To some extent I disagree with this, not that Google+Meta are under attack, but that the threat is coming from competitors.
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…
I have given up on Google AdWords due to the exact issue you describe.
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.
There's a hidden setting when configuring geo on campaigns.
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.
Once you have thousands of ad impressions with very few clicks, it takes thousands of new impressions at a very high CTR to get your overall account's CTR back to something reasonable. And now that your cost per click has skyrocketed, even if you can get a high CTR for the new impressions your cost has skyrocketed.
No confusion. I've been through this with several accounts I helped manage. Once an account has a history of low CTR the CPC goes up. Starting a new campaign doesn't help; the CPC stays high until you can get the CTR back up. And that costs dearly.
But again, that was years ago. Things may have changed.
Unfortunately, things have not changed. You are 100% correct. If anything, things have gotten worse, because now we have even fewer options to manage accounts.
It’s on Google’s end. “I have inventory (a placement) to sell to an advertiser. I can sell it to X with a CTR of (10% or 1%) and a CPC of $0.50 or to Y with a CTR of 3% and a CPC of $1.”
Whether X’s CTR is 10% (what it used to be) or 1% (what it is now) drives the decision of which ad is better to serve in that inventory slot.
The GP does not appear to have any misconceptions.
From your first link, "how relevant your ad text is to searches, how likely people are to click your ad, and the quality of their experience once they reach your landing page"
This is all data that's generated based on the overall learning that Adwords does against your site presence. It's why it takes weeks to really get your data settled in, and why if you (or your Google rep) start to mismanage your account, things will rapidly go bad.
The GP story was based on the premise that opting a campaign into the display network increased CPC on search ad clicks. I know for a fact that it is not possible.
I am not at liberty to go through each issue the GP had, so I linked to the best source of truth on this subject.
The effect of lowered account-wide CTR on CPC is something that has been experienced by a lot of people who have run Adwords campaigns. I saw it discussed a lot on forums about affiliate marketing. They always said, whatever you do, avoid the "account slap" that comes if your CTR plummets. I saw it myself on more than one account.
Maybe it isn't causal? But the correlation is pretty near 100%.
These are excellent tips. I have been managing Google Ads full time for about 12 years and I run a small agency. I can confirm he is right about all of this.
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.
Google's reps routinely "take care" of big agency staff and show them a good time while feeding them the same "spend optimization" suggestions.
The agency staff can then claim the campaigns were optimized based on Google's suggestions, which is the perfect smokescreen.
Most big brands that outsource media buying don't have SMEs to audit the media buying they've outsourced, so the result is Google makes a ton of money via their preferred middleman, advertising agencies.
You are absolutely right. I worked at a big agency where I managed a team that ran the search ads for a fortune 500 tech company. That was usually how it worked. I tried to communicate up the chain that the dinners and outings on Google's dime are a clear conflict of interest, but nobody wanted to hear it.
By far the most dissapointing thing was that the client often just wanted to go with Google's recomendations or they had even worse ideas. Even when we really tried to look out for the best interests of the client it was like fighting an uphill battle both ways.
Another problem is that anything that isn't direct response is hard to measure so it's tough to make a clear and compelling case. Anybody can chalk up any hare brained idea to brand value and it is tough to push back on that when the client doesn't really care.
Like, everyone in the industry shows agency reps a good time. Back a decade ago, FB reps used to get the clients drunk the night before they'd see Google on the principle that they'd remember less.
However it's worth pointing out that Google as an org have absolutely hated ad agencies for many years, in fact being nice to the agencies was a strategy used by FB when I was there.
I'm not disputing your point about optimisations, but the notion that Google like ad agencies is just ludicrous.
Google wants to make more money - of course they may not be giving you the best advice for your company :-)
What I have found works best is to always start playing around with the most restricted type of ads. So restrict by location, test, restrict to the most exact keyword or semi exact (instead of general), do not use common words as much as possible (or quote phrases instead of single words), etc etc.
> Definitely a dark pattern and results in a lot of garbage clicks if you overlook that setting.
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.
> What's Google's interest in pointless clicks? Short term they could get some extra charge for those
Because there are humans in the loop, and "Google" isn't a monolithic all-seeing entity. Sales guys, devs, etc. are rewarded on a quarterly (or yearly) basis, and short-term gains are prioritized over long-term effects ( I mean, how _do_ you measure the fact that, say, after getting 9 months of pointless clicks, the advertiser decided to cut their Adwords budget by 30%?)
So, someone runs an experiment (replace the obvious radio button with a hidden drop-down box, say), the clicks on the advertiser's ads go up, so the experiment increases revenue week-over-week by, say, 3%; and voila, everyone involved gets a pat on the back and a nice phat bonus come the next eval cycle, and maybe a promotion too.
> "I mean, how _do_ you measure the fact that, say, after getting 9 months of pointless clicks, the advertiser decided to cut their Adwords budget by 30%?"
Oh man, this is _the_ problem with metrics. We must find a way to measure and demonstrate aversion (instead of conversion).
> Short term they could get some extra charge for those, but if they don't convert they lose a customer.
They _might_ lose a customer — I suspect that they've determined that enough people either simply don't review their results closely or increase their spending to make it a net profit for them to do this. That would fit with the general pattern of hubris you see in many of their decisions where they've been coasting on their old reputation for at least a decade and don't seem to be fully aware of just how much loyalty they've sacrificed.
Plus they are a near monopoly/duopoly. So if the customer spends for wasted clicks they still get some good clicks as well. Google could optimize it for them better but the customer can not really tell if they could get a better result by some other means.
this would explain why when i was doing an ad spend for my SAAS even though I limited it to the US all the users came from a different country as confirmed by a third party that tracked where users were from. This is brutal
I think there is probably a record breaking class action lawsuit here with the right lawyers. Damages could be 50-100% of Google's yearly gross revenue, especially when you include countries outside on the US who really don't like Google.
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.
The government in Sweden could call a too crappy EULA non-enforceable. It's like the anticompetitive clauses that I happily sign over here because they don't hold in court, which employers are well aware of.
Because any challenge will lose. It is in their terms of service that what they are doing is legal. But nobody is going to read 70+ of legalese just to set up a campaign.
The issue is that they have not been good faith actors for many years now.
As explained by other comments above there is a hidden setting you need to change to get Google to actually run your ads in the areas you selected.
> Because any challenge will lose. It is in their terms of service that what they are doing is legal.
I don't think that's even close to a given, but consider how much time and money it would take to fight that lawsuit — they would be loathe to settle since it'd validate the idea for other customers, and you'd have to put in that effort hoping that they wouldn't succeed in being able to say it was a misunderstanding on your part or some nebulous “bug” which has reportedly been fixed. Most people don't lose anywhere near enough money this way for it to be worth fighting, especially since a lot of businesses would be worried about potentially being demoted on Google Maps, search, etc.
It doesn’t matter if it’s in the ToS if everything else misrepresents and misleads the user. Or regularly gets changed to undermine the user’s expectations. That’s bad faith, fraud, etc.
There isn't any precedent that confusing UX is illegal, is there? If a user enables "interested in NYC" when they mean "browsing from NYC" is a judge going to get involved?
It's not about logic or even law. Suing a giant like Google implies a base cost in legal fees that is simply not an option for most regular companies. They'll draw you out in procedure way before you can see a juge, let alone plead your case.
You can sign away certain rights or accept certain terms that would otherwise open avenues for a legal claim though, which is effectively what OP means I think.
Because I'm wary of litigation and unfortunately depend on Google for some of my business. I assume litigation would mean being removed from their platforms.
I have had the opposite experience. I have tried many different ad networks for my product and the only two that work are Google and Bing, but Bing has very low volume. Facebook's bounce rate is about 80%. I get billed for so many accidental clicks.
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.
Not surprising at all. Just as a mobile user, on websites, I don’t think I’ve ever intentionally clicked on any ad. Every fricken time it’s by accident because some stupid pop up or overlay was in the way of closing a modal or ad box.
Do you know if you get charged for misclicks that are blocked by pihole? I have googletagservices blocked, so I think it should prevent google from using me as an excuse to defraud you.
Good question, I'm not sure. But very few of my targeted advertising base are going to have piholes configured, so that specifically is not impacting my numbers.
I can understand that people are going to have ad-blockers or just accidentally click ads, but it's scummy that FB charges me for it. They have the technical means to filter those out, but they don't.
That's ridiculous, isn't selecting a target market Marketing/Econ 101? What possible reason would they have for not giving some kind of locality options?
Everyone wants US visitors so by including other countries it brings up the inventory of people looking/clicking ads which brings down the price per click which creates more ad spending
Marketing 101 would teach you to investigate your target market yourself, not simply select from a dropdown and assume that the automated real-time bidding platform will have taken that off your plate.
I have seen this play out so many times over the years, “if we fix this bug, our revenue will go down X%” and no one will fix it. Ever. Any redesigns or redacts that fix this bug will probably fail A/B testing unless they account for this bug. It holds back the entire company from making real progress with the product, all for a few extra bucks.
It's funny it's like intentionally putting a feature that did this would make you guilty, but if it's just a bug then nobody can blame you for not fixing it.
Most software licenses say the software is sold "as is", so if there are bugs you can't complain.
It is not like having a monopoly on finding customers combined with not finding customers is going to have any economic effect.
It is also entirely fine if IT is leading the US economy where IT is a bunch of guys playing ping pong.
Companies can just dig a little deeper into their pockets, customers can pay a bit more for products. Specially nowadays everyone has plenty of money and the economy is solid as a rock.
I wonder if there is a way to play with the url submit string, you know, entering fields which don't have a UX selection. I use to do this with FB and Craigslist, leave the search criteria, and change the locale. In facebook, it was more the search string copy paste to groups(this was before marketplace). These hacks should come in handy if someone can hunt them down. Espeially the geo-tagging and the income-bracket (I am sure there is an income-bracket criteria in their big "benevolent" database... lol
I think this is a bigger signal than anyone appreciates
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 this respect, I think cable companies are missing an apportunity, they should embrace and monetize geo-location. They are the only ones who can categorize us by income bracket (relatively speaking... house/neighborhood=income bracket). This has huge potential to become a targeted premium ad conduit.
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?
>>"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."
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 :->
There was a recent Ask HN from someone who was concerned that maybe greed was the only reason people would work for places like Facebook or Google any more.
That thread was quickly killed before it could grow any legs, but I did have a knee-jerk response anyway:
I'm sure there are some other reasons for those employees having potential to do more noble work, but aspiring to become an "ad man" on an aggressive media platform has always had an appeal to a certain amount of selfishness at the expense of others.
Now when the entire process is geared to appeal more strongly to even more greedy individuals, that's what you're going to end up with more so than anyone else.
I'm certainly not the innocuous one, with the toxic petrochemicals and all, where the oil business has always appealed more strongly to the greedy get-rich-quick types in its own way.
Rather than add to the size of a growing behemoth, I chose to do my survival activities more as a parasite instead.
There's definitely less money for the taking when you have to earn every dollar by adding value to resources, as opposed to collecting pay from accounts where funds were accumulated wildly before you showed up.
But that's the kind of decision you've got to make.
Organizations that are trying to do something disreputable or shameful (or just something that could be construed that way by a nontrivial portion of the population) often come up with sweet little lies about their motives that help their employees sleep better at night.
It's not about making money by serving ads, it's about "organizing the world's data". It's not about winning defense contracts to put military hardware into space, it's about "colonizing mars to save humanity". It's not about printing money by getting poor people to sign up for 50,000% APR payday loans, it's about "providing liquidity to undeserved communities". Etc.
Hypothetically working on the security aspect doesn't seem so unethical. I mean, it is helping the evil empires in a sort of abstract way, but realistically people are going to use the services because they are ad-funded (and so, appear free). The direct harm to people who have their communications which they believe to be basically private (in the sense that they are only spied on by the service provider) broken into seems to be more significant.
Agree with you wholeheartedly, just look at the advances in AI defined graphics, why can't the search engine be the same, we give the search engine a query and click on whether we want paid product ads to be included in the search. The web is getting so convoluted, that we(the consumer) will have to install pihole into our own version of "assistant software" in possibly our own design of an android and funnel every web interaction thru that android/assistant. They are making it to the point that we will not trust their "asistant software", nor their ad platform, and anything else they build. Essentially we will filter and curate all web interaction that is not text. And even text may need to be curated to avoid echo-chamber.
I sometimes browse random awesome-[thing] lists just to see what they have in store and if anything in there gives me any new idea or seems to scratch some itch I didn't even know I had.
No need for any invasive tracking or obnoxious pop-ups.
> But there are also things that would benefit me that I don't even know exist, so I can not ask for them.
True, but those are categories of products, not products. That's not something companies are interested in advertising to you, so you can't rely on advertising to learn about them.
Even though this idea of visibility is often touted, the vast majority of advertising is in practice all about obfuscating the actual uses (and especially limitations) of a product.
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.
Obfuscate facts. Appeal to emotions. To appeal to emotions with the kind of results they are expecting you have to target women and children...ideally by driving an invisible wedge between them and their supporting caregivers.
> To appeal to emotions with the kind of results they are expecting you have to target women and children...ideally by driving an invisible wedge between them and their supporting caregivers.
Are you comparing women to children in their ability to discern advertising drivel from real facts about a product? Not only is that insulting, it is obviously false.
Ads => Consumerism => Destruction of the biosphere and depletion of natural resources => Hundreds of millions of extra deaths over the next few hundred years.
Now, this is simplified, they don't get to bear all the blame, and there are worse industries, but we better reform them fast, and radically.
If 4chan and QAnon were the vast majority of the internet, I would agree with the comparison.
But as I said, the vast vast majority of advertising by any measure you chose to use is of the manipulative kind, not informative. And this despite the existence of truth-in-advertising laws for decades.
And banning advertising is not even that harmful to industry - we have the case study of the tabacco industry, which didn't exactly die away once advertising of all of its products was entirely prohibited in all wealthy countries.
I’ve worked at two places that turned off Google ads for some number of months (except trademarked keywords they had a license for). There wasn’t a significant change to sales or traffic.
I don't know about this, I suspect it depends on the product. What about that experiment AMAZON did down in Mexico, where it stopped advertising on google for 6 months and their revenue tanked?
Amazon and e-commerce, in general, have a different usecase for search engines. IME, the two products were people searching for the best solution to a problem and had fairly strong organic channels because they solved the problems people were looking to solve and were blogged about all over the internet.
E-commerce: people are looking for the best deal. You pay google to “show up first” and capitalize on brand awareness once they see your competitors. The customer is going to think, “ah nice, at least it’s on Amazon in case all these other stores are too sketchy.” The other stores probably play a better SEO game than Amazon because /they have to to survive/ while Amazon merely throws money at the problem to capitalize on the brand.
Limiting advertising created bigger tabacco companies that shut out newer companies. Demand remained constant because it's a drug...That might work for other drug like coffee or pop/soda or social media but will not work for Tom's hardware and nails having an excess inventory of power drills
People will still always need power drills and nails, even more so than cigarettes. Do you honestly believe the hardware industry would collapse if it were forced to stop advertising?
Now, the biggest problem with advertising is that it is an arms race. If your competitors are advertising and you are not, or are investing significantly less than them, you're very unlikely to remain competitive for long (assuming the products are even vaguely similar in quality).
With a ban on advertising the biggest companies the ones we all know will benefit as no alternatives would be known. Some brands can spend endless amounts of money and I wouldn't purchase their product because of past experience or reputation.
Banning advertising would collapse industries or reduce market size and limit any expansion efforts.
> With a ban on advertising the biggest companies the ones we all know will benefit as no alternatives would be known.
Why? If I go to a hardware store and see a new power tool on the shelves that looks sturdy and costs less than the existing ones, why would I not buy it, or at least look for reviews on it?
Edit: this would be especially true in the longer term, as consumers start forgetting the marketing and there are no more "premium brands". In the near term after a ban, the older advertising still holds some sway, which of course creates a disadvantage for new brands. Still, a small price to pay for making the market more rational.
Advertising is "pay someone to say/show something about your product", where "pay" can refer to any kind of payment. It's really really easy to separate, conceptually, from any other discourse.
Now, there are situations where this is more ambiguous, and in general any display of a company's products or brands, especially one that is not critical, is suspect of being advertisement for that brand.
I'm not even sure how you can even claim that there is any sort of ambiguity between, say, The Raven and a Super Bowl commercial.
Advertising is a judgement. It is a synthetic definition (defined but it's relationship to other concepts), but you want it to be analytic (ex: the number 5).
You completely dodge my point because it's a stake in the vampire heart of your non sequiturs.
If I have a know I have problem, I'll look for a solution myself, and perform an objective comparison. I don't need some marketing asshat's stilted sales copy designed to con idiots into buying.
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.
Unfortunately the prevalence of reviews in exchange for money or free product warps this significantly. In those cases, reviewers are being paid to con you with their bias, even if they're unaware.
It's too subtle a point. The argument here is not about logic, but about intellectual honesty.
The parent you replied to believes everybody else is unduly influenced by 'asshats' and that his/her favored influencers are not 'asshats.' As if Ezra Pound or Edmund Teller weren't 'asshats' for nuclear explosive mining, or fascism.
Dismissing advertisers for being into the 'filthy lucre?' So what should we do with all the engineers doing the same?
Not naive at all. Certainly, there are a billion products. Group by things that don't matter in the first analysis, and you probably knock it down one or two orders of magnitude. But the consumer knows what they need - and can tell Google. An educated consumer (can we grant them that) will find trusted review sites. That knocks the list down to like ten! At ten, the burden really shifts to the manufacturer to have a quality web site. This, in my opinion, is where most fail.
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.
What if you are looking, but an advertisement helps you find it faster?
As an example, I was shopping for a keyboard the other day. I spent several hours looking through different specs. It would be handy if a website would have popped up "hey, here are the 3 you are probably looking for, pick one!".
The benefit would have been for me (less time looking) and for three site (less server time serving pages to me)
When I am looking to buy something, ads actively get in the way of that. Ads are why we don't have websites that tell you "these are the 3 options you're probably looking for" any more because people figured out that they can make sites like that where the three choices are just ads rather than good recommendations. There's been times when I've simply given up on buying something because I got sick of wading through ads looking for any actual information.
> There's been times when I've simply given up on buying something because I got sick of wading through ads looking for any actual information.
It's happening more and more often to me. I've been caught on this spiral of mistrust ever more often, even when wading through what once was a good place for human reviews: reddit.
I can't tell anymore what's an honest review to a paid one, be it affiliate links bullshit all the way to astroturfing on social media, it's exhausting.
In my experience all three options are usually crap and I would have been better served doing my own research.
The only time advertising has been of use to me is advertising clothing. It's an extremely saturated market, so searching for "cool t shirt" or "nice jeans" is worthless. Before COVID I would go to a nice area in Tokyo, NYC, or some other major city and just load up when it was time to buy new clothes.
I block most ads, but a couple ads have gotten through over the years and I've learned about new brands or atleast new styles and had a jumping off point.
I still feel I am way better off blocking as many ads as I can, but can't say they've been completely worthless.
Most of the HN crowd can't fathom the idea of spending money on clothing outside of necessity. Shirts that will last ten years is more popular of a topic than shirts that actually look good.
You basically want an oracle. That's fine, but none of what you just described requires a push model - you have a specific query, "best keyboard for me", so what you want is a service where you can go and explicitly ask that question, and get an accurate answer.
OTOH if an ad popped up and said "here's the best keyboard for you" - or even "here's the top 3 choices for you" - would you seriously trust that?
The vast majority of the population, they don't even know there are solutions that would change their life.
E.g: In a world of 8,000,000,000 how many people know that there is Coursera which has top-level courses that can change their lives, improve productivity and make impact?.
"I know everything, don't tell me. I'll ask" is exactly the attitude that prevents learning (and prevents people from knowing about coursera). You are just advertising that personality to the rest of the world
> In a world of 8,000,000,000 how many people know that there is Coursera which has top-level courses that can change their lives, improve productivity and make impact?.
I would bet there are more people who know Coursera exists than people whose lives would literally change if they took a few Coursera courses (though that doesn't mean that there aren't some people whose lives could be changed by Coursera if they knew about it).
However, seeing an Ad for Coursera is not likely to help anyone find out whether Corusera can actually help them or not - since there is absolutely no way to tell from an ad whether the product being presented is going to be even close to fit for purpose. The only thing the ad tells you that can be trusted is "Coursera is a company that is trying to sell online courses" (note: that doesn't mean that they actually provide online courses, you can only trust that they are trying to sell them - see the myriads of ads for mobile puzzle games whose gameplay has literally no relation to the game play shown in the ad).
Note: I'm not trying to take potshots at Coursera here - they are a reputable business and have many good courses - which I know from my own and friends' personal experiences. I'm trying to look objectively of what an ad for a company you know nothing about can actually tell you.
> The vast majority of the population, they don't even know there are solutions that would change their life.
> I know everything, don't tell me. I'll ask" is exactly the attitude that prevents learning
This feels parental-- a version of mommy knows best. Why not let me, by default, decide if I want personalized advertisements? What if I want to be ignorant in regards to the new fad product? What if I don't want companies to mine my interests, location, prior searches, etc just to tell me that coursera exists? Advertisers are afraid of using an opt-in model because they know most people won't do it.
The best solution for the argument that “ads help people find stuff when they do go looking”, is an ad-directory.
Want to buy some new clothes and shoes soon? Go to an ad directory and browse the offerings - it’s beneficial for everyone. Users, because they’re getting what they want (when and how they want it) and for providers too: their audience are self-selecting their target, they have high intent to buy. This would make actual advertising cheaper, brands would get more creative freedom (have to stick out more, have to help your target market quickly identify you and you don’t need to spend oodles of time and money setting up complicated arms-race-sequence AI targeting run by a duopoly of “totally trustworthy companies”). Users are happy because they’re freed from the cognitive burden of constant harassment.
The thing is, the mass of advertising isn't about helping you know the unknown unknowns, it's about manipulating you into wanting things you know about, more, or wanting things you don't need / wouldn't really want in a fair evaluation.
The thing is, in our society, institutions mostly develop venues for advertising rather than for listing - since both the owners of the venue and the entities offering products/services have overarching profit motives, and advertising is more profitable.
Are you aware that advertising is explicitly defined in law, and already regulated, even in the USA?
In fact, the definition is extremely simple: if a company payed you (with money, free product, free trips etc) to say or show something about their product, that is advertising, regardless of what you are saying or of whether you believe it. No more, no less.
Note: some countries extend this to any display or mention of branding, whether payed for or not, at least in broadcast media. So, for example in my country, a TV show has to blur out brands on bottles of water or cars shown, or display an explicit "this is advertising" logo on the screen while the branding is shown.
I saw a commentary on education - I think on HN actually - where the writer was suggesting that the prime directive for each student should be 'know thyself'. Advertisers know me in a shallow way only, and they aren't really served by knowing me in a deep way - they need to know me well enough to know if I might buy a given product, the why of that is immaterial to them (and they have no direct access to it anyway).
There is an ideal world where everyone spends a lot of time getting to know themselves on an intimate level and then broadcasts their very personal desires to an advertising industrial complex, which finds the solutions to these deep and difficult-to-articulate drives. But the advertiser can't realistically get that kind of information on anyone. I know that's not what advertisers claim, but I'm confident in calling bullshit on what they say about knowing their customers. They can't even tell when they're irritating someone to the point of installing an adblock, and they're supposed to know what self-actualization looks like to each of their many customers? I ain't even renting that.
I agree with the basic premise that advertising can be a force for good. But the advertisee has to be an active participant, else the advertiser will reliably determine that the target's telos is 'maximize shareholder value for <advertiser>'.
Seems obvious. I agree. However I think you're not going to get through to those with central planning biases. By which I mean, the notion that perfect planning can beat the market.
The Palace Economy central planner says, "give me wheat." The Soviet central planner says, "more steel comrades." The American style technocrat planner says, "we will tell you what you want and then deny market alternatives."
How, exactly, each person deciding on their own whether to look or not look for information on a particular subject matter translates to economic centralization? It's the other way around - the ads, with their push model, naturally produce centralization, which is why we have the duopoly this article is about.
We're talking about advertising, not monopolies. That's your first fail.
Second, you present a false binary that we have either the duopoly, or the self-starting individual.
Marketing is a subset of Influence. Influence is a subset of the Arts. Arts being defined as non-axiomatic symbolic ordering.
You want to ignore all these distinctions, so you can stop annoying advertisers.
In the process of doing that, you either push advertising into the arts, or you kill the arts. Both are stupid. And that shows so are you.
You would dispense with the market, because you don't like that it's a meany.
You conflate because that's the standard tech scumbag method: you interpret 'restrictions' as 'damage' and route around it. Like a virus that crashes the whole system.
How would you find a book that didn't try to influence you? How would you find information that did not exist to influence? You are asking for an invisible pink unicorn. It does not exist. Your whole argument is stupid, sloppy, and sophomoric.
The centralization has to do with cheap money. That appears to be a topic beyond your pay grade. Hacker News has a low skill base when it comes to economic understanding. VC funded enterprises all have a magic money aspect to them that proper entrepreneurs (bootstrappers) do not have. Your post reeks of it. That was not the issue.
You want to strawman my point, because...?
InCityDreams:
"In a funny kind of way, I'd rather have unsolvable problems than be advertised at.
If the problems actually need solving, ill go looking.
If I'm not looking, there's no problem (to be solved)."
Summary: "If I'm not looking, there's no problem (to be solved)."
Then Deltree replies:
"Newsflash: There are unknown, unknowns.
The vast majority of the population, they don't even know there are solutions that would change their life.
E.g: In a world of 8,000,000,000 how many people know that there is Coursera which has top-level courses that can change their lives, improve productivity and make impact?.
"I know everything, don't tell me. I'll ask" is exactly the attitude that prevents learning (and prevents people from knowing about coursera). You are just advertising that personality to the rest of the world"
Summary: ""I know everything, don't tell me. I'll ask" is exactly the attitude that prevents learning."
Me: "Seems obvious. I agree. However I think you're not going to get through to those with central planning biases. By which I mean, the notion that perfect planning can beat the market.
The Palace Economy central planner says, "give me wheat." The Soviet central planner says, "more steel comrades." The American style technocrat planner says, "we will tell you what you want and then deny market alternatives."
I think there's no reasoning with these people"
Summary: Yes, I know everything don't ask people can't be reasoned with. Same as Soviets or Palace economists. Same as American duopolies, which have gotten worse and stronger as government spending and share of national economy has increased. I took for granted that this is obvious, as others in the thread seemed to instinctively grasp this point.
Not you though.
Duopoly exists from too much government influence so solutions involving more government influence are doomed to failure.
Let's teach you to fish anyhow: the duopoly only mirrors the power structure of the government which allows it. More regulations to enforce what is advertising and what is art, means lawyers are then involved with case uses of the English language. An area that is a known incompetency for the trade.
Any individual who says, "I know everything. If I don't, I'll ask." How did they know anything in the first place? From the government schools? From their parents? Parents can't know everything. And AHA! Government schools are influencers and NOT AT ALL institutions of learning. Any learning done is incidental.
This is Kuhn's argument: you cannot revolutionize a flawed paradigm inside the flawed paradigm. If you prefer, you could say it's the Dunning-Kruger effect.
You're a jack@ss. I addressed my interlocutors arguments directly. You do not. Eff off, you MF.
EDIT: And as a concluding point, because you're so daft, this means that only influence from outside a power structure can possibly change the decision control flow. Ie Art, the child of which is applied symbol, the child of which is advertising.
You're not making any points, and your comments are written to be inflammatory (unlike deltree7's, who is clearly advancing the conversation, even if I don't agree with them).
> Advertising is actually an optimal / scalable way for companies to reach you.
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.
I would venture a guess that companies that already made quality products are entirely unaffected by this, it's companies pushing shit that only sells thanks to ads that get hit, and: good. I hope those all go out of business.
In the more grass roots advertising industry we are seeing agencies move away from what can be called "performance marketing" in general, which entails the high volume low effort advertising channels such as google and facebook ads. Alternatives are more traditional, real world brand building and engaging with communities in a real sense, running events and getting involved in the spaces their customers are active.
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.
So, ironically, advertisers are right back where they started. The relentless desire to track leads gutted publishing because the ad dollars got sucked up by Google and Facebook. Publishers that survived did so by chasing “clickbait” and SEO that everybody bitches about. In the end the golems they helped create is taking away the control and tracking they wanted in the first place - and undermining their relationships with their audience, too.
Maybe we’ll move back to a better model that helps support decent content.
Big businesses and advertising agencies already see this, they have been tracking it. But I wouldn't want to be a small ecommerce brand who built their business on the back of online marketing that worked. Coupled with Amazon stealing absolutely everyone's lunch, they have had the rug pulled out from under them by big tech companies.
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.
I have spent a long time in ecommerce and follow the results of a bunch of public ecommerce companies.
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.
100% this! You are even required now (as an advertiser) to send so many metrics to Google for the algorithms to work they know everything about your business. The entire system is now engineered to extract the maximum possible value from the advertiser.
People complain about the tracking of visitors, but the tracking of advertisers own business is equally as abusive.
> 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.
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.
Have you read "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism"? I would say that your observations - tho they frustrate you - are very much inline with what the book proposes.
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.
You don't, but that's what's being sold. Not the old transaction, but instead the boarder awareness from the network of the market to create and deliver an audience.
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.
Ultimately as ad blocking rises im pretty sure ad hosting and tracking as it is now will go the same way popups went and ads will end up within the content itself or included in the pages directly so they can’t be blocked.
I 100% agree with this sentiment. I think we're going to be transitioning back to more personalized marketing with CRM and email and SMS as channels. It seems to be happening already as there's lots of startups in this space.
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.
Yeah I found it quite hard as a novice to actually tell if my Facebook pixel stuff was all working and firing exactly as intended. The lack of data means it's hard to map a 1:1 relationship for a certain visitor (me). "Luckily", our site was not successful so we could find some matches in the recent queries list... on a busier site it would have been hard to pin down.
It still felt like a total money pit into which you toss offerings to a dark god which may or may not grant blessings.
But that is adverting in general. We have billboards, tv ads, paper ads, product placements. You have no clue how many people will buy because of these ads. But you burn your cash anyway.
The difference there - you can at least verify your ad is being shown, even if it is not a guarantee of effectiveness, and use other estimates to see how many people see it such as foot traffic or TV viewership.
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.
I used to have a retail store on a busy state hiway in a congested area. We put out a used ragged-arse flashing arrow sign that just had keywords on it or maybe a few sentences for products we sold. That worthless piece of junk printed money.
Road signs, sidewalk signs, and billboards are worth every penny.
>"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."
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?
This Google black box is not just on the advertising side, it's also on the customer service side. Really impossible to get hold of a real person, even after giving them thousands of dollars.
Interesting point! And I supposed with things like stable diffusion there is a level of skill, intuition and experience in how to steer it to what you want. A skilled stable diffusion user is still an “artist”.
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.
"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."
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.
To make money by helping people spend less, you need to be a "discounter" or some kind. E.g. here is fruit that is 20% less than your supermarket. But even such services and businesses need to advertise. Even the government needs to pay to advertise, even if it is advertising giving money to help people in tough economic times.
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.
> 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.
As far as I know, the technical term for that is greed.
From a consumer perspective, the sole valuable thing about ads seems to be discovery. If we could have discovery without ads, that can only be a good thing. What is the future of discovery in such a world?
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.
> 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.
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.
> what actual search terms people are using, proper visible conversion tracking of an ad
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.
> I challenge the blowhards here to like, name one substantive harm someone has experienced from ad ID tracking on an iPhone
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.
It was a question in bad faith. The central issue is the power asymmetry, whereas we don’t know when we’re tracked, by whom, or how our information is correlated.
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.
> 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.
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.
Advertising is actively working against this - trying to find ways to correlate your activity across as many devices and accounts as possible. Especially now that work from home, BYOD and ZeroTrust (which reduces the need for corporate VPNs) are all blurring the lines and giving new opportunities for correlation.
> 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.
This is assuming that the ad isn't promising something too good to be true, or using deceptive pricing to make it seem cheap enough to be better than the OSS, or using psychological tricks to try to override your rational choice (which may not work for this particular example, but may well work for many others).
> 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.
Things don't have to cause obvious harm to still be inappropriate.
It's all tradeoffs at the end of the day. A better entertained, better informed public - enjoying their free IP paid by better ads - is worth the some-abstract-not-yet harms.
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.
I would preferred the government regulation apparatus to be brought to bear against harms, both demonstrated and imminently likely, rather than mere inconvenience or "inappropriateness".
> 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
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.
Everyone is all gangster about privacy and their hatred for ads until they realize they need to pay for the services they use.
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
I'm pro-privacy and anti-ad, and I block all ads on my home network. I have a YouTube Premium subscription. I also pay for Fastmail and Kagi. So I don't think that; I know that.
‘Microsoft’s social network, LinkedIn, is unglamorous but its business-to-business ads allow it to monetise the time users spend on it at a rate roughly four times that of Facebook, estimates Andrew Lipsman of eMarketer. It generates more revenue than some medium-sized networks including Snap’s Snapchat and Twitter. <...> So far [Apple] is only dabbling in ads and does not report sales figures. But Bloomberg reported recently that Apple’s ad business was already generating sales of $4bn a year, making it about as big an ad platform as Twitter.’
Twitter is now a unit of being moderately unsuccessful at advertising.
who the fuck is spending even a microsecond amount of time on linkedin to even see one ad, let alone a lot...
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
Do we really need this type of comment every single time advertising is mentioned. We get it, ads don't work on you. The entire world is just throwing away trillions of dollars in marketing for nothing.
How is it so inconceivable to you that people use LinkedIn?
I’m guessing you don’t use Twitter or follow it much. Of all the major social platforms — FB, Reddit, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram — only Twitter has significant and consistent usage by the intellectual and economic elite.
Just like when I interviewed at Goog and the asked me "what do you think google is" and I replied "everyone thinks you're a search engine, but you're and ad engine only..."
They then called me to tell me " YOU DID GREAT ON YOUR interview, you'll get an offer letter tmrw"
The next day they called me back to tell me "yeah, we arent going to give you that job"
They then proceeded to call me for FOUR FUCKING YEARS for the same job.... and I finally had to tell them " DELETE MY FUCKING NUMBER BITCH!"
>Considering the audience of twitter, which is the elite of society,
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.
I work in online search and recently expanded. In my opinion there are two major threats to Google and Facebook (I.e., ads related threats):
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.
1. Google isn't relatively safe. They are paying rent to Apple just for default. And while the cost per user has been flat over the years, ( growth coming from total active iPhone / Apple user ). Apple may raise that cost, taking another slice form Google.
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.
On the medium term I see another problem for search ads - the raise of AI powered question answering engines. They are accessible through voice on mobile, but probably have much less opportunity for ad revenue. The research grade models are amazing, but deployed models like Google Assistant very far behind. I bet Google is dragging its feet with the deployment of QA technology because the shift is not in their interest. Site publishers won't like it either because they lose a part of the search traffic.
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.
The voice assistants already do self—advertisement by suggesting other things you can do when you ask for simple things like the time or the weather. At best this is to help people understand what’s possible, and at worst it’s to juice engagement metrics.
What replaces it? People aren't going to host content for free. I hate ads too, but we have to be pragmatic about monetization; platforms like YouTube literally cannot exist without advertising to subsidize the insane architectural cost.
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.
> platforms like YouTube literally cannot exist without advertising
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.
YT's content isn't free. The majority of the income (55/45 split) from ads and Premium goes to the content creators. To compare, in 2021 Netflix had content acquisition costs of 60% of their revenue.
And then on the flipside, YT has a much harder infrastucture problem than Netflix. There's probably like 1000x as much content (both new and existing), and much more diversity in what is being watched. That means 1000x more storage and transcoding, and far lower cache hit rates.
(I've got no idea of whether/how profitable YT is. Just saying that if you're trying to reason about it via analogy to Netflix, you've got the directionality wrong on both of the issues.)
> YouTube: 20 billion USD profit in 2021 on 28 billion revenue
Alphabet does not break out YT's profits in their financial reports, just the revenue. So that $20 billion is just a total fabrication. Shame on you.
It's also not at all a credible number, because YouTube's split of the ad revenue is known to be 45%. It's literally impossible for them to have 70% margins like you claim.
> because YouTube's split of the ad revenue is known to be 45%
What's the split on demonetized videos? What's the split on "ad supported" videos where engagement is too low for actual payout? How does this affect overall split?
Honestly? I don't care. The economy will figure it out, somehow, like we always did whenever some business model or another went obsolete. At the end of the day, no ads produce wealth; people do.
And no, I don't want "government-approved ads", either - that's a surefire way to corrupt our political system even further.
Decentralized architecture, open source. No one single entity owns the platform. "Payment" is in the form of sharing your hosted content (bandwidth, energy, time). Fully democratized.
But what if you can't afford having huge server, to contribute to the network?
And how to incentivise people in redistributing content?
For example in perfect decentralized p2p world, people on mobile clients would be leaching content from fat clients. You either have to rent server, to host for your own phone, or go to some company to do it for you.
People are already paying companies to access the Internet. If the infrastructure (and the incentives) actually existed, I doubt the average person would have to worry much more about it than their phone bill.
Of course copyright laws make this "perfect p2p world" illegal, so there was never even a chance for it to materialize.
> What replaces it? People aren't going to host content for free.
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.
Well, we had it, back in the late 90's. You wanted to put a video on the internet for people to see? You put it on your site, and paid the appropriate fee for the space and the bandwidth.
So people wanted to get paid for the content, if nothing more than to cover the hosting costs, and LEPT at the chance to put their crap in some walled garden that handled the monetization. If we had it to do all over again, we'd wind up right back at the same spot.
The only thing that will fix this situation is to force YouTube to charge for subscriptions at a price point that gets rid of the advertising, like Netflix. And then YT can share THAT money with creators. And this goes for every other "free" service where the product is YOU, like Facebook and Twitter.
I still can't wrap my head around how advertising is so valuable that the entire US economy seems to be based on it now. I just can't fathom there's apparently this strong of a correlation between annoying ad campaigns and consumer spending, but it MUST exist, ipso facto.
Not with the shit internet service we currently have. The bandwidth cost is the gatekeeper propping up youtube etc. If I try to serve anything with consumer internet service my pipe will clog or I will get shoved over to business class internet service. The "business class" internet service will soon choke also.
Next step? Rent a data center and start buying contract lines and millions in hardware.
If you search for socks and someone shows you a promoted ad for socks, you are likely trading relevance for money as the best sock for that person is unlikely to be the most promoted one. This works in the short term but ultimately what should happen (and currently doesn't) is users then use a search or retail platform that gives them more relevant results.
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).
> as the best sock for that person is unlikely to be the most promoted one.
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.
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).
You're not wrong, main difference is between big companies vs smaller ones. Big name brands can afford to shell out more, but sometimes you see the smaller shitty dropshippers trying to get more visibility by hyping the hell out of a sub par product
It's not just you. The business model of many tech companies consists of creating digital fiefdoms to lock "their" users into and then selling access to "their" users. They sell access to "their" users to other software developers. They sell access to the attention of "their" users to advertisers.
I reinstalled Windows 10 on a machine recently and like half the setup process is now ads for other Microsoft services or things related to ads. Do you want Office 365? OneDrive? Xbox Game Pass? Can we use your location for ads? Kind of ridiculous. I don't think there was any the first time I installed Win 10? Maybe just Office 365?
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.
>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.
The sad part is that even despite the horrific bullshit that's become bundled with Windows since 10, Linux Desktop market share still hasn't changed.
At the end of the day, what the average person wants is an OS that works properly without requiring complex configuration, and the people making Linux distributions don't understand or respect this.
Many many years back, when I knew nothing of programming and very little of tech words, I used to wonder why people don't use Linux instead of Windows if it is so great. Then I realized Linux is good for nerds. For the rest of tech ignorant people, it is Windows. As I read somewhere long ago, Linux is for people who know what they are doing. Windows is for people who don't know what they are doing.
I would consider myself fairly tech-literate. Software engineer, use git from the command line, can exit vim. Even then I gave up on Linux after using it for a couple of years because it's just so darn stressful.
When I need to get shit done, the last thing I want to is read pages and pages of documentation about someone's pet project or some Stack Overflow post containing the random incantation I need to fix some hardware incompatibility that is fixed out of the box on some distros but not others.
The Desktop Linux experience, at least for me, was like owning a car with an incredibly detailed repair manual and amazing parts availability but broke down every 6 weeks. Even the best mechanic in the world wouldn't want to use that car as a daily driver.
It's weird. I had that exact experience with Linux. Had to reinstall the system from scratch every major distribution upgrades because they always screwed something up. Fedora's package manager corrupted its own database once. Support was just badly answered forum posts.
Then I switched to Arch Linux and never had problems ever again. Been running it for years with no problems despite its inexplicable reputation for instability. Whenever I want to do anything, I just look it up in the Arch Wiki which is the best Linux documentation ever made.
I have to use Windows at work and it's nothing but constant never ending pain. The god damn OS just does all sorts of stuff I couldn't care less about that have absolutely nothing to do with my job. It actually costs me money in lost productivity. All this for what? The only thing it does is launch the browser, and very rarely Libre Office when the network is down and I have to save a document locally. Yes, Libre Office.
>It's weird. I had that exact experience with Linux. Had to reinstall the system from scratch every major distribution upgrades because they always screwed something up. Fedora's package manager corrupted its own database once. Support was just badly answered forum posts.
I feel like most of the people complaining about constant trouble with Linux were using Fedora...
>Then I switched to Arch Linux and never had problems ever again.
Same thing here with Ubuntu-based distros. Sometimes I wonder if Fedora is secretly made and pushed just to ruin Linux's reputation.
On the flip side, I had the opposite experience. With Linux it was just the matter of compiling from the source. And most of the time, it would just compile without any issue. With windows, I needed to download MSVC and the whole studio and wasn't able to have the app running. I really did not understand why it had to be so complicated. At least with linux there is a support from the community because the same problem might have been encountered by someone else.
Further, in Windows, whenever I was trying new things or doing out of the normal stuff, it required modifying a lot of registry values. I found it horrible compared to Linux, where everything is a file and you can immediately change the file.
It's weird how people are still complaining about this stuff. I never have any trouble like this; I just use an Ubuntu-based distro, and get well-supported hardware (i.e., just buy a Dell or Lenovo laptop), and everything "just works".
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.
The home screen on my Windows 10 copy usually has a nice image and a few bits of text about that image or location.
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.
Unfortunately, it's a very similar situation for MacOS. Seemingly endless prompts to sign up for one service or another. At least Linux is viable for some of us.
These corporations are not bastions of self-awareness nor moral fortitude. They are machines with the singular goal of making the red line go up. It will continue to get worse as long as people continue buying their products.
That's funny. Whatever happened to vision and innovation? Improving the world and people's lives? Achieving great things through technology? Empowering people? I guess founders only talk about this stuff in the startup stage.
If all these corporations will concern themselves with is "line go up" then it's time for society to step in and seriously constrain what they're allowed to do in order to drive that line up. Frankly, corporations making line go up by shoving advertising into everything everywhere aren't adding a lot of value. They're just increasing audiovisual pollution and that's an extremely charitable interpretation of their activities. What I actually think is they're violating my mind every single time they show me an advertisement. My attention is mine, it's not theirs to sell off to the highest bidder. I couldn't care less how much money it costs them, it should be illegal for them to do it.
> That's funny. Whatever happened to vision and innovation? Improving the world and people's lives? Achieving great things through technology? Empowering people?
Unironically, they've already done that.
Microsoft put a PC on every desk, running Microsoft software.
Facebook connected the world to all their friends and relatives.
Amazon first revolutionized e-commerce, making it possible to buy almost anything from almost anywhere. Then they revolutionized server computing, making it possible for anyone to spin up a software backend and scale it out without buying or leasing your own servers.
Apple got pocket sized general purpose computers into the pockets of the majority of people in the world (through iPhone and inspiring Android).
Google enabled people to find pretty much any piece of human knowledge or information.
The problem is, once those goals were accomplished, there was a still a need to keep revenue and profits rising. Which always seems to end up with selling ads at some point.
>Microsoft put a PC on every desk, running Microsoft software.
As someone who was in the industry in the 90s and 00s, and saw just how many man-hours were wasted in dealing with problems caused by MS's buggy and insecure software, I don't really count this as "improving the world and people's lives". Even at the time, there were far better alternatives available; they just didn't have the same marketing or lock-in advantages.
I'll grant you the stuff about FB, Amazon, and Google though, and maybe Apple with their iPhone.
>The problem is, once those goals were accomplished, there was a still a need to keep revenue and profits rising. Which always seems to end up with selling ads at some point.
Yep, this is the problem: unsustainability. These companies should have been able to shift into a "utility provider" type status where they don't really grow much (except from expanding population, or new untapped global markets), where they can simply provide a fairly constant service and have a regular revenue stream.
> I don't really count this as "improving the world and people's lives".
Microsoft provided the operating system that allowed the commoditised IBM PC, and later laptops, to launch.
Without this, no Google, no Amazon and no FB.
Put another way, if every workstation still cost $5k and up to own, far fewer people would have bothered in the first place.
No complaints about your views on Microsoft software ;) I'd argue I'm not sure Google or Amazon are "making the world a better place" when you get into the details, but this is purely about the wider impacts of their strategy.
> That's funny. Whatever happened to vision and innovation? Improving the world and people's lives? Achieving great things through technology? Empowering people? I guess founders only talk about this stuff in the startup stage.
These were lies calculated to help them recruit idealistic young people, who lack the experience to disregard companies making grandiose claims about themselves and their motives.
Most of the most successful corporations/businesses have vision/innovation to begin with, they do create useful things that people didn't know they wanted but once they see it they do.
After a while though, the business gets big enough that no new innovation can actually move the needle on the businesses revenues, the people at those companies who do have ideas are better off getting paid well for some period of time and then leaving to make it themselves.
That's the stage google is in more or less, innovation won't move their bottom line very much so they're trying to extract as much as possible from their existing businesses, which basically means as many ads as possible in as many places as possible.
tech giants have the moral-teflon of their bastardized implementation of DEI. So they're obviously just and benevolent. If you think they're ratfucking their customers, then you're just a bigot who's mad about the diversity but won't say it.
It's healthier to think of business models more like organisms. Animals aren't "good" or "bad" for having a lifecycle that involves parasitism or predation, stealth or deceit, or any number of behaviors, like cannibalism. Life doesn't care how you live, just that you live.
Businesses live because society allows them to live. How about we make humane business models a pre-condition for existence?
"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.
> Businesses live because society allows them to live.
It is not a one way street from "mores of society" -> "business practices". Large corporations frequently go to extreme lengths attempting to manipulate what society does and does not allow.
>"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.
It's worse than that. Some insects (I think it's mantises) will murder each other after copulation. I'm not sure what the evolutionary advantage there is, but this doesn't seem like something humans should emulate.
>How about we make humane business models a pre-condition for existence?
I argue only that organisms evolve to occupy whatever space is available to them. This true of organisms, it is true of businesses. Both respond to incentives.
I am not "life". Considering something humans do as "bad" is kinda like the cultural equivalent of an immune system. I don't judge a parasite for trying it on with me, because there is no utility in it. Use those resources for fighting back harder instead.
Of course. When I go to places like that, it's because I want to consume. When I go to a store, when I open the store app, it's because I want to see products. That's the whole point. In those cases, it's not advertising, it's information.
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.
You want to consume plastic stuff; Disney World wants to sell you plastic stuff; a magical time ensues.
But you buy Windows because you want a useful OS; whereas Microsoft make Windows as a shop-front for their paid-for services; your purpose and the makers' purpose are misaligned, and you end up frustrated and annoyed that Windows isn't what you want it to be.
Similarly, if a website's purpose is to make money (which is fair enough of course), but you're there because you want to read interesting stuff, that's a misaligned purpose and a frustrating time for you.
Websites that exist primarily to show off interesting stuff tend not to tax the content-blocker so hard, because the author and audience's purposes are well-aligned. And community-governed OSes/distros tend not to push other services, because the purpose for making them genuinely is to be a useful OS (for their intended niche).
My suggestion for what it's worth: choose tools and services where the maker's purpose for making it aligns with your purpose for using it.
> choose tools and services where the maker's purpose for making it aligns with your purpose for using it
What if they don't exist anymore? Because not taking advantage of your users by advertising to them means leaving money on the table. Eventually some executive is gonna show up, notice that and demand that it be done because his compensation is directly tied to revenue growth or something.
Yep. I'm saying: avoid things that exist primarily to make loads of money.
Smaller, looser, less-commercial organisations have fewer or no executives, less concern with making as much money as possible, and (in my opinion) tend to produce less bullshit.
This is distinct from producing good-quality work — their output may be unpolished, but it'll generally be sincere, and free of over-commercialised tat.
Which ISP, phone company, or electrical utility company works like that? They don't, because we have (hopefully) regulated them. There is a point in which a product stops becoming a choice and starts becoming necessary to function. You could argue that operating systems are one of those things. Lets put some ideas together for regulation in these spheres.
Yes, because it's trivially easy to avoid going to Disney. To avoid all tech giants, you practically need to opt-out of modern society and become a hermit.
Apple advertises their cloud services in macosx constantly and there's no way to permanently dismiss these advertisements, other than buying said services.
I am still running Catalina 10.15, and haven't seen any ads for Apple services. There is stuff like Apple TV and Apple News pre-installed, but I never open them, and they never send notifications.
Turning off the Apple Music / iCloud / Apple Arcade notification badge "adverts" in iOS (just got a new iPhone) is also - while not that difficult technically - mildly annoying...
It doesn't punch a hole in it. If P implies Q, that doesn't mean the inverse of P implies the inverse of Q. If you're not the customer, you're the product. But if you are the customer, well, sometimes you're still the product.
Sometimes you are neither the customer nor the product. (e.g. a service like wikpedia or a project like linux)
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 comparison worked for Facebook at the time, because having a directly reachable and targetable audience was groundbreaking at the time (2006-2012)
In 2022, audiences are everywhere and getting them stratified and connected is not hard. Therefore, many companies are exploiting this to cross- and up-sell their products.
I guess my point is that product != audience.
You're always the product unless you're using freedom respecting hardware and software. If you're a customer, it just means you paid for the privilege of being someone else's product.
But doesn't it imply that the only way to not be the product is to be the customer? In this case, we see that being the customer is insufficient to not be the product.
No, being a product or a customer stand in no relation to one another. You can be neither, either, or both. If you don't want to be a product, you have to work on that, not on being a better customer.
Every app these days requires your unique and unchanging advertising identifier to log in. You can’t get an Apple ID or Google account, or order a pizza or make a dinner reservation without it.
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.
> 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?
There’s no problem; Costco is an intermediary that brings value and so it takes its cut. Why do people buy from Amazon, who is also "just" an intermediary? Because you can buy millions of different products from one single place instead of having to go see each manufacturer where you wouldn’t be able to buy individual items anyway.
This situation is a lot more effective than forcing each manufacturer to develop its own customer-facing business with all the costs and logistics that go with it.
Those are not the only two options available. A locally produced yogurt would cost more than in Costco, but not that much more. Maybe $20 a pack, with a deposit for the glass, and you would get it at your door with your milk.
Technically, advertising business basically solves a market optimization problem, which means you can keep improving revenue/profit while your business structure remaining transparent to customers. This gives you a definite control on your business as well as removing lots of uncertainties. I have no doubt Apple or MS want to get their hands into the advertising business; how to do that is a different question though.
Huh, for some reason I'd gotten it into my head that Windows was free to OEMs. But it turns out that that was just a particular version of 8, "with Bing," a while ago. Wild that Windows is a paid product.
The advertising duopoly is a crown with no kingdom in 2022. Online advertising is dead - most people online aren't worth advertising too. This isn't 2010 when most people online were from wealthy countries. Google and Facebook are having a harder and harder time finding high-net-worth individuals to advertise too, because they all use adblock or avoid the open internet, preferring to stick to walled gardens like reddit and tiktok (which serve their own ads).
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?
Well there are two ways to look at this story. One way to look at it is the duopoly is "under attack" from different media platforms, which is a frankly boring observation. Tiktok becoming more popular cuts into YouTube ads? Hardly shocking.
Another way to look at it is the duopoly is being forced to retreat into their safe havens, yes that "90%" of their revenue that they can safely take for granted. I would wager on a guess that Alphabet and Meta are not happy if they can only serve ads on their owned and operated properties like google search, youtube and instagram. They are risking losing the wider web advertising market.
Google booming doesn't necessarily mean OP is wrong. Go read some PPC forums and you'll see a pretty consistent trend on ad ROI going down everywhere. Folks may just be spending more trying to spend their way back to a low CPA.
That's also because they have to sell things we don't need to buy, 99.9% of the time. They don't have an offer for what I would buy today, they offer me something completely unrelated. The ads are not helpful. But if they focused on helpful ads their profits would be too small.
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.
Misleading title. The heading implies both Google and Meta are threatened, but the article discusses the emerging competition to Meta, like Snapchat, Tiktok, and Apple. There is no mention of a search competitor to Google. There is no mention of any concrete threat to Google from the competition, either, other than implying they will also be affected by the general trend.
Google may very well face competition from device manufacturers and the like, but this article does not provide any details about it whatsoever.
Google isn’t being threatened by a search competitor they’re being threatened by attention competitors. The fact that Google provides search results is very much secondary to the fact that they deliver advertisements to eyeballs.
All that geographically relevant advertising could go back to how it was before Facebook/Google became the only way to do it. It seem an easy-enough solution to me.
There are always threats, but these companies being paranoid, are always on the lookout for competitors. Facebook in the past had success defusing the threat by simply copying the competitor's app verbatim (Snapchat) and is trying to repeat this by altering both Facebook and Instagram to work like TikTok.
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.
Everyone here likely works for a company that advertises.
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.)
One reason I’m highly skeptical to claims of monopolies, especially in an industry as dynamic and volatile as tech, is in 5 years you already have competition from new upstarts (TikTok) and old hands (Apple and Amazon) that makes claims of digital advertising “dominance” by Google and Meta outdated. The monopoly claims were suspicious from the beginning but now it looks pretty absurd.
TikTok is better product than Youtube shorts or Instagram reels, money have nothing to do with it, especially while FAANG have more money than ByteDance.
The claims of monopoly have always been political. The only company that comes close to a monopoly is Apple due to them locking out third-party apps on their phones.
"Monopoly" is just a shorthand for a range of market dominance abuse. I.e. if an 800lb gorilla abuses you, it doesn't really matter that there are several others 600-700 lb gorillas ready to do the same to you.
"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. "
I think they're saying that the word "monopoly" is used colloquially, by many, to simply mean dominant position and that those people don't mean the literal definition. It seems they're just trying to say that the parent comment is arguing about the definition of monopoly rather than the actual point, which is dominant position abuse.
I agree that it's important to recognize the differences between monopolies, duopolies, and oligopolies in theory and practice, as you say, but I also don't think that using the wrong term nullifies validity of the actual point.
Unfortunately, in the meantime, the "monopoly" has done huge and world-or-population scale damage in some way. Just think of how the industry has been affected (potentially negatively) by the heavy push and funding by big tech giants of technologies such as React, Angular, and Kubernetes?
A somewhat tangential question. Why is Alphabet not decoupling Google from Google Ads / Google AdSense? Having Google’s name constantly in the news cycle because of their ad practices has ruined their reputation (deservingly). Wouldn’t a separate legal entity also be a safer approach from the legal perspective in the light of the ongoing antitrust investigations?
Because Google would then become a business with virtually no revenue - and no chance of producing revenue. Even though Alphabet itself would remain just as profitable, a business organization can't survive long if its goals are not in some ways associated with producing revenue, by the nature of how corporate politics work.
>Because Google would then become a business with virtually no revenue - and no chance of producing revenue.
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.
Maybe if google wasn't so beholden on the ad revenue, they could pursue more interesting opportunities for revenue. Imagine a first rate aws competiter that wasn't Azure and the headache that system is in comparison. that alone would generate conversions overnight. Then you can use some of that infrastructure you've just built and your customers are paying for to run your own science division that could research anything and everything with free compute.
If you have basically a free money generator, why aren't you putting that in a room to run and make its free money while you work on a second or third free money generator?
That's true, but as long as you have one money generator that takes a lot of pressure off of you to go and set up another one. Not to mention having to put resources on maintaining the money generator versus just having more people pursuing innovation, increasing the odds you hit on another money generator.
There is no such thing as guaranteed or overnight conversions to a new cloud, at least not from the relevant segment of the market (enterprise). They would have to invest massively in B2B sales and actual human support (which they have an institutional aversion to) to make any more of a dent in this market then they already have.
OTOH everywhere I've worked has bought licenses both to MS office products and the google analogs. Dropox too. Enterprises buy things if a big name comes and markets it to them. If wind catches that everyone is also buying slack/google drive/whatever, the people in charge of buying enterprise software jump like lemmings. It's insane. Why does every job I join with more than 100 employees pay for three commercial cloud storage providers??? Software salespeople must be really good at their job these days.
Somebody always brings this point up so it might as well be me this time - but does advertising work at all, particularly online advertising?
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.
This is a great question and one which is quite difficult to answer.
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.
How do you know your ad even worked and you didn't just correlate performance of your ad campaign with some confounding factor(s) you will never be able to account for? you aren't testing for a mechanism here, just whether certain other metrics changed favorably over the campaign period and you make assumptions about the cause. you have no idea if the ad converted or not. how may times are you repeating your ab testing and with what sample size? are you running simulations too so you understand what a successful campaign would even look like based on your sample size? are you underpowered or underdetermined? probably only the most careful advertisers are thinking about these things, and I really wonder how significant the results look after doing these sorts of things.
its a simple question answered by sociologists not economists.
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.
We have been considering that possibility in the literature on the economics of advertising since the 1950’s or 1960’s, if not earlier. If you want a survey of this and other early ideas in the literature, see Kyle Bagwell’s contribution to the handbook of industrial organization, vol 3 (2007 or so).
I know this is a terrible imposition, but would you mind summarizing the conclusions of this comment and your previous comment with regard to the measurements done in literature?
This is hard to follow for those of us not in academia with access to journals. Or time to figure out how to hunt these sources down.
I feel like your comments contain pointers to deep quantitative insights.
It works. It works a lot better than you think. My biggest mistake was relying on organic traffic. Once I switched to paid ads business went 10x. Don’t assume everyone is like you, you are the 1% of the 1% of the 1%. Majority people follow ads that’s why it still exists.
Tracking users with online advertising is actually a good thing for economic efficiency. People tend to see more relevant products, and are able to allocate their resources to products that better meet their needs. The best ads aren't lying to people.
How is that true if the "best" ads are still paid for by companies who might not sell the best stuff?
Ads just try to drive up sales. This is something we don't need given current energy/climate issues.
There are better ways of bringing supply and demand together. Several decades ago we had yellow pages, and they worked fine. I'm sure in the internet age we can come up with an even better system that doesn't involve user tracking and/or distracting ads.
Many people don’t care about optimizing for buying the best of its kind, they are just interested in something interesting/useful. Ads relevant to interests is more efficient than ads not relevant to interests.
Only if your measure of efficiency is more things bought and sold. An efficient economy would do the same work with the fewest goods moved the shortest distance possible. What we have is the opposite of that. You go to the store today and there's a plastic can opener that will break in 2 years and came from parts sourced half a world away instead of the metal one your grandfather has been using for the past 75 years and was stamped in a building downtown using steel also smelted downtown with ore from within the region.
Mind elaborating what’s your general business and which ad platforms worked for you?
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…
This is true of regular advertising too: many people think they're immune to it. Corporations wouldn't spend billions if it wasn't effective.
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.
Corporations wouldn't spend billions on advertising/marketing for no returns. The problem is we have no idea what works. Every single experiment says it does _something_ and that's as far as we’ve gotten.
Corporations do make mistake, but probably not consistently spending billions of dollars for no gain. For instance, Coca Cola spends 4 billions per year [1]
When you "see it" and if you not going just by cheapest price, one of the things you might go by is "familiarity" (for products in the same space that are similarly priced). That "familiarity" which introduces a sense of "maybe it's good" because you've seen it mentioned many times is sometimes introduced by the advertising of the product you constantly see as you go around the Internet. All that happens prior to you actually buying the product.
The hacker news audience is definitely in a minority demographic of highly tech literate people. You may not always realize it, but just by being in this community and participating in our discussions you are miles ahead of many other people.
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.
I thought I was basically immune to ads. Well, other than the "customers were also interested in" ones on Amazon that come up specifically when I'm already looking for a particular type of product. That of course has the opportunity to be exceptionally well targeted.
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.
That's a fair point - but please note that the ads that have influenced your behavior have nothing to do with online advertising.
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.
Having worked in ads, yes. People click through and purchase, and in numbers sufficient to make the whole ordeal make sense. Granted I worked in ads at Amazon, on their platforms (Kindle and retail), and for items sold on Amazon, so they were winning no matter what happened. The sellers were doing good too though, with many repeat customers, and not enough inventory to satisfy them all.
What I've personally noticed is that for people like us ("special snowflakes"), the ads still work but at a subconscious level. When you are evaluating products in your "research" phase, you aren't doing a completely unbiased analysis. You have picked up brand names and products in the background as you browse the internet and when it comes to making that 50/50 call in the end, you will likely go with brands that you subconsciously trust. There's another way where ads work which I call "incessant bombarding". I would not have heard of Vrbo if they didn't have a massive campaign on Youtube where almost every video I watched for 3-4 months in 2022 had a Vrbo ad on it.
When you research a new product, on what platform is it the review hosted and do the reviewers make a living out of reviews?
I believe that that the line between advertising and reviews are increasingly blurred
“advertising” is not just the obvious obnoxious youtube preroll ads and flashy popups. Sponsored products, in content product placement, adjusted and paid ranking, it takes so many more forms.
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.
You may not be a special snowflake, but you're not exactly common either I'd wager.
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.
I worked at one of the worlds biggest travel search companies. The guy who was in charge of PPC for our region reckoned that if they turned off Google search ads then the company would lose 70% of revenue. It’s probably even worse now that Google has taken over the SERPs for anything travel related.
What I find most amusing is the amazon and brand ads I see on Facebook.
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.
Some products or services primarily exist through ads. We ran local events, and eventually advertised them. Once we ran ads, we had to upgrade our conference hotel reservations on average from 3 rooms to 12 or so.
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.
If it's a duopoly, why do websites like this one ask me to consent to twenty thousand different ad networks?
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.
The article is based on… nothing? And a bit of TikTok mania? I thought this was really low quality in essence - providing no real proof for any substantial change.
My assumption is that Google and Facebook are pushing stories about how they're in a precarious position and actually have a lot of threatening competition, some of it dangerous, foreign, and in need of investigation.
Absolutely, although the risk for them is retaliation, especially with the US deciding that it wants to be the chief geopolitical chaos generator in the world.
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.
I think we are seeing psychogical warfare occurring on any platform possible by many groups & governments. If we keep using technologies that refuse to adapt to strictly prevent this, rather than enable it, we are doomed. Metrics will always be gamed, and cat-and-mouse moderation makes this a losing game.
How would you even do that? Government controls mass communication by law, its privately operated with federal permission essentially (FCC). Government sets up the frameworks that media operates in. the best you an do is akin to zine printing with your little independent website. Once you go big you are subject to attack by the media if you go against elite business interests and vilification by the wider public who will never be exposed to nuance, then its over. The public narrative moves on to the next permitted discussion point and leaves you behind. I hate to be a cynic but this is what the history books suggest.
I think platforms and users need to be willing to sacrifice functions that can be abused. at least by default. Email and phone are both examples where enforcing allow-list communication at the protocol level could save them. Instead, both of these communication protocols are dying because they are now overflowing with scams and spams that are allowed to reach you instantly by default, with little to no distinction from legitimate communication. Something like Twitter probably should not exist in its current form.
That's power users probably using that, or people with fancy phones. You can tweak settings and use extentions to improve just about any user experience, but if the default experience is being abused and 90% of the userbase won't ever switch from that, it's a problem. As far as the insane regulatory mess I'm seeing spawn up, I think p2p systems are the way to tackle that.
> 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.
It's an article about potential competitive threats to Google-Meta, not a survey of the entire online advertising industry. The rise of potential competitors is not "nothing".
"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.
If I'm understanding baxtr's point, they're saying that the article is attempting to claim a trend without showing enough evidence to point to one. The fact that the competitors have gone from 0% to 25% within 5 years could be evidence that Google/Meta have growing threats, or it could be evidence that their competitors can't grab enough of the market to be sustainable so they die within 5 years, or that they're buying up all of the competition within 5 years of their launch. Google/Meta could have gone from 60% of the market to 75% of the market in the last five years.
So that's the case for the headline claim that they're "under attack" being linkbait. It isn't really affected by how you feel about the Economist's (or even less Der Spiegel's) brand.
The title is: “the ad duopoly is under attack”. The term duopoly describes how the market is split: two companies make up the biggest chunk. The article provides no evidence that the market structure has changed. See my comment.
A clickbait can be used by any publication. Apparently, including The Economist.
I’ve never really understood how such a large portion of google’s revenues are derived from search. I’ve rarely clicked on any ads when using google or any other search engine.
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.
I think most people click the ad more than you. A lot of companies advertise on their own keyword so I’ll click the ad then for example if I want to charge the company.
Neither have I clicked on any Google ads. I suppose the sheer volume of searches made on Google make up for a 0.000001% click rate (made up number, but point stands).
To quantify it a bit more, I think I only click on google search ads on the order of once per year. Contrast that with YouTube, where I probably watch 1000 ads per year on that platform.
No has mentioned Subprime Attention Crisis yet. It’s worth reading. The whole thing is a hyper-inflated, opaque house of cards, and its collapse will cause a lot of pain.
There is no ambiguity. This has happened to me with several accounts I've helped manage. When an account has a history of low CTR, the CPC increases. Starting a new campaign does not help; the CPC remains high until the CTR improves. And it's not cheap.
Is it that this is a contraction of the online advertising market, or just the fact that cheap money is gone (corporate paper is no longer free if you want it)?
Google Maps reduced free tiers and raised prices for access to its APIs few years ago - so maybe it is profitable on its own, at least core parts. Some people moved to use OSM but its quality varies between areas. There probably is no way to make StreetView profitable
>There probably is no way to make StreetView profitable
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.
YouTube and Facebook tune their recommendation algorithms for censorship and ad profit. This left a massive gap in their product, which was filled by tiktok. Capitalism is at work here
monopoly aside the bigger threat is prolonged stagflation in the economy which will result in dramatic consumer pullback which will kill the RoI of advertising. of course, this will hurt far more than Google and Meta
Facebook and social media companies rely on viral phenomena to sustain their monopoly. It will take 1 inciting event for them to fall into an irreversible death spiral. The instagram + whatsapp acquisition, feeling threatened by 100x smaller dev shops demonstrates that.
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.
What happens if Apple decides to or is forced to stop accepting a reported $18 billion a year to be the default search engine on iOS devices? Google will lose its most valuable customers.
Microsoft Office adoption in the enterprise dwarfs GSuite.
I bet it won't happen, and if happen it won't affect G a lot, at this point.
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.
Google is also a competitor in mobile which is a much bigger deal. Apple and Microsoft have been competitors and at the same time worked together since Microsoft wrote AppleSoft Basic in 1980. Microsoft was on stage with Jobs at the introduction of the Mac in 1984 and has consistently developed Office for the Mac since 1986 through all of the Macs transitions.
If Google didn’t need to pay, why are they paying $18 Billion a year?
I added the part “are forced to” because as much as I rail against the government getting involved in the free market when it comes to tech, it even makes me feel uneasy that the two major mobile platforms are unabashedly colluding and one is outright paying the other to funnel customers.
I don't think Android is a competitor to iOS. Most iOS users fanatically don't want other mobile OS. Don't think Ads can change this :D
Not sure about PC, but I bet availability of more apps and games can tip the scales. I consider MS more competition than Android. But that's just my perspective.
> it even makes me feel uneasy that the two major mobile platforms are unabashedly colluding and one is outright paying the other to funnel customers.
Indeed sounds creepy.
P.S. As other commenters mentioned -- there is Brave search, about which I was not aware, that it has their own Crawler. Apple could potentially switch to it(or buy it).
I doubt users of ARM based Macs are saying “I really want a laptop with a quarter of the battery life, gets hot enough to melt steel when I open three Chrome windows and sounds like a 747 and on top of that is slower”.
These days as long as consumers have Office, Adobe’s software and a good web browser, they don’t care.
Apple does have its own crawler - AppleBot. It uses its own “search engine” in parts of the interface.
If google stopped paying apple, then apple would probably make their own search engine honestly. They already have a tentacle wrapped around all sorts of industries you wouldn't have expected 15 years ago.
They wouldn't do it like that. They'd pull an App store or an Apple News. Block the world, whitelist publishers that jump through your hoops. Then it would be really easy to make a search engine if you are only crawling the top 100 sites or whatever that 99.999% of apple users are visiting anyhow. Most users would probably blind to the fact that this isn't close to actual search, and many more still wouldn't care. Some might actually like Apple removing the SEO spam that plagues google.
Or they could “pull an Apple podcast” - anyone can register their podcast for free, the actual MP3 are played from your server (unlike Google and Spotify) and there has been a documented API of its index that anyone freely use and that is used by many third party players on both iOS and Android. The API has been available since 2005.
What else busdines does Meta have beyond FB, Instagram, Whatsapp?
I guess they are somehow wurnelable to search market problems(including regulations), but that won't make them collapse, just less wealthy. And they can start monetizing WA and Insta more agresively.
Perhaps your concerns are one of reasons why they are investing so much in metaverse.
Google on other hand has bigger hold. They have Hosting business(which is not profitable currently, if that is truth), and YouTube. If something happens with search business, YouTube would feed Alphabet. Also money from play store and licensing fees from android vendors. I bet, Google's investment in Android was great move. It makes them more secure than Facebook.
Android makes very little money for Google. It came out in the Oracle lawsuit that Google had only made $27 billion in profit from Android from its inception through the trial.
Android was already dominant as far as market share. Also Google is non existent in the worlds largest mobile market - China. That’s Apple’s biggest market.
Apple has to be making more from Google on mobile from the money that Google pays Apple to be the default search engine (a reported $18 billion) a year than Google makes from Android.
About Apple. I guess most insecurity is from possibility of war in Taiwan. Inability to produce iPhones would struck hard. But beyond that, they have most loyal customers, who doesn't care abou their freedom to own device.
> 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.
Azure and Microsoft's hardware business would be nothing without the productivity suite. They leverage their existing business and personal relationships to sell those products.
Youtube wouldve never grown to that size without Googe's money. It wouldve inevitably shut down or made huge changes to their model.
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.
Goog and Facebook are still safe as hell. Even if you think Facebook is waning, is going tk be hard to dislodge WhatsApp and instagram and I don’t really think Facebook is going away.
Those companies aren't going away any time soon. Heck, IBM, Cisco, Hewlett Packard are all still around, and all still making profits. Doesn't mean they're desirable places to work at all compared to the olden days.
Apple is focused on consumer products and consumers can be fickle. While it won't be anytime soon, it's not impossible for Apple to someday lose the design mojo that makes their products popular. Steve Jobs and his RDF aren't there anymore and neither is Jony Ive.
Creating hardware at scale is hard. What company do you think will be able to duplicate Apple’s infrastructure, manufacturing, chip design, retail, etc?
Not to mention that even with “great design” any Android phone is still stuck with being Android and the lack of integration between software, hardware and ecosystem.
Foxconn is the most prominent contract manufacturer that Apple uses, Samsung makes iPhone screens, etc.; their infrastructure and manufacturing pipeline is the same as everyone else's. And suggesting that Apple's leadership in processor design can't be toppled is akin to saying that Intel's leadership in chip design can't be toppled back in the several decades when they were dominant.
It's the design and ecosystem that keeps consumers buying Apple product but what used to be seen as cool and hip can turn old-fashioned after a while; Sony's Walkman products used to be everywhere but where are they now?
You’re not going to get the same prices or priorities from Foxconn or TSMC with a less than 10 million device run rate that Apple gets by selling 300 million + devices. Besides Apple invest billions in TSMC and Foxconn and their other suppliers.
Do you remember that Apple became dominant in the iPod era by buying up all of the worlds supply of 2.5 inch hard drives and later flash chips?
Anyone else is going to struggle to get the prices or manufacturing time from suppliers to produce at scale.
Heck Sony is struggling to make even 21 million PS5 in a year. If Sony can’t manufacture at scale, which electronic manufacturer can?
It’s not just priced for design, it’s processor design, supply chain management, software, software/hardware integration etc.
FAANG is kind of a weird classification: 4 web companies, 2 of which are primarily ad companies... and then Apple, a devices company with real low-level chops.
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.
Did you look at the graphic? Google and Meta no longer have a stranglehold on the market, but the market is also bigger than ever. 70% of the ad market in 2022 is worth more than 90% was in 2012.
Microsoft is reliant on Azure for growth. Although cloud initiatives are designed to save money in the long run, in the short run they cost money. If we go into a strong recession than at the least I would expect Azure to do worse than projected.
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.
Finally, an archive.org URL at the top instead of archive.ph. Nice one.
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.
Correction: FAQ states client IP address (instead of Archive.today IP address) is sent but not in a X-Forwarded-For header.
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.
The entire advertising industry should burn down, as far as I'm concerned.
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?
>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.
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.
> people should not only create content for you, but they should pay you for the privilege of having you enjoy it?
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.
Funnily enough, only Google is currently offering paid subscriptions that delete ads. All of their competitors are all-in on advertising. Google, by contrast, has that attention-respecting and affordable YouTube program that makes YouTube completely ad-free.
> 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.
> 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 think there is a very simple solution. It requires no technology, but it does require changing the culture of billions of people. And that solution is to make search a paid-for utility. People pay for their ISP, Electricity and Phone, but expect search for free. The problem is this would be less profitable for Google. Because advertising me a $10,000 computer at $10/1000 impressions that I will buy "for my company" is more profitable than me paying $10 a month for search. Therefore the solution might be to make Google a public service, perhaps owned my multiple governments around the world. Call me a dreamer! Downside to that might be tighter surveillance though :-(
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).
Yeah, anything paid can have ads. Cable TV springs to mind. Magazines. Even streaming services are thinking about it.
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.
I'm not a Brave user, but from what I've read, users can choose to see ads and earn BAT, or they can fund their BAT wallet and opt out of ads altogether. And the ads don't seem to track the user or infringe on their privacy, so it's a substantial improvement over most adtech ads.
