This is the spiral of businesses based on personal data. They are pressured to meet quarterly earnings targets. As more people flee with their data, they must squeeze more out of what they have and can get.
They are trying to diversify into business services and hardware, but those are struggling even though often heavily discounted. Their tarnished reputation is making it harder for customers in those markets to trust them.
It's worse than that: It's YoY revenue growth targets that really matter to the stock price, hence the never-ending push to put more ads into places you never expected to see them.
FWIW I've pretty-much given up on YouTube due to the aggressive ad insertions.
Or, in other words, the huge price/earnings of all stocks (even large companies) require that those companies grow even when this is physically impossible. Otherwise there is a huge downwards correction on the price, and people that brought it by the unrealistic price (that's anybody that brought it) lose most of their money.
This is the price of participating in an irrational market.
Replying to myself so as to add the following quote from Rudy Rucker that seems to me terribly apropos:
"I never really understood the ideas in economics, in fact I almost failed to graduate from college because I couldn’t stand going to economics lectures. Hate, hate, hate the stuff. It’s like studying Bible stories or pseudoscience—economics has so little connection to daily reality. For instance, it’s completely obvious that companies can’t in fact grow forever, year after year, without hitting some debilitating limits. But the so-called value of a company is based on how much they grow from quarter to quarter. Economics as practiced by bankers is complete horseshit, but they’ve bought out all the politicians, so nothing reasonable ever gets done. In the long run, of course, the situation will resolve itself. Meanwhile we’re seeing a resurgence of the dystopic SF novel!"
Its the same way that everything on TV turns into crap. It is all about maximizing profits while minimizing effort and focusing on the least common denominator of customers/viewers/users, and actually shrinking the userbase to maximize user profitability. So the result is the shit that half the people out there will just put up with.
They are trying to diversify into business services and hardware, but those are struggling even though often heavily discounted. Their tarnished reputation is making it harder for customers in those markets to trust them.