Most of the megacorp growth around here, for which the small-business habitat has been bulldozed, is driven by companies that, in terms of business, are real-estate development corporations with on-line advertising networks and lots of investment capital.
Well, you can only go so long burning capital on flashy headquarters complexes, lavish parties, and political donations before you need to show some positive cash flow from the advertising-network side of the business.
And, guess what? Seems the companies that have been paying into the advertising business are getting no return from it. As in, none. Throwing money down a rathole.
And that's now becoming apparent. So, when the on-line advertising market collapses from lack of advertisers, and all the pension funds run out of money to invest, and all the Chinese pension funds run out of money to invest...?
(If you look closely, and are fool enough to play Android games without turning on airplane mode first, you'll notice that the ads in free, ad-supported games are mostly for other free, ad-supported games. Which I suppose makes sense to an enlightened neo-Keynesian, but to us old fuddy-duddies who ponder how money is spent, and not merely that it is spent, this seems monumentally unproductive: starving programmers pay each other to advertise each other's free games. But the house always gets its cut, so all's well for Google. Until the starving programmers run out of advertising money.)
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