That makes even less sense. Really, ZERO brands have found customers from web marketing? Not even Audible, or Harry's, or all those mattress brands, that weird tongue brush all over YouTube in 2012? No success stories at all?
> Not even Audible, or Harry's, or all those mattress brands
They advertised through sponsoring podcasts or Youtube channels, which is the sort of traditional advertising that's being contrasted to tracking-based adtech.
You can add Alibaba, Baidu and Toutiao to that list. Nearly all of their revenue comes from adtech. Just three platforms used by a billion people. Yahoo was also made possible by adtech, it was / is a brand known to over a billion people.
Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat - they only exist courtesy of their adtech.
Can you imagine how difficult it would be for Twitter to sustain itself with a paid model? There's such an extreme imbalance between the people that post regularly and are power users, vs people that just occasionally consume. The median user that reads a few tweets per day - at best - is never going to pay $60 or $100 per year for that product. Even if you have five million power users on there paying $100 per year, Twitter instantly goes bankrupt, they could never charge enough.
I'm amused by the implication here, that it's obvious $500 million a year isn't enough to run a website where people send short messages to each other.
Out of the three you listed, only one has actually made money. Snapchat and Twitter have lost incredible amounts.
Also, I think what the article is suggesting is that brands don't typically get built on the back of advertising _initially_. All three of those started without it and added it in later once they were highly entrenched to try to monetize.
I still don't think it was a very good point in the article, though.
Google.