After Snap’s poorly received Q1 digest and ahead of this week’s string of earnings reports from the largest U.S. tech companies, we wondered whether the advertising market is in trouble. Not that most folks associate Microsoft or Apple with advertising the way they may with Alphabet or Meta, but the majors — Amazon and Apple included — have ads businesses of material size, meaning that the ad market impacts each of them.

(That ads are considered to be a lackluster business model for smaller companies and startups — speaking loosely — but are a huge revenue source for platform companies says something interesting about competition inside of the technology industry. But perhaps that’s a topic for another day.)

Now, with three of the five majors having reported their Q2 results, how are their advertising results faring?

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The question ripples into other areas of the economy: Tech companies generate huge incomes from hosting advertisements, but with companies as far afield as Netflix working hard to bolster their subscription incomes through ads, the question of advertising performance is not idle, and impacts trillions of dollars of corporate value.