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Pluralism in Economics: inequalities, innovation, environment
Pluralism in Economics: inequalities, innovation, environment

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7 The rise of digital ‘platform’ companies

In recent years, there has been a rise in digital-based companies like Meta (Facebook and Instagram’s parent company), Alphabet (Google’s parent company), and ByteDance (TikTok’s parent company) providing ‘free’ services, using the content created by its user to increase its engagement, relying on user content and data to provide detailed advertising, which is one of their most important sources of revenue as illustrated in Figure 9 (Alphabet Inc, 2024; Meta Platforms Inc, 2024; The Beijing News, 2022).

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Figure 9: Advertising Revenue of Meta, Alphabet and ByteDance in USD millions
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Figure 9 is a bar chart. The horizontal axis is labelled ‘Revenue (billions of US$)’; there are tick marks every 50 billion from 0 to 350. There is a list of three firms on the horizontal axis: Alphabet, Meta and Bytedance. Each bar for the firms is split in two colours, blue and orange. A legend at the top of the chart indicates that the blue part of the bar refers to the share of advertising revenue and the orange part of the bar refers to the share of other revenue. Inside each part of a bar there is a percentage.

Alphabet: the whole bar reaches just over 300 billions. The percentage in the blue bar is 77.4 percent whilst the percentage in the orange bar is 22.6 percent.

Meta: the whole bar reaches around 135 billions. The percentage in the blue bar is 97.8 percent whilst the percentage in the orange bar is 2.2 percent.

ByteDance: the whole bar stops short of 50 billions. The percentage in the blue bar is 80.6 percent whilst the percentage in the orange bar is 19.4 percent.

Figure 9: Advertising Revenue of Meta, Alphabet and ByteDance in USD millions