There are periods in time when digital technologies deliver “aha! moments” at a global scale. To illustrate, when WhatsApp’s usage started to rise in the 2010s, my friends & family were amazed by the low cost, low latency and high reliability instant messaging service. As another example, when Google’s Gemini usage started to rise in the 2020s, my friends were amazed by the low cost, low latency and high reliability digital output creation service. For many of these incredible digital technologies, the principal entity owners tend to also own and operate digital advertising businesses with high free cash flow and high net income^{1, 2}. As such, focusing on developing an understanding of the digital advertising business ecosystem seems helpful.

To understand the digital advertising business, one needs to identify what are the problems to be solved. Following this line of reasoning, digital advertising serves to solve one core problem. Looking back to September 2025, The Twenty Minute VC (20VC) podcast hosted Alex Schultz, the Chief Marketing Officer and VP of Analytics. During the discussion, Mr. Schultz recommended listeners to read Claude C. Hopkins’s book Scientific Advertising. One of the book’s key takeaways is an explanation of the problem digital advertising solves, and that key takeaway is that, “The only purpose of advertising is to make sales.”

With that understanding in mind, one may imagine that an advertising ecosystem can be presented with 3 ecosystem entities. Let this model be named the Theoretical Digital Advertising Business Ecosystem.

In reality, the ecosystem participants structure involves a combination of at least these 15 ecosystem participant groups. Let this model be named the Observed Digital Advertising Business Ecosystem.

Thinking through the 2 lists above, one may conclude that the Theoretical Digital Advertising Business Ecosystem model resembles an ecosystem model illustrated by Ben Thompson’s Aggregation Theory. Continuing on this line of reasoning, one may conclude that Alphabet Inc. and Meta Platforms, Inc. have built digital advertising businesses which appear to have implemented the Theoretical Digital Advertising Ecosystem model.

If that conclusion is true, then entrepreneurs and employees operating digital advertising business operations may choose to use Alphabet’s and/or Meta’s digital advertising suite of tools because of the simplicity in the setup to make sales as compared to other alternatives offered by competitors^{3, 4}.