undefined | Better HN

0 pointsanyonecancode2mo ago0 comments

> In order to sell anything, people need to know about it. Google and Meta provide a way to make this possible. If they didn't exist, you wouldn't somehow have a more affordable way to get people to know about your product. However frustrating the current situation is, it is still more accessible than needing access to the airwaves or print media to try to sell anything new.

The places people can find out about your product are controlled by a very small number of companies. And those companies not only own those spaces, they also own the means of advertising on those spaces. So if you have a product you want to advertise, you're not paying to distribute your message broadly to consumers, you're paying a toll to a gatekeeper that stands between you and your potential customers.

0 comments

3rodents2mo ago

but that’s not really true. You’re not paying, you’re bidding. You are competing against thousands of other advertisers for eyeballs. If you are the only advertiser targeting a group of people, you will spend almost nothing to advertise. If you are targeting a group of people that everyone targets (e.g: rich people in their 30s) you will pay through the nose.

Facebook, Google etc. are the most “fair” forms of advertising. We can dislike advertising, their influence, product etc. but when you compare them to almost every other type of advertising, they’re the best for advertisers.

The reason they generate so much revenue is because they are so accessible and because they are so easy to account for. The reason LTV and CAC are so widely understood by businesses today is because of what Google, Facebook etc. offer.

pclmulqdq2mo ago

No financial market would be able to run the way Google and Facebook run their ad markets. They are the supplier, the exchange, and the broker all at the same time. This is not a competitive market. It's a captured one where the supplier effectively gets to set their price, and the exchange and the broker incentivize and advise you to trade at that price.

93po2mo ago

Google has famously and repeatedly rigged this bidding system in anti-competitive ways and has had to pay billions in fines because of it (which I am sure were less than the amount they profited from)