[gingerbread-man]

Most ad tech companies (Google, FB) likely devote well under 10% of their engineering might to work directly related to the advertising that forms their revenue stream.

Newspapers and magazines are ad-funded, too, but few would consider the work of journalists to be wasteful.

[dv_dt]

I would be curious to see an article, presentation, or quarterly report where that's written down because that's quite surprising. Maybe my gut is thinking ad-tech and all the support infrastructure, when the 10% is direct assigned engineering to ad-tech. And to be fair, the "support infrastructure" can and has other purposes.