The advertising duopoly is a crown with no kingdom in 2022. Online advertising is dead - most people online aren't worth advertising too. This isn't 2010 when most people online were from wealthy countries. Google and Facebook are having a harder and harder time finding high-net-worth individuals to advertise too, because they all use adblock or avoid the open internet, preferring to stick to walled gardens like reddit and tiktok (which serve their own ads).
Everything you just said is voided by the fact that Google's ad business continues to boom. It's going nowhere. And I say that as someone that dislikes Google. Your pitch is emotionalism, I've been reading rants like that on HN for the past ~15 years. They're in practically every thread on Google or advertising. Meanwhile Google has gotten 17 times larger in that span of time.
Their business has doubled in size since the beginning of 2019. Their operating income has skyrocketed.
When did the death struggle begin for them exactly?
Well there are two ways to look at this story. One way to look at it is the duopoly is "under attack" from different media platforms, which is a frankly boring observation. Tiktok becoming more popular cuts into YouTube ads? Hardly shocking.
Another way to look at it is the duopoly is being forced to retreat into their safe havens, yes that "90%" of their revenue that they can safely take for granted. I would wager on a guess that Alphabet and Meta are not happy if they can only serve ads on their owned and operated properties like google search, youtube and instagram. They are risking losing the wider web advertising market.
Google booming doesn't necessarily mean OP is wrong. Go read some PPC forums and you'll see a pretty consistent trend on ad ROI going down everywhere. Folks may just be spending more trying to spend their way back to a low CPA.
That's also because they have to sell things we don't need to buy, 99.9% of the time. They don't have an offer for what I would buy today, they offer me something completely unrelated. The ads are not helpful. But if they focused on helpful ads their profits would be too small.
Google once had the right approach - showing ads related to the search terms. It was polite and nicely delineated. But that wasn't going to earn them money from unrelated ad campaigns.
