I’ve spent most of the last 10 years earning my living from an e-commerce business I own. The online advertising industry is unrecognisable from when we started. My thesis, in beef, is that the industries excessive uses of personalised data and tracking lead to increased regulation, and then a massive pivot to even more “AI” as a means to circumvent that (to some extent). The AI in the ad industry now, I believe, is detrimental to the advertiser. It’s now just one big black box, you put money in one side and get traffic out the other. The control and useful tracking (what actual search terms people are using, proper visible conversion tracking of an ad) is now almost non-existent. As an advertiser your livelihood is dependant on an algorithm, not skill, not intuition, not experience, not even track record.
Facebook, Google and the rest of the industry were so driven by profit at all cost, and at the expense of long term thinking, they shot themselves in the foot.
Advertisers are searching for alternatives, but they are all the same.
I think online advertising, as a whole, is probably f***ed…
Trying to restrict my advertising budget to just one city and do a hard geographic restriction to just US IP addresses did not work. I filed 5 tickets over two weeks with Google trying to get this resolved, only to have over half my budget spent in another continent making impressions with people that will literally never buy the local specific product advertised.
By default it's set to "People -interested- in your target location" . You need to change it to "People who are -in- your target location".
This setting is hidden under a toggle, so it's very easy to miss. Definitely a dark pattern and results in a lot of garbage clicks if you overlook that setting.
This is just one of many dark patterns which makes Google Ads effective only for people willing to spend the time tuning and tweaking every single setting.
A big part of the problem is Google themselves - they say always use "broad" keyword matches (and of course it's the default). Broad matches are really not good for most campaigns unless you have an extremely large budget, yet if you read their documentation they heavily encourage it.
While we're at it...
1) Never enable the "auto apply recommendations" setting. If you do, it gives Google free reign to modify your campaigns (this has always resulted in worse performance and more spend in my experience)
2) Never listen to a google ads rep if they call. Once you're spending enough, they'll call you every week trying to convince you to change various settings. 95% of the time their advice is just plain bad. The quality of the advice does increase once you're spending enough and get assigned more senior reps. But even the senior reps are there to get you to spend more money, their job is not to make your campaigns more effective, "ad specialists" are simply sales people in disguise.
Excellent advice. I was helping manage an Adwords campaign for an online shop, only had search ads turned on, was carefully watching and tweaking ads and managed to get a pretty decent CTR which had a big impact on cost per click.
I was in a different time zone (15 hours ahead) than the company. I went to bed one night and next morning I checked and found that our CTR had gone through the floor, was way less than 1%. And as a result our cost per click had sky rocketed from 10 to 15 cents to several dollars.
Turns out that a Google ads rep had called the office and convinced someone to turn on display ads, which killed our CTR. Our advertising budget was depleted, our Adwords account had received the dreaded low CTR slap which meant it would be very costly/impossible to get CTR back to a reasonable level. We were done with Adwords.
Things may have changed since then. It was years ago and I haven't touched Adwords since.
The challenging thing about this advice is that for most people it feels unnatural to do the opposite of what Google recommends. Usually people need to get ripped off a few times before they accept that fact that Google is no longer a good actor.
I really don't get this part. What's Google's interest in pointless clicks? Short term they could get some extra charge for those, but if they don't convert they lose a customer. On the other hand, for quality clicks they could just charge 5x the price and nobody would complain.
Google intentionally modified both geo-targeting and mobile app targeting, removing the options advertisers set. For example, you opted out of mobile app targeted. Then they removed the option and you had to set it in the domain blacklist. Then they removed that. This wasn't a one off, hid, modified, and moved these options repeatedly.
Advertisers didn't know that when you geo-targeted a location, by default it was set to users searching that location. You didn't want people in India who were interested in NYC? Too bad.
Remember the whole Adwords prescription drug settlement. This is an organization run by people who would be serving hard time if they didn't have a legion of lawyers and bottomless pockets.
For whatever reason, Google was showing my ads to people on the other side of the planet and then taking my money for the privilege.
Most other non-faang ad networks are hot garbage. So many bots. In my view, Google has a "monopoly" not because of anti-competitive behaviour... It's because they have the best ad product.
If google is making it harder for people to spend money on ads, something is either seriously broken or alphabet figured out another way to make money that isn't ads
This is not possible unless the end user are willing to provide geo tracking for your convenience. The IP of the phone is the one of a datacenter, and it can be in any state (speaking about the US) - heck, in some cases, there could be multiple outgoing IPs in different datacenterss, different states.
It's just a fallacy and wishful thinking... unless google combines the geo location data where the user has been logged with the browser one. Which, of course it is.
In other words, companies now have to compete by making useful products at a good price, rather than gaming SEO.
Say, In a world of 1,000,000,000+ great products, reaching consumers through word-of-mouth is hard.
I bet there are products that solves a lot of your current problems at a decent price. But you don't know about it and none of your friends or network have the same problem for you to give you the solution.
The only way to solve this problem is for the product/service provider to know about you and the fact that you have a problem.
Advertising is actually an optimal / scalable way for companies to reach you.
In a Billion+ product world, you need at least 10 Million Trust worthy reviewers to give you an unbiased review of everything. But, how do you trust the reviewers?
Only way?? No.
No no absolutely not.
If/Since we are talking ideas and hypothetical, the preferred way would be for me to search for a product / indicate my need, and then marketplace to provide / compete for it.
The whole notion that advertiser must understand what I need, all the time, without my involvement knowledge or permission, then shove what it thinks I need up my throat constantly, is dystopian.
Basically, I think we are mixing up a pull paradigm to satisfy the consumer, with a push paradigm to satisfy the business. This is not to be naive about realities of world, business, saturated market, crappy products and differentiation, etc. But it peeves me when companies lack self awareness to be honest with themselves about which model is beneficial to which party.
Edit (and if we are going to talk about consumers being ignorant of the realities, let us not please pretend that the ultimate purpose of advertising is to perfectly satisfy a need with optimal product. Ultimate purpose of advertising is to make a sale. Sometimes, that sale is in fact optimal for the consumer. We can disagree how often that occurs as a percentage.)
Edit edit : the more I think the more I disagree. It's the word "optimal" that really bugs me - there's nothing optimal about modern online advertising. Clever, persistent, pervasive, desperate, obnoxious, hard work, devious, are some attributes that come to my mind. But it feels far from optimal - there's so much money and effort in this arms race which is increasingly hostile between an advertiser and consumer, and knowingly so; google and meta are 300 billion worth of not optimal :->
Furthermore, rather than trying to find the few people whom a product matches, it is often about pushing the product on people who never needed it in the first place - such as the diamond industry marketing inventing the practice of giving diamond rings for engagements, or the toy industry creating ads to specifically teach children to nag their parents. Or the vast amounta of pills promising penis enlargement.
Sure, these things may not happen so much in B2B specialty advertising, but in B2C they are the norm, and exceptions are few and far between.
Convincing people who are happy that they have problems they need to spend money to solve for your personal benefit is morally dubious at best.
I’ll use a recent example of my own. I am in the market for new hardwood floors. Some Googling confirmed my believe that engineered hardwood floors are the best option. A couple of good review sites then told me the features that I should care about. From those I also found six candidate manufacturers.
One of them seemed to have a nice product, but their web site was just awful and had literally no information. You had to download hard-copy PDF to get any info – and good luck there. The others were better. One really stood out in the breadth and depth of information provided.
Friday, I emailed the four that made the short-list asking for more information in the context of my specific project.
If the problems actually need solving, ill go looking.
If I'm not looking, there's no problem (to be solved).
I don't need companies to reach me - that's their problem.
> I bet there are products that solves a lot of your current problems at a decent price.
I bet not. The problems I care about are not solvable with products. Even if there were unknown products I might be willing to learn about, the problems they solve would necessarily be minor things relative to the primary concerns of my life, and I will very happily forego the opportunity to discover them in order to shut down the overwhelming firehose of inane, manipulative toutery.
If you don’t pay Google/Facebook you’re absolutely screwed. You will lose no matter how good the product is.
What this actually means is that now companies have to pay a Google/Meta tax simply to enter the playing field. And once they enter the playing field. And once you enter the playing field, the only winners will be the ones who pay them the highest amount of money.
So a smaller business, which in the past could potentially use some ingenuity, or target a specific niche audience to get some traction and then build word of mouth and let the product do the talking, doesn’t even stand a chance now because they simply cannot differentiate themselves as your exposure is entirely dependent on how much money you give Google/Meta.
This is a delightful turn of phrase. I wonder if it was deliberate or an autocorrect happy accident.
It shouldn't surprise anyone here that online advertising is wildly saturated and that users are unable to engage with thousands of brand voices a day.
Maybe we’ll move back to a better model that helps support decent content.
You can say it's their fault for building on top of someone elses land, and you would be mostly right. But online commerce has become a mess, and it is just hard to make it work without being on these platforms. They have hoovered up all the customers, and dominate all the avenues for advertising online.
It seems to be that Google basically collects the whole profit margin. Companies will do this to keep growth as high as possible to justify their high market caps and hope that they can eventually scale back on advertising and keep their customer base.
People complain about the tracking of visitors, but the tracking of advertisers own business is equally as abusive.
Look, I’m about as anti-consumer at you can get, but whoever is in charge of advertising over at Instagram has me literally scared for my life. I want almost every product they try to sell me, and I’ve never been this targeted by any ad in my entire life. I even recently made a new purchase of shoes outside of Insta because of the influence their ads had on me. It’s pretty fucking incredible.
In short, and paraphrased a bit to speak to your context, you're no longer buying impressions / clicks in the traditional transactional sense. Instead you're buying the influence on behavior within the broader context of what these networks know about the individuals within a market, but also what other influence these networks have accrued on the individuals.
It's a blackbox be because it's no longer a simple transaction, but also because the AI (?) is in a broader sense exerting proactive influences. Nudges on behavior that add up and ideally can not only be predicted but also created.
The book is long and deep, but it will also change how you view the world and Big Tech.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capi...
Put another way, the book would argue that with the traditional way "relevance" was a reactive guess. Going forward the ability to create the desired behaviour is less of a guess and more predictable.
Search advertising is in real trouble, it's one of the reasons I sold my Alphabet shares a year ago. I see long term headwinds in this space. I don't doubt Google can engineer their way out of this, I'm just not willing the market has priced that risk in.
It still felt like a total money pit into which you toss offerings to a dark god which may or may not grant blessings.
I have no real way of knowing how many people see my online advertising, I just get a number and a bill, and I have to trust them. The pixel does help for visits but not views and other metrics.
Road signs, sidewalk signs, and billboards are worth every penny.
They work.
Could you elaborate on some of the things that have changed to make it unrecognizable? Wasn't it still targeted ads 10 years ago by the same players mentioned in the article i.e FB and Google?
Does this say anything about AI in general?
My issue with the AI behind ad networks is that it a hostile AI, it is trained with an agenda that does not align to that of the user (the advertiser). The AI is trained to maximise the profits for the platform (Google or Facebook) at the expense of the advertisers own business and the viewers of the ads. It’s an exploitative relationship (to both advertisers and viewers), compleat with all the usual gas lighting and manipulation.
In my view there needs to be a separation of ad placement vendor and advertising exchange. The exchanges need to be regulated in the same was a securities exchange is.
If one subscribes to the idea that reducing spending can help curb inflation, then consider that the "business model" of online advertising-supported "tech" companies seem to require that consumers keep spending, in spite of inflation.
I think companies that are so large, and do one thing (advertise!) cannot be immune from business cycles. But is it a bad thing if these companies don't grow every single damn year.
As far as I know, the technical term for that is greed.
Here is just one of MANY possibilities: https://qbix.com/ecosystem#Decentralizing-the-Marketplace
disclosure: i'm a co-founder
"No, no... we're not competing with ad firms. We're about bringing products to users before there's even a need to advertise them."
In my view advertising can't end fast enough, but my worry is that our economy is so tied to advertising as a model that it would cause a deep depression - as spending would shift and slow down to a halt.
Psychopaths with money that want to trick people into doing what they want will always seek out the most targeted way to manipulate people.
If there's a system that allows advertising psychopaths more granularity in their attempts to burrow into your brain they will be all over it, until all the competitive advantage is burned out and then they will hop to whatever gives them even better advantage
My evil genius idea in 2016 was to eventually just inspect every piece of trash that people throw away (legally possible) to build the most personalized and predictive profile of a consumer possible without strapping a camera to them, which is the ultimate goal.
Would it, though? I can't think of the last thing I bought because I've seen it in an ad. There certainly were some, but I'd be surprised if it all added up to even 1% of what I spent on products and services.
I sympathize with this position. I operate a one stop shop for digital advertising for huge brands.
First I agree that the regulations (the government ones and Apple's) have benefitted no one. This is in a sense totally factual, and I challenge the blowhards here to like, name one substantive harm someone has experienced from ad ID tracking on an iPhone. While I believe government regulations should be proactive, rather than reactive, I believe the sum total history of ad tracking has pretty much confirmed that there aren't any substantive harms to correlated ad IDs.
From the perspective of advertisers:
An enlightening explanation of the Google value ad I read came from another guy explaining how he advertised dev tools on Google. He created a YouTube ad so that Johnny Programmer, watching YouTube videos on a weekend, would see a demo of his devops tool because Johnny searched "how to connect git to kubernetes" or whatever in the previous 10 days. And those ads converted really well. Even though the YouTube video had no contextual relationship with the ad the user saw.
So it sounds like you are complaining about the flaws in Google's tracking UI. Well, I guess e-mail them some more.
The sense of entitlement from those on the other side of the ads business, and their disdain for what users might want or how they feel, shows exactly why this business and industry is broken. And frankly why the whole thing is being dragged down right now. Figure it out. Adapt. It's what every other business has to do all the time.
I understand this is a stylized opinion.
There is actually a great deal of innovation in advertising! I don't think the ad ID tracking is going to, on net, matter. For example, Fortnite already has unavoidable branded advertising that doesn't require tracking at all to work. Native ads can't be blocked by uBlock.
The big forces at play move around where advertising goes, but it doesn't really get rid of it or necessarily make it "better". Probably we should not allow advertising to kids, and yet here we are, Roblox and Fortnite branded experiences primarily for very young children! Thanks Obama.
> disdain
I don't know, I only have a jokey disdain for the end user. People have rehashed these arguments a million times. You can't just righteous your way into being right here. I would just say you didn't name any harms, and then you went and blew very hard.
You then give a perfect example right in the next paragraph:
> so that Johnny Programmer, watching YouTube videos on a weekend, would see a demo of his devops tool because Johnny searched "how to connect git to kubernetes" or whatever in the previous 10 days.
So now Johnny Programmer's work life is hounding him on weekends. Even worse, he is being influenced to buy a paid product to do something that could probably be easily achieved with open source tools as well.
And if someone is likely to use an open source solution, they’re also unlikely to be influenced to switch to a paid product based on an ad instead.
How quickly we forget/forgot this proof of concept:
http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-...
Things don't have to cause obvious harm to still be inappropriate.
That said I believe journalists are definitely getting fucked by the government, Google, Meta and even Apple, with the shit payouts of Apple News being unsustainable too. You misunderstand me, these giant corporations are definitely the antagonist.
It's just not necessarily most advertisers, who just want to get you to buy shoes or whatever the fuck. Nobody forces you to buy anything. But someone has to feed the journalists.
Building up a huge library of data about you in an unregulated fashion has never backfired on the public at large, oh wait those exact data warehouses have been continuous sources of pain for users.
The reality is these breaches cost the business next to nothing. After all even if millions of users have <$100 worth of damages it is impossible to recover that. So the business did hundreds of millions of damages at no cost to itself.
People do not want to be tracked and then bombarded with the cloud's idea of who they are (right or wrong), they want to be in control.
Do you think all the uBlock origin and other "anti ad/pro privacy" folks really pay for, say, Youtube to remove ads when they use it. Of course not. Talk is cheap
That will definitely work
Making zuck and google richer.
Twitter is now a unit of being moderately unsuccessful at advertising.
the amazing thing about social media ads, is that they make me less engaged than more... i wouldnt touch a facebook url with a ten foot pole... I will never update my linkedin again.... blech
How is it so inconceivable to you that people use LinkedIn?
Twitter advertising should be the highest CPM out there, with the probably wealth and influence level of its audience.
You and I have very different experiences of Twitter
What? Twitter is firehose news for, in my experience, the lowest common denominator unless you spend an inordinate amount of time curating your own experience.
1. Platform power: Apple was a key supplier to Facebook in the sense that they provide platform driving a significant % of their Ads revenue. With Apple tightening privacy they have become an indirect but significant threat to Facebook. Google is relatively safe.
2. Threat of substitutes: as seen in Amazon, Ecom platforms are much closer to the customer. Us timer is about to make a purchase. I think over time Advertisers will eventually shift to platforms like amazon, Etsy etc so that can reach the customer right when they are about to make a purchase. Some what same appeal with snap and TikTok.
Overall online ad industry will continue to flourish but will see big changes in who are the big players.
2. This has already happened. Amazon's Ads is making more profits than Amazon E-Comm itself.
It is nice we finally have some decent discussion on Ads. Rather than the usual HN rant about how all ads are evil. Or Internet should be free of Ads.
In the meantime a new crop of semantic search + question answering engines appear (like DeepSet.ai's Haystack). It's time to ditch link based results. They are primitive and actually don't work well today.
Apple desperately wants to grow their ad business and has found a great wedge under the guise of privacy to kick push away competition.
The solution is proper oversight. We've gone too long without regulating advertisements, app stores and video platforms, and we've witnessed the consequences. It's time that we put the interests of the people before FAANG shareholders and HN pundits.
Why? If you consider Netflix without the cost of content creation, then less than 1 USD per month per user would cover the infrastructure cost just fine. Maybe cents suffice.
Youtube is just one big profit center for Alphabet.
And no, I don't want "government-approved ads", either - that's a surefire way to corrupt our political system even further.
Perhaps. But I for one would like to try this just to see what that Internet would look like. I think it would be a refreshing change from the Internet we currently have.
Those wanting their stuff seen can pay money to host it or just host it on their computers/rasberry Pis
Just like how streaming killed cable, not for the good of the consumer, but so they could simply take on the same profitable business practices.
Second is using my search for socks elsewhere on the platform. This is essentially using user-data outside of the intent it was given and that should be controllable by the user and default to the most conservative option without annoying dialogue boxes or other harassment. Whether it's within the platform or not shouldn't make a difference.
So competition is good, but unfortunately what I'm taking away from this that companies are going to bake more ads into their products because the products themselves aren't seeing much competitive pressure (except maybe for Meta and rightfully so).
not necessarily. I don't see how there could be a correlation between the two. When you see "sponsored" on a listing, that doesn't tell you how much the vendor paid. Also many large and reputable vendors will pay simply to guarantee they are at the top of the listing. For the vendors that don't sponsor, you don't know whether the amount they save goes into a higher quality product
> This is essentially using user-data outside of the intent it was given and that should be controllable by the user and default to the most conservative option without annoying dialogue boxes or other harassment.
Except feeding user data back into the system makes certain things technically possible that weren't possible before. Do you think modern map applications would have the same degree of accuracy if they weren't able to use user data to improve it?
> Whether it's within the platform or not shouldn't make a difference.
It does make a difference because keeping it within the platform could be used to improve the platform itself. Sending it outside the platform could be used for more malicious purposes. In the map application example, the user knows their data feeds into improved accuracy. But they don't know where that data goes outside the platform
For the vendors that don't sponsor, you don't know whether the amount they save goes into a higher quality product. Maybe it did, maybe it didn't.
But for the vendors that DO sponsor, you definetly know that the money didn't go into a higher quality product.
Some eCommerce companies who are agressively using Google/FB/Social will spend 30%+ of their revenue just on online/influencer advertising (based on companies I have worked with).
[1] https://www.makeuseof.com/windows-11-remove-ads/
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-08-14/apple-...
It's pretty disgusting and dehumanizing.
I can't wait for Windows 13 when Microsoft has sold installer ads to the highest bidder and I'm asked if I want a case of Mountain Dew during install.
As a Linux user, I look forward to that, so I can laugh even more at Windows users and what they're willing to put up with. I just wish Apple would follow suit with this kind of bad treatment of users.
If you pay attention closely, you'll notice that sometime in the last year, the Windows 11 installation slide for onedrive went from "hey do you want onedrive, yes or no?" to "hey here's onedrive, we've enabled it for you" (with no option now for opting out of one-drive).
It's still possible to disable one-drive once you boot up for the first time, but the steps are kinda hidden and convoluted:
1. open onedrive settings, go to the "backup" tab, then "manage backups" and uncheck all the folders
2. go to another tab to the left (whose name escapes me, but was something like "sharing" or "syncing") then go to "select which folders are shared" or something like that, then uncheck all the folders. You can even uncheck the "personal vault" folder if you expand it and uncheck its contents (consisting of a single subitem) first.
3. go to the first tab and unselect "start onedrive at startup"
4. Right click onedrive's menu and click "quit onedrive".
These steps are now necessary, when in the past you were able to opt-out of onedrive with one click during installation.
Recently, I got an image of a tropical island. The text was all about how Jurassic Park was shot on the same island, and how, more importantly, Jurassic World Dominion was also shot on the same island, and that Jurassic World Dominion had X many dinosaurs.
A very thinly disguised ad for Jurassic World. Right on my home screen.
https://www.digitalcitizen.life/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/w...
The graphic says a thousand words.
They casually want your credit card info, documents, schedule, calendar, conversations, what other people know about you, and what you search for.
And that's just for Cortana.
"It exists in nature" is not a solid argument for anything. I've read about insects that coerce their mates into copulation under threat of predation. Yet nobody seriously argues that humans should be allowed to rape because rape exists in nature. Such an obviously sociopathic argument just doesn't fly.
The problem with computers today is you get advertised to no matter what you do. Can't boot goddamn Windows without it finding an excuse to show you stupid Taboola ads. Can't open a simple website without being literally flooded with ads all around the "content". This "content" is just an incidental abstraction, an arbitrary square on the screen that ads mold themselves around like parasites. It doesn't matter what the "content" is, it could be anything that draws in users, the real product is their attention being captured by the ads.
I think the context in which the phrase "if you're not the customer, you're the product" is often used implies that we should upgrade our relationship by paying, however this is not necessarily the case as shown here.
The fact that matchmakers always make way more money than the makers is not a new phenomenon.
As a matter of fact, I'd wager that it's been this way since the day man invented barter.
Cosco doesn't make the goods they sell - they are just being an intermediary between you and the the manufacturer. An intermediary that takes a 60+% fee for their work.
It can take such "fee" because it’s so enormous that it can negociate prices in a way you couldn’t, as well as handling the logistics and having lots of different products at the same place. It’s not "just an intermediary", it’s an intermediary that adds value.
If you want to eat a yogurt, would you prefer paying $4 a pack of four at Costco or $1500 for 4000 yogurts you have to transport from the manufacturer to your home with your own truck?
Disagree.
A retailer does add tangible value beyond matchmaking.
For example, to name a few:
- transport
- quality control
- inventory management
- fine-grained understanding of local demand and providing the corresponding supply.
https://twitter.com/modestproposal1/status/10026493600422830...
Everything you just said is voided by the fact that Google's ad business continues to boom. It's going nowhere. And I say that as someone that dislikes Google. Your pitch is emotionalism, I've been reading rants like that on HN for the past ~15 years. They're in practically every thread on Google or advertising. Meanwhile Google has gotten 17 times larger in that span of time.
Their business has doubled in size since the beginning of 2019. Their operating income has skyrocketed.
When did the death struggle begin for them exactly?
The ad crown is already being passed to Amazon and Apple.
Google once had the right approach - showing ads related to the search terms. It was polite and nicely delineated. But that wasn't going to earn them money from unrelated ad campaigns.
Google may very well face competition from device manufacturers and the like, but this article does not provide any details about it whatsoever.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/small-businesses-cou...
Apple accidentally attacked small businesses that used to rely on geographically relevant advertising by increasing privacy protection.
There is no easy solution here.
The reason I see TikTok as a threat is largely because the company ignores all the rules and regulations that protect the privacy of minors and adults alike and companies will want that data regardless. Facebook won't be able to supply it to them since it has to abide by our laws.
OTOH TikTok being based in a nations that's a strategic competitor to the U.S. may well mean the company is simply banned. IMHO it would be more fortuitous for Meta and Google to lobby for a ban. Fighting TikTok will not work.
Real-Life ads became competitive with internet advertising. In fact, they might be better for a large number companies.
Unless they can manage to guarantee that ads are being seen by real humans, I think their revenue will keep dropping.
It might be in our individual best interest to have super effective advertising (for increased revenue), but it might be in the world’s interest to not allow that, because effective advertising leads to consumption… (and for privacy reasons,etc.)
Oh wait..
To be honest, I didn't use TT. Ecept when someone gives me direct link. But I am using YTshorts, coz I am already at youtube watching long vids.
Pretty addictive this shorts are.
I hate TT for trying to force me into registering.
Also I hate TT for baning porn and even erotic couple tears ago.
https://ethique.rexel.com/en/competition-law/abuse-of-a-domi...
"A dominant position is not defined merely by market share, but by classification as a market leader. Typically, a company is considered to hold a dominant position if it has a market share of more than 40%, but even a market share of 15% may be considered dominant if it is the largest player in a fragmented market. "
kagi.com bets on becoming a business with revenue. In the same way, Google could start asking money for searches without ads.
In the long run, Google should make more money because a society that runs on the best available information will be more valuable. The information market will be bigger and thus Google's income should be bigger.
The problem is that it's too easy to pitch advertisers against each other and force them to pay a huge fraction of their profits. On the other hand, profit margins in a transparent market are small.
Google could become something like Bloomberg and sell their good information to companies for high margins.
I refuse to believe I'm some kind of one of a kind special snowflake, but whenever I wanna buy something cheap or disposable, like food, socks etc. I just see it and buy it.
On the other hand when I'm looking for something I'm planning to get a bit more mileage out of, like a laptop, a pair of headphones or a cordless drill, I usually read the reviews and buy the product I think is most appropriate for me, not what the ads show.
One place to start on the difficulties is an excellent paper by Lewis and Rao from the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2015. The original title was something like: “on the impossibility of measuring the returns to advertising.” Just getting enough data to reject the hypothesis “this ad campaign did nothing” is extremely challenging. Lewis is a great producer of research on this topic and has written papers based on his experience at Yahoo.
Another great paper is by Blake, Nosko and Tadelis from Econométrica in… 2014? They turned off all of eBay’s keyword search ads in some markets as an experiment. They found that they maintained about 95%+ of their business while saving $50 eBay million dollars or so.
Beware confident assertions from people in the ad industry that ads clearly work. It is not so obvious that they do. This isn’t to say they don’t work! But it’s a challenging scientific question.
advertising creates a barrier to enter a market, not the market.
when you spend on ads, you are not creating new market for you, you are just unlocking some of the reserve market the established leaders secure via misinformation and brand brainwashing.
I.e., people buy stuff they wouldn't buy if they got honest information.
It works against the main argument in favor of the free market: not the best product wins, but the one with the biggest advertising budget.
I have a broad-market/horizontal smb Saas and tried google ads to not much success. Was getting charged ~$3/click for quite irrelevant searches even after lots of negative filtering. Suppose I could’ve tried some more…
That being said, I tend to agree with you in the sense that I never buy the obscure products that are recommended to me on FB/Google.
On the other hand, I think paying YouTubers to promote products is super effective. People are extremely receptive to influencers recommending products, esp. when it doesn't seem like advertising.
Not sure I buy the first premise of this argument.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/286526/coca-cola-adverti...
I suspect a lot of people are immune but also a lot of people are very susceptible.
While we may identify and scroll past all sponsored google results (or even use adblockers or custom host files to block certain actors, etc) most other people are not at the same level of computer sophistication and won't necessarily do the same. Ads get clicked a lot.
Online advertising is far, far better than other forms. Marketers can tie individual sales to specific ads and improve ads by making them more like successful ones. This kind of specificity isn't possible with TV or print ads.
what the ads show
A good chunk of advertising is "brand awareness" not necessarily just selling one product. The point of brand awareness is to associate your brand with its brand values in a person's mind.
But I did notice a couple I'd fallen for. I happened to see Harry's Razors and Tommy John underwear in a store. They are heavily advertised on podcasts -- go to the online shop, the host will say, put in the code, get it shipped blah blah, your face and/or balls will feel nice. Somehow as a result they'd gotten into a mental niche in my brain as "things that would otherwise require jumping through annoying hoops to get," so when I saw them in a store, I ended up grabbing them. Because getting them otherwise would have been annoying. Yes in retrospect I recognize how silly this thought process was.
The razors I've been using for a while. They are basically fine I think -- which is to say, you only really notice is a razor is really shitty, and they aren't, so I'll call that a win. Just got the underwear recently, no notes yet.
I'd assume you bought those things because you lend a higher degree of credibility to the podcasters' recommendations than TV ads or side banners.
These ads have nothing to do with the high tech $300B AI and data driven ad industry mentioned in the post, there were sponsored segments on radio talk shows more than half a century ago.
I can say that my bad ads get less sales than my good ads.
My good ads consistently work, my bad ads don't.
So, ad copy matters.
However, a good advertiser accepts that not everyone is a good ad target.
You may not be a good target for advertising.
I would say, I'm not a good target.
Some people are very moved by advertising.
Others are not.
The 80/20 rule applies here.
80% of the profit in advertising probably comes from 20% of the target population for a given product.
I've learned that it's better to think of good advertising as just a form of communication.
A great ad is factual information that answers questions customers have, and provides urgency.
An ad might contain some fluff, but to really sell it usually needs to state explicit, accurate facts, in easy to understand language.
There is a lot of bad marketing from people that think they can make an ad just because they're a hip or a cool person, or they have an eye for color.
Those ads can be egregiously bad.
Just as some marketing sites are all fluff no substance, but sold to unsuspecting business owners, the same happens with advertising.
But the key idea is that, for certain products, good ads sell "enough" to the target audience to be very lucrative.
A great book on this topic is "Ogilvy on Advertising." Specifically, the first chapter.
As an avid internet user, my mind is automatically turned off to ads on any content I see.
I also blindly ignore the YT ads and focus only on the skip ad button. Strangely, I also ignore the audio, it just doesn't register.
However, If I am researching to buy a product or service, I keep getting shown ads about it everywhere I go to, so I do click on some ads.
Also a lot of people won’t be able to make the distinction between an ad entry and an organic entry in a listing. I’ve mistakenly hit ads, and might be hitting some here and there without realizing it, and I would bet you do too.
That’s part of why legit businesses have to buy ads for their own product to avoid having a competitors eating up their result page and getting all the misplaced hits.
Same for my solo stove.
My first thought when asked if online ads work is “No. Of course not. I just ignore them.” But then I remembered these purchases.
most web pages are up to 60% ads, search results are almost all ads, tv is mostly ads
google with their "answering question" thing has thought people to just trust it and click on first results, most of which are ads
ads, cookie banners and privacy popups cover easily most of the page, especially on mobile.
During lockdown I found several fantastic butchers who decided to launch a delivery service to reach more people through ads on Facebook. I'm still a regular customer.
For things that are available in a supermarket, brand advertising is better, for smaller businesses operating online, ads do indeed work.
Amazon is trying to sell me dental office equipment, or specialized restaurant tools, and a dozen other things that few outside of a particular area of expertise would remotely consider. It’s bizarre.
Of course you have to qualify Advertising as being a persuasive Ad' shown to an audience that may purchase your product at some point!
What constitutes an Ad' is also open to some debate, but you get the general idea!
There was a promotion like 25% off on Thermomix. For a week only. I wanted one, but I naturally distrust campaigns that urges yoi to buy in a short time.
Now it is like 25% more expensive.
I was compelled to note this. I'm Sorry.
Of course that's not what the article means, but it's interesting that Google, Meta and TikTok are described as advertising giants when their products ostensibly serve different purposes. I wasn't aware they were comfortable with being so mask-off about the actual nature of what they are, namely vehicles to generate ad impressions.
Having US social media in your country is a huge geopolitical risk, especially if you're one of the regimes that isn't just doing what the US wants at all times.
But you are blaming US in all problems. Typical.
Key quote:
> For Meta and Google’s corporate parent, Alphabet, the cyclical problem may not be the worst of it. They might once have hoped to offset the digital-ad pie’s slower growth by grabbing a larger slice of it. No longer. Although the two are together expected to rake in around $300bn in revenues this year, sales of their four biggest rivals in the West will amount to almost a quarter as much. If that does not sound like a lot, it is nevertheless giving the incumbents reason to worry. Five years ago most of those rivals were scarcely in the ad business at all (see chart).
- today: Google and FB have 75% of all sales combined and those other rivals have 25%
- 5 years ago: those other rivals had 0%
What does this say about the market share of FB and google 5 years ago? Nothing. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Maybe it was 90%. Maybe it was 75%! But hey, whatever, let’s publish that clickbait article.
"Clickbait" can be used with a lot of publications. But in the list of publications it can be applied to... I'd say the Economist would be ranked about dead last. Maybe tied with Der Spiegel.
YouTube, in my opinion, is far more effective as users are forced to watch 5 second ads prior to watching the video that they are interested in. 5 seconds is too short to context switch and can also convey a lot of information.
Spread that click amongst billions of users, and you have a good revenue stream.
"a combination of independent commercial or industrial enterprises designed to limit competition or fix prices"
They have been sleeping while making money. Now it's time to wake-up and do some serious innovation or become irrelevant
Replace the operator and the subaru with a drone then the prospects change. With a single drone flying a programmed route at 20mph during daylight you'd have mapped the ~22000 miles of maintained roads in Los Angeles in under 100 days. Maybe you could contract with city vehicles who would like to have street view maps of their cities, and just stick the cameras on garbage trucks and the like and have the bulk of the area mapped before long over the course of their regular job duties coming into different areas.
Google's big advantage is that their core product has fundamental value (search and by proxy: ads) and their secondary products are such loss-leaders that outcompeting those freebies (Google office suite, Gmail, maps, YT, chrome, ml tooling) is where the real difficulty comes in. But building a core-search competitor is far easier than competition with Apple or Msft's core products. Google has a lot more scaffolding that FB, but they too have a single point of failure. A sea-change (like Mapreduce, pagerank, the smartphone) can see them collapse swiftly.
On the other hand, enterprise / feature-checklist companies lie in a stable equilibrium. You can't really beat them unless you invest a similar amount of resources into it. And even if you defeat them, they'll catch up to you in time if they're run at similar levels of competency and can throw a ton money money at it. Microsoft and Apple are exactly that. It's like trying to start a Boeing or Nvidia competitor. You better at least be at Airbus's or AMD's level before even trying to compete against boeing.
Microsoft's weakness is best displayed by Adpbe's acquisition of Figma. If Microsoft is run in a similarly predatory manner and a competitor gets 10 free years to catch up on 1 feature while you continuously fail to innovate, then you feel a mild threat, at which point you can simply outbid and acquire them. That shows how remarkably comfortable of a position Adobe is in, and Microsft and Apple sit a couple of orders of magnitude above that.
Microsoft Office adoption in the enterprise dwarfs GSuite.
1. Who else can Apple put as default search engine? -- Bing? But Microsoft is Apples direct competitor on laptop and desktop market. Who knows what Bing would show users? And other competitors in search market are extinct. Yahoo, AOL, etc. Duck is using BING's api.
There are local market search engines (like Yandex in russia), but they already are default search engines on mobile in that markets(at least on lot of android devices, don't know about iOS).
At most Apple would offer user to chose search engine on first set-up, and guess what users would chose?
So we slowly are moving to second point.
I don't thing Google needs to pay for this, they just are doing this by inertia. Most competitors are extinct. And people know by word of mouth, that google "is the best search engine".
About Firefox it might be tricky. People who decided to try firefox can be more interested in trying another search engine as well, so here their payment for default SE makes some sense.
IMO, The vulnerability from most vulnerable to least goes:
Facebook > Google >> Apple ~> Microsoft = Amazon
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3637079/as-google-move...
> Google grew its share of the productivity software market to 10.3% in 2020, according to research from Gartner, taking about 2% from Microsoft. Microsoft is still the clear leader however, with 89.2%. Overall, the productivity software suite market grew 18.2% during 2020.
Gmail, yes it would be huge without google but its only so bug because google forced it down everyone's throats with mandatory google accounts for android, maps, youtube, drive, etc.
GSuite again this would never be s big without google's backing. Just look at its non MS competitors.
Why don't we put Apple in with somebody like: MAIA -- Microsoft, Apple, Intel, AMD. Maybe add NVIDIA, you have to work out a good acronym though.
MANIA
Likewise, Apple sells luxury goods.
If I had to bet on one FAAMNG in a sharp recession it would be Amazon. They have the most diversified revenue streams.
How is a luxury good affordable by over 50% of the US market?
The later has a "bot protection" page that looks like Cloudflare's but someone suggested it is not. Makes sense because archive.today and Cloudflare were in a spat some time ago. Archive.today wanted to allow monitoring of users' locations, e.g., via EDNS Client Subnet, but Cloudflare did not send ECS.
Unlike Archive.today, Internet Archive does not try to force users to enable Javascript or make them solve CAPTCHAs. Nor does Common Crawl.
It is interesting to contrast the Internet Archive (IA) with Archive.today. The later is vague about how it is funded and admits it could sell out to advertisers in the future.^1 There is obviously no small amount of data it could collect about user interests and behaviours that could be used to support advertising. For example, what usage data does it store, if any. What are the Terms of Use for that data. There are no public statements about any restrictions on what the website operator can do. The operator invites users to "Ask me anything" but AFAICT the website has no Privacy Policy. The operator admits it sends the client's IP in a X-Forwarded-For HTTP header. This is not something one would experience with IA. The server hosting the page being archived receives an IA IP address as the client IP address, not an IA user's IP address. IA has a Privacy Policy, last updated in 2001.^2 Unlike Archive.today, I feel reasonably confident IA wil not sell out to commercial interests but who knows.
1. From Archive.today's FAQ:
How is the archive funded?
It is privately funded; there are no complex finances behind it. It may look more or less reliable compared to startup-style funding or a university project, depending on which risks are taken into account.
Will advertising appear on the archive one day ?
I cannot make a promise that it will not. With the current growth rate I am able to keep the archive free of ads. Well, I can promise it will have no ads at least till the end of 2014.
2. YMMV, but IME but the fewer "updates" to a Privacy Policy over time the better.
Archive.today FAQ:
Do you preserve archivers' privacy? E.g. not disclose the source IP address?
Yes.
But take in mind that when you archive a page, your IP is being sent to the the website you archive as though you are using a proxy (in X-Forwarded-For header). This feature allows websites (e.g shops or the sites with weather forecast) target your region, not mine.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220913195108if_/https://archiv...
You can easily test this. You will find that, actually, it does not send this header. Or the client's IP address in any other way.
Advertising ruins every form of media it touches. From radio, television, newspapers (it's arguably responsible for killing journalism), and now the internet, and all the services we use it for.
Web search is useless because of it. Most websites are pretty much spyware. A large percentage of them are SEO spam, existing only to serve ads. Most content on YouTube, the largest video platform, is unwatchable due to constant ad breaks and sponsored content. Astroturfing is everywhere, promoted posts flood social media sites. Advertising is instrumental to spreading of disinformation, propaganda, toppling of democracies and companies like Cambridge Analytica. And if all that wasn't enough, _paid_ subscription services have started serving ads. It's the same business model from TV, but even more intrusive and lucrative since user tracking and microtargetting is now possible.
Stop. Just stop. Users want none of this. Of course, everyone loves getting services for free, but what adtech companies are getting in exchange for user data now is worth much more than the "free" services they offer. *They should be paying us instead.*
We need new business models that are as easy for content providers to implement, yet don't come at the expense of user experience, and don't cause services to deteriorate into a privacy nightmare. This should be easier nowadays with cryptocurrencies. I still think the Basic Attention Token[1] is a step in the right direction. Are there more examples of this?
This solution is backwards; people should not only create content for you, but they should pay you for the privilege of having you enjoy it?
It wasn't ads that killed journalism; it was the proliferation of free content that killed the funding for any kind of meaningful journalism. BAT isn't the right direction; they just tack on a crypto grift to make other people rich. I'd argue services like Netflix and Disney+ are the type of business models that work without ads, its just that people dont want to pay for content.
I was specifically referring to "free" services from the likes of Google and Meta. The value they extract from user data is worth much more than the value users are getting from their services. Tech companies paying users isn't a novel idea[1].
For content providers I'm arguing that there should be new business models they can rely on that doesn't detract from the user experience. Patreon is also a good alternative.
> BAT isn't the right direction; they just tack on a crypto grift to make other people rich.
That's the cynical take, and, sure, I don't trust Brave Inc. either. That said, funding a crypto wallet from which I can selectively pay for the content I consume is a sound model, even if this specific implementation isn't ideal.
> I'd argue services like Netflix and Disney+ are the type of business models that work without ads, its just that people dont want to pay for content.
People are definitely paying for it. For a short while there a few years back, there was probably a reduction in pirated content. But large studios got greedy, enforced region locking even more, the market split up into dozens of similar services, and now consumers are expected to subscribe to many different streaming services to access content, which is exactly what we were trying to escape from TV by cord cutting.
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2020/10/30/sh...
You don’t see an issue with that statement?
but they perform important economy function: connect buyers and sellers..
Do they? I've never once clicked on an ad and made a purchase, and I'm a fairly regular consumer. If I have a need for a product, I'll search for it.
All advertising does is create a false desire to own a product by psychologically manipulating the viewer. It is dishonest by definition.
In order to make a purchase, I first have to have a need for a product. This should arise naturally, not via some artifically produced desire. Then I'd like to read the true specifications of all suitable products that I can find, and read hopefully real and honest reviews by people who've purchased them. After that, I will narrow down my search and will only make a purchase if I think a specific product will fulfill my needs.
Advertising directly interferes with this concept, steps in as a middle man between buyer and seller, and introduces all kinds of psychological tricks to manipulate me to not even make the purchase--I just need to click on an ad, and I make the advertiser money. It is unnecessary at best, and outright harmful at worst.
Companies track conversion rates from Ads, and since they still put money, it means Ads work for many cases.
Without ads we wouldn't pick products blindly we'd simply have more product-comparison sites.
and you would need ad to promote your product comparison site. And then we will go full circle with leading sites abusing their power, and manipulating search results.
I don't see blockchain as a knight in shining armour here. Search is one of those hard things. Like sending a man to the moon. No one can compete overnight. Maybe the hope is AI could create a scenario where a search engine running locally is realistic (like all the prompt-based image generation stuff that has come out, can be run locally now).
There's nothing making the search engine refrain from additional ads.
Remember magazines? They were paid. And still had lots of ads.
If search becomes a utility, like water or natural gas, presumably there would be some limit to the advertising. I think the original Google results with ads on the right format is a good compromise. Because 2% of the time an ad is what you actually want, and those options are then presented still.