A Brief History of Mobi’s Founding and Fu Sheng’s Entrepreneurial Journey

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Quick summary:

Building tools and layering in third-party advertising networks is a proven way to generate cash flow quickly.

On the flip side, when your revenue depends on platforms that can squeeze your margins overnight, you’re forced to develop other business lines to create new growth channels.

Cheetah Mobile’s ad revenue has been throttled by Google and Facebook, both of which control the ad networks it relies on for monetization. Facebook, in turn, has been squeezed by Apple and Google, whose stricter privacy policies have limited its ability to serve targeted ads and hurt its revenue.

The first half of this argument holds up; the second half is a bit weak.