That framing is silly. “NBC doesn’t have a television business, they have an ad business”. “Google doesn’t have a search business, they have an ad business.” “Amazon doesn’t have a retail business, they have an ad business.”
It doesn’t provide any value to reframe it this way, unless you think it’s some big secret that ads are the main source of revenue for these businesses.
I'd contrast this with Flickr. Flickr was the original social network. They have a modest loss leader, a reasonable free tier, but nothing like the permanent money bonfire that the big tech firms operate.
They were kinda the first real Web 2.0 social media site, with a social graph, privacy controls, a developer API, tagging, RSS feeds.
I feel that they never really got to their full potential exactly because these big VC-backed dumping operations in social media (like Facebook) were able to kill them in the crib.
If we're going to accept that social media is a natural monopoly: great. Regulate them strictly, as you should with any monopoly.
Flickr failed because they sold to Yahoo which was bad place to end up. But a successful Flickr would look a lot like Instagram
Del.icio.us is the same story. Good product ahead of its time, bought by Yahoo and died. Could have been Pinterest.
Fair point, there's a good chance we'd be living in a techno utopia right now if someone was able to go back in time and prevent Yahoo from murdering so many promising startups. Conversely, if Yahoo had just spent the relative pocket change that Google was asking for back in the day perhaps we'd be living under the oppressive thumb of a trillion dollar market cap Alta Vista.
> VC-backed dumping operations
Which is very reassuring considering some of them are fairly obviously on the wrong side of history with very naive viewpoints https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7852246
NBC produces their own content, Facebook and Instagram meanwhile are the equivalent of public access TV with ads. There is no unique "brand" that Facebook has, anything posted on there is also posted everywhere else.
It’s crowded out craiglists and events boards.
Restaurants don't have a food business, they have a charging people money through bills business.
They're in the food micro delivery business. They deliver food from the expo to your table. Short hop logistics specialists.
> “NBC doesn’t have a television business, they have an ad business”.
They do broadcast TV, the purpose of which is to display ads. That does make sense.
> “Google doesn’t have a search business, they have an ad business.”
When Google started out, in the "don't be evil", simple home page days, they were a search company. It is hardly true any more, ads are now the centre of their business.
> “Amazon doesn’t have a retail business, they have an ad business.”
Well, duh! Quite obvious these days. That is where they get the lion's share of the revenue, outside AWS.
I am impressed, you hit the nail on the head!