an ads company. It’s not as well diversified as apple (hardware, services, ads) and amazon (cloud, retail, consumer electronics, logistics, healthcare,…etc)

paxys 4y ago
iPhone hardware sales account for 50% of Apple's revenue, and that number goes up significantly when you allocate revenue from Apple Care, services, ads, App Store and more that are directly driven by iPhone. The entire company is reliant on that one device, so not quite as diversified as people think.
- wiremine 4y ago
  True. I think it's also fair to say it's more of an ecosystem than a single product. The switching costs to another similar ecosystem are high.
- matwood 4y ago
  It's better to say Apple is becoming less reliant on selling every iPhone user a new iPhone every year.
- asdajksah2123 4y ago
  Apple can deploy several levers to increase non-iPhone revenue which they haven't yet. First party games. Ads. Increase first party paid app costs (final cut pro goes back to being a pro service). Developer services. All on the mac side. They also have cloud infrastructure they haven't focused on yet, but can potentially be a major source of revenue with the right hires and focus.
MuffinFlavored 4y ago
Is Google trying to be anything other than an ads company? If so, what? I know they are famous for spinning up projects and killing them super quickly. If not, what are they doing? They have 140k+ employees worldwide. Is that what is needed to maintain their core ad business without focusing on growth of any kind (ad related or not)? If not... how many engineers/managers/whatever positions could they afford to "layoff" if we were to see US recessionary pressures/consumer spending pullback?
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  Google is putting a lot of resources into enterprise productivity software with gsuite. Google's strategy there largely revolves around letting students use the software for free and giving away chromebooks to school districts so that ten years from now every college graduate will be more comfortable with gsuite than microsoft office, so a bit of a long game there. This is basically microsoft's entire business, so there's definitely a huge market there. They also have GCP which is chugging along I guess.
  - xapata 4y ago
    To some extent, that was Microsoft's strategy in the 90s and 00s.
  - substation13 4y ago
    They sure missed boat with Teams / Slack.
  - paganel 4y ago
    MS also famously has lots and lots of pretty decent re-sellers all around the world, which re-sellers have their own very deep lists of business contacts. Afaik Google has tried to get something out of the enterprise space for a good 5 years now (I'd say), ever since they launched GCP, but it's just not in their DNA to do and especially to maintain business sales.
    - Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
sanedigital 4y ago
Google is in all of those areas as well, they're just minor plays. Last quarter, ~10% of Google's revenue came from non-advertising Services and ~7% came from Google Cloud. The ~82% that comes from ads is split between Search, YouTube, and the Network. Amazon by comparison is 83% dependent on Amazon retail. Cloud fills the remaining 17%. They're not any better diversified, by revenue.
- mh- 4y ago
  I don't think you can look at Amazon's "dependency" on revenue through that simplistic of a lens. AWS is purported to be much more profitable than their retail operations.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  What are the margins on Amazon's retail revenue after all logistics costs versus the margins on Google's advertising? I'm going to take a guess and say retail probably breaks even (almost by design by Amazon but not sure if it'll ever be more than a 10-20% margin business because by design they are offering traditionally expensive services like fast shipping, very lenient returns at very low cost/price to the end user) whereas advertising is probably... 80% margin? I know there are server costs, engineers to maintain them, but if Google stopped investing in growth as far as diversifying/expanding advertising services goes engineer/developer/management wise... how lean could they run? Could they support Google's current ad offerings with a core team of... 1000 engineers? 500? 200?
  - bushbaba 4y ago
    Amazon doesn't want to show profit in retail. It instead re-invents much of the profit into their logistics and technology. Buying all those 747s for prime air these past few years wasn't cheap. Amazon go wasn't cheap. Alexa sure ain't cheap. That all comes out of the margin of retail. Amazon retail isn't just getting revenue from e-commerce sales. There's multiple diversified business units part of that division. For example people pay for amazon logistics, amazon warehousing, etc.
- master_crab 4y ago

xtracto 4y ago

Just yesterday I got contacted by a Google recruiter through LinkedIn asking me whether I was "interested in discussing our current remote opportunities!" . Given the infamous Google 5-7 stages interview process I promptly rejected the offer. IMHO It's just not worth it for an employed person to go through that hell...

temp_praneshp 4y ago
I applied at google the last time I looked for a job (dec2020-jan 2021). The 5-7 stages interview process isn't even the worst thing about it. Unless you disagree in principle, it's basically a day's worth of time. After confirming that the hiring committee had said yes, and a level, the recruiter found some teams that were atrocious (either they were looking for a completely different skillset, or so far out from my stated preferences). We then did a 2nd round of interviews and did a level jump (mid Feb-2021), and found a team in mid-March. After okay-s from both sides, it took them till mid-April to come up with an offer. My entire h1 transfer for the company I chose took less than how long google took for the last step.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  The top-end players operate way outside the norms for mid-market (as in, the "trimodal" software developer comp graph). Among the 8 or so software job offers I've accepted in my career, I don't think I've ever had one take more than 7 calendar days from initial contact to an offer. I do see some paying mid-market rates and taking a month or more for their process. I bet they believe it's very hard to find software developers.
  - xtracto 4y ago
    I had a thought around those lines. I am sure Peter Norvig didn't have to go through 7 asinine whiteboard coding questions to get hired into Google. Now, I am way way way far away from being Peter Norving, but in my 15 years career, I have found companies that value my experience enough so that they treat me well during the hiring process. In my last 3 jobs (10 years) I didn't even have to do "interviews" for the places I got into. I have been spoiled...

kevin_thibedeau 4y ago

Amazon's gonna bleed the quarter after they introduce ads.

peppertree 4y ago
Amazon already has ads.
skinnymuch 4y ago
Amazon is massive in ads. I believe they are 3rd now. Even ahead of Microsoft+LinkedIn
Brystephor 4y ago
According to the Amazon recruiter that reached out to me for Amazon Ads, their growth has been significant and they're now one of the largest sources of income for Amazon at $30B+ a year in income. All the Amazon devices are likely whats being targeted for Ads. Kindles, Amazon Prime, Audible, alexa, firestick, and now that Prime has access to Thursday night football they'll get some of that ad revenue too. TLDR: Amazon is going big on advertising.
- coffee_beqn 4y ago
  Also notice when you search anything in the store you always get a bunch of Sponsored results at the top. This is almost exactly like AdWords for search

ronnier 4y ago

Amazon was hurt deeply by TikTok. TikTok pushed Shein which is now the top shopping app. shein is direct from china sales and is now insanely popular for cheap fashionable clothes. TikTok is eating many. https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/18/shein-overtakes-amazon/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/18/shein-overtakes-amazon/

eunos 4y ago
Also I read that Tiktok e-commerce is now home to brands that were delisted from Amazon.
- coffee_beqn 4y ago
  So aliexpress garbage? Wow they must be scared
fomine3 4y ago
It's interesting but App store ranking for shopping app isn't good metrics.

collegeburner 4y ago

Anecdotally as the target demographic of short video, i'm starting to have friends send around the occasional insta reel not just tiktoks. I think they're making up some ground.

duud 4y ago

TikTok had $4.6 billion revenue in 2021, Meta had $117 billion. TikTok has stolen some fries but Meta still has a huge juicy steak.