Internet Stocks

About Internet Stocks

The product is advertising. Search results, feeds and video are free to the user because attention is the thing being sold, at auction, to advertisers bidding for a moment in front of a particular person. That makes the group a geared bet on corporate marketing budgets, and marketing is the line companies cut first when their own outlook wobbles.

It is also one of the most concentrated corners of the market. A few platforms take most of digital ad spend and their scale is the moat. That has been extraordinarily profitable, and it is exactly why antitrust and privacy rules are a permanent fixture here rather than a passing headline. A change to what data can be collected reprices these without anything about the business changing.

Part of the group rents computing rather than selling ads. Cloud is a capital-heavy property and hardware business wearing a software multiple, and it is worth knowing which of the two you have bought before you decide what it is worth.

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