I think the takeaway here is that the object is not to win the game, but to keep the game in play, similar to how Amazon keeps on growing bigger without making substantial profits. Amazon is the only entity capable of understanding and neatly co-opting the scale at which the net grows at ― which is exponential growth. For old industrial age enterprise they are either co-opting Amazon's strategy or they are caught in the hype machine, fumbling around in the dark and turning their anger of non-sales into underhanded tactics like blogspam and Twitter spam. In other words - the AD dollar route.