Meta’s Victory Lap Over Google on Ads Will Be Short
Mark Zuckerberg has all but abandoned his apps’ utility.
Photographer: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images
There will be a changing of the guard by the end of the year: Meta Platforms Inc. will for the first time surpass Alphabet Inc.’s Google for total digital advertising revenue, both globally and in the US. It will be a “watershed” moment and “major upset,” according to analysts at Emarketer, the market research firm that made the projection.
That’s great news if all you care about is Meta’s legacy business. But reaching this milestone has meant sacrificing the core of what Meta’s apps used to offer — an actual personal utility. That leaves Meta highly vulnerable to Google and other competitors in the future. I see the problem as this: How can you build “personal superintelligence” from a social-networking platform that has become so utterly impersonal?