alt Hacker NewsThis reminds me of around 2002 when I wrote an article looking at how all the web behemoths at the time were claiming profitability through ad sales, but actually the vast majority of ads were from one web behemoth advertising on an other's site and vice versa.
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Also a pg essay from 2010: https://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html
>By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto Ponzi scheme. Investors were excited about the Internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo's revenue growth. So they invested in new Internet startups. The startups then used the money to buy ads on Yahoo to get traffic. Which caused yet more revenue growth for Yahoo, and further convinced investors the Internet was worth investing in. When I realized this one day, sitting in my cubicle, I jumped up like Archimedes in his bathtub, except instead of "Eureka!" I was shouting "Sell!"
Do you happen to have a copy of that article? I’d love to read it.
Same as capacity swaps in telecom of that era