They are a news aggregator and distributor, they are a customer of media and news agencies. Or a parasite, depending on point of view. Still not a competitor. They also still don’t compete with ad brokers and don’t do any targeted advertising.

> increasingly in the ad business itself (revenue is expected to rise to 11 billion in 2025, growing quickly)

These ads are in the Stores and keyword-based. Which is distasteful, but not quite the same level. Again, they don’t distribute ads, and are not in the market for targeted advertising. They don’t compete with ad networks, and if they weren’t doing that there would just be no ads on the store. Like it was not that long ago.

> in the exact same way digital platforms overall benefited from laying waste to the small and mid-sized ad-industry.

If the mid-sized ad industry does not rely on tracking, blocking invisible pixels in newsletter won’t affect it. If it does rely on tracking, then it can’t die soon enough.

Note: I'm not claiming that Apple is somehow a particularly bad actor in that regard. But their ads are not just keyword based. They track you, and sell access to you based on the information they collected, just like other adtech companies. Does that change your conclusions?

so it seems that the current revenue is a guess and the projection is a guess.