i firmly believe it’s the interest rate hike. the fed rate has been set to “free money” since the GFC in 2007.

[aside from a little blip between 2016 and COVID when rates were gradually increased up to a whopping 2% over 4 years before being flattened to “free money” when COVID hit].

now, in less than 1.5 years, it’s gone from “free money” to 5.5%. that’s enough to make “investors” [aka, people who negotiate giant loans from investment banks to invest in companies] squeamish about negotiating additional operating loans and pressuring executives to find money under the couch cushions, so to speak…

to be fair, i think the enshittification process of trying to squeeze a buck out of everything was inevitable to capitalism, but the rise of interest rates so high over such a short window set a fire under it.

my guess is that gulf state monarchy investors (Saudi, Qatar, UAE etc) haven’t been satisfied with the profit margins and are demanding more control over the companies, whereas American/European investors are possibly more focused on market share

could be rising competition from Chinese tech companies as well

It could also be a collapsing bubble where everyone’s realizing personal data sold to advertising companies isn’t as valuable as everyone assumed it was 15 years ago. They ran out of people to scoop data from. Everyone’s already got every possible type of targeted ad pointed directly at their eyeballs 24/7. The market is cornered and there’s nothing left to speculate on

it was never profitable. Its all sort of been a big scam from the beginning

Apparently Google does not reveal YouTube profitability: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/03/google-still-isnt-telling-us-about-youtube-and-cloud-profits.html

I think this is normal Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall stuff