There are a number of incredible low-margin consumer services that have massively grown their operating profit (and their valuation) through an in-product advertising business:
- Amazon: ~$80B
- Uber: ~$2B
- Doordash: ~$1B
- Instacart: ~$1B
It'll be interesting to see if this creates a modern form of the innovator's dilemma, i.e., enabling agentic use (which is unequivocally pro-customer) cuts deeply to their bottom line, creating opportunity for those that don't rely on ads for their operating profit (e.g., Shopify).