Just how bad is the Q1 ad market going to be?

What do media layoffs and tech worries have in common? Fear about what’s ahead in coming quarters, especially as it relates to advertising revenues.

The advertising business is huge and lucrative. So lucrative, in fact, that for major tech shops, some level of advertising-derived income is unavoidable once they reach a certain scale. Amazon is famed for its mega-scale advertising business (the other side of that coin is here); Apple’s App Store is an ad goliath; Microsoft’s Bing search engine generates material advertising incomes, and the company has even greater ad-focused aspirations; and Meta and Alphabet are advertising-centric businesses by nature.

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Due to major tech companies’ reliance on generating advertising-based revenues, we track the ad market more than we once did. We kinda cannot not, if that makes sense.

Back to media: It’s a bloodbath out there today, with layoffs arriving in droves and some publications straight-up dying. Underlying the cuts, at least per official corporate talking points, is anxiety stemming from an uncertain economic future.

Just how bad is the Q1 ad market going to be? by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch