The fact that the ad model has worked so well is always a nice reminder of how much of a bubble I live in. Personally I have never intentionally clicked on a Google/YouTube/etc ad. Never. I wonder if the general population has been getting more tech-savvy and skeptical of ads over time, but this change takes a very long time to play out. I sometimes see my dad clicking on ads because he doesn't understand the mechanics behind them, but he'll die pretty soon, and a younger more tech-savvy generation will replace him.
Idk, but the drop in revenue is due to companies (eg coca-cola), no longer wanting to pay alphabet to have their ads displayed on alphabet's platforms, not so much as a drop in the amount of people clicking ads. (I say no longer wanting, there's still companies wanting obviously, demand for a spot on the platform is just lower). And it's mostly just the effects of monetary tightening, and companies trying to prepare for tight times.
I think this gets really close to the actual story. A ton of the money in all faangs, is between the big companies. Google paying to be the default search engine. Microsoft doing the same. Everyone paying to be the top Google result. How many stupid large payments are between the big players directly?
My dad browses the web without adblocker on his smartphone and tablet and he never clears his cookies on these devices either. It should be easy to target him with advertisement, and yet he mentioned how irrelevant all the ads are and that he couldn't understand why companies kept paying for them. So they can't show him interesting ads despite observing his browsing activity for years.
I believe the only effective form of online advertisement is saturating search results with sponsored links, which is also kind of scummy because it hinges on making the ads look like regular search results.
I've noticed this mostly on Google properties, YouTube in particular. Most of my YouTube viewing is done on my TV through an Amazon FireTV device, so I see a lot of ads.
Now, Google knows me very well and should be able to target me with super effective and compelling advertisements. Yet, I get tons of ads for products that I would never, ever purchase. Things like women's beauty products (not a woman), alcohol (never drink), trucks (not interested). While things that I would be interested in are never seen; science fiction movies, technology news, etc.
I really don't see how Google (or any other ad company) are successful at all. I'm guessing they are just spewing ads to everyone on the planet and hoping that some stick. It feels like the "male enhancement" emails have the exact same process and probably work just as well.
haha my favorite one is retargeting on things i already bought. Like Columbia pants hounding me for weeks on every website after i already bought them.
I am tech savvy and run ad blockers on all my devices. However I consume Instagram through an app, and can’t be arsed setting up an ad blocker that would deal with that. I have bought a whole bunch of stuff through Instagram ads. I see too many ads on Instagram, but not enough to make me stop using it, and the ads are apparently relevant enough.
I assume this is a large reason why websites are so keen for you to use their apps.
I've been so much happier with YouTube when I removed the Android app and replaced it with an icon on my home screen that goes to https://m.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions in Firefox (with uBlock Origin). Works perfectly.
I do the same thing with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Reddit, which has the added advantage of trashing the experience a bit so I use them much less.
Instagram doesn’t really work outside of the app for me though
I run an ad blocker centrally on my router (pfSense with pfblockerng on an APU2.D4), which has an automatically updated list of all known ad servers worldwide, directing traffic for those into a DNS sink. No device configuration needed. Cannot be detected by websites.
Enough non-ad stuff breaks for me using a browser-based blocker that I’m not sure it’s worth the hassle for me, to block ads only on Instagram, especially as I do occasionally buy stuff
No, DNS sinkholes silently replace queries by a valid internal IP - to JavaScript, it looks like the resource is loading, but the webbrowser actually just displays whitespace instead of the app. Check for example this page [1] - if you run AdBlock, it will be detected. My page just looks void of Ads with pfblockerng [2].
It works inside Apps (Android etc.) and games or youtube videos, too. There are ways to get around this, like e.g. hardcoding IPs that are not known to serve Ads, but this needs additional work and 99% of ads don't do this. Benefits of router based DNS sinkholes:
- cannot be detected by websites with anti-adblock scripts
- no memory consumption on clients
- fewer web browser plug-ins needed
- lower device CPU utilization from AdGuard PC/Android apps, uBlock extensions etc.
- protects all network devices without requiring extra work
- browser, software and OS independent
- device and PC independent.
- implements redundancy should users remove/disable browser plug-ins
It's probably still somewhat detectable by noticing that all requests to ad domains are taking a long time to load while requests to non-ad domains are loading quickly. There will be false positives and false negatives, but I think it can be pretty accurate for people who have good network speed.
You're right, in this case the https will fail and this will indeed (mostly) slow down loading of Ads. I was wrong - although, personally, I do not observe slower loading times for pages, even though some ad-urls are failing. There are indeed some very rare pages (like zdf.de) that won't load at all because they have a very aggressive ad/surveillance checking.
Someone determined enough to serve you ads through a DNS sinkhole could do something like this: the page injects the ads using js and waits for a pingback that is triggered after the ad is loaded. On a timer, if the ping was not received, the page can inject another ad with hard-coded ip address, instead of DNS.
The reason why this does not happen is that companies understand that someone who hates ads so much they are willing to deploy an ad blocker, a DNS sinkhole, etc will probably not click on an ad either way.
Also, note that pfblocker-ng contains lists of millions of (automatically updated) IPs known to serve Ads (or malicious content), redirecting those, too. So unless you are willing to switch precious IPs for your hardcoded IP-Ad-Serving Servers, injection through Javascript won't work either.
The only actual direct consequence to clients I have noticed is that if you directly want to resolve Blocked-Ad-Links, it won't work - e.g., Google usually displays some "Ad"-Links first as results - clicking these won't get you anywhere. For my private LAN users, I think this is a good lecture to have - realizing that you're bullied into clicking valid-looking links that are instead Ads, from people that pay others to distract you from what you were actually looking for, or distort the natural ranking by paying for being ranked first.
I have a printout at our house for visitors who complain about this: They can manually set their DNS to 8.8.8.8 and my router won't interfere (it could, but I found spoofing direct requests to Google's DNS a bit too much).
They can but it’s pretty rare for them to do anything about it (and even then it’s normally just a full page div that’s easy to remove with dev tools).
I use nextdns (because I was too lazy to setup pi-hole), which has a simple ui for whitelisting domains as and when I can’t get around one (though usually it’s down to a tracking script breaking a site when it fails to load).
Instagram ads are uniquely irrelevant for me. I get some ad for wayfair advertising an excavator or a cedar lined sauna. I don't even think wayfair sells these things they are advertising towards me.
I don't think it's that simple of a hypothesis to verify, even inside Google. There are lots of reasons why CTR may be constant or go up despite fewer people converting through ads. Examples are bots, crawlers, more kids playing with iPads, or malicious website design, e.g, I have clicked on ads because I was tricked on it by the HTML/JS, but that doesn't help the advertiser because I'm not going to buy anything.
CTR only matters in the short-term. In the long-term, what matters is if the market of advertisers believes ads are profitable for them. If their CTR goes up 10x but they cannot verify conversions, they may eventually stop buying ads. That won't happen quickly, because attribution is so hard and you can never be sure where your conversions really come from, but the decline of ads may still happen over a longer time frame.
> Examples are bots, crawlers, more kids playing with iPads, or malicious website design, e.g, I have clicked on ads because I was tricked on it by the HTML/JS
Google considers all of those spam, and goes to great lengths to detect them, refund them, and remove them from the stats. Changes in spam-cleaned CTR, which is what advertisers see and what Google talks about for aggregate metrics, should not be explainable with any of those.
Also, even in the short term, CTR as a primary metric only matters if you're paying a fixed amount per impression on a fixed number of impressions - i.e., almost never, unless you're looking at a particular fixed subset of the network. If prices go down, e.g. because of adding enough new inventory to decreases auction pressure, or if you add new lower-CTR inventory in a CPC auction, then the total amount of ad spend can still go up as CTR goes down. Google-wide CTR has been dropping for years, mostly due to mix shifts. In particular, Youtube ads, which have lower CTR than search, have been growing a lot faster.
I identify with the "oh I never intentionally click on ads" segment, but I still click on ads mainly on mobile. That's because mobile developers are entirely user hostile like the early 2000s web developers who brought us popup ads. half the time I try and scroll some article on a mobile website these days, I get a banner ad that pops up which I accidentally misclick. I even misclick 'benign' banners on ios native apps all the time. If you were looking at clickthrough rates from, say, before smartphones to now, you might be observing an artificial bump just from people fat fingering an ad that's honestly tricky to avoid not tapping on by mistake.
About 2010 I published a stupid little Android app and added ads to it just because I wanted the experience. I was shocked to actually make $25 a week off of an app that I didn't think anybody was really using.
I put the ad someplace where people had to click on it on purpose, and I guess a lot did. That or Google did it for me
This. Gen Z's I know will buy random shit like shoes or phone cases off of Instagram
Me personally? Seeing something on Instagram is enough of a reason for me to never buy it. Same for influencers telling me to buy something, I'd rather they eat shit
But for ads that get interleaved with organic Amazon results, a lot of these are harder to spot (and also more innocuous imo)
I must also be in this bubble because this blows my mind. I have never bought anything from an ad. Maybe a few times a year on something with really good targeting like Instagram I’ll click on it if it’s interesting and I want to learn more, but I wouldn’t buy it. I just can’t imagine spending money that way, rather than “I need to solve x or do y so I need z so I will find it and buy it”.
How? Back before I used an adblocker it is not like most ads were anything I really wanted or in some cases even could buy. Very few ads are a direct call to sales and they were often irrelevant.
ah. Should sick my millennial wife on them. Her clothes have to be literally falling apart at the seams before she consents to considering new ones. Doesn't wear beauty products. Had a knitted case made for her phone 5 years ago. I did not seek out a person with these attributes but I'm pretty glad about it. The only downside is she isn't that tolerant of me buying tat either.
almost every website has a paywall now that detects adblockers and nags you. the number of distinct websites I regularly visit has dwindled drastically. If Im not on reddit/HN or reading documentation, I pretty much stick to the few sites I have subscriptions to.
I click on search ads sometimes, but it's only when it happens to be the same result that I'm already looking for and it saves me an extra second finding that same result below. This doesn't seem to be very valuable to the advertiser, but I'm sure preventing me from getting distracted or persuaded by another result in that next second has some value.
Entire model is hostile to those advertising. At least in these cases. You need to advertise your company name in searches so that your competitors advertising on your name don't beat you.
This can only last as long as there is competitors willing to pay for those adds. Which might be getting tighter.
YouTube ads have gotten vey scummy too. A lot of get rich or get fit ads though I just listen to music or lectures there. And it seems common for others and now people have learned to avoid YouTube ads.
This is usually a sign of advertiser flight. Usually big reputable brands are easily the top bidders getting their ads shown, and in the absence of those, the much lower bidding scams can get through.
It's not clicking. It's that it may have popped up somewhere in your awareness, the industry calls this an impression. That's monetized along with that space on the sides and within articles and content. It's like real estate that this industry trades at low latency.
If I don’t like a company but have to visit their site, I’ll click on their Google ad that often appears and cost them the $1. Particularly if I’m using my work machine
Are people getting used to native advertising though? It seems prolific to me but I still just hear people brag about how advertising doesn't affect them because they don't click on things. People are used to basic advertising (billboards, commercials, and web page images) but I don't think people are used to other types of advertising. I also don't think people understand how all the basic advertising works. For example, many car commercials aren't always trying to get you to buy a car but rather build brand prestige. These types of ads have existed for quite a long time but I don't think people acclimated to them because they still misunderstand how ads work (or rather the diversity in purposes of ads).
Yes, but CTR and conversion metrics still matter to ad buyers. It's much more difficult to measure the influence on my subconscious and attribute that.
I think that there is some weird effect in the ad business where this isn't the case. Look at sponsorships or untargeted ads; Red Bull may sponsor someone jumping out of a balloon at the edge of space, but it's probably hard to convert that investment to a number of extra cans of energy drink sold. I see a lot of video ads like that in the same way. Everyone watching Overwatch League is just there idling for in-game rewards for watch time and probably have no idea who the sponsors are. And, all these children inflating YouTube view counts because the thumbnail has a weird face they can't resist clicking, aren't buying razor blade subscriptions or workstation monitoring systems that the video sponsors are advertising. (Hi Linus.)
I could never figure out if advertisers don't know what's going on, or they merely don't want to know. I get the feeling that companies value brand perception so heavily they don't know they're getting ripped off by the distribution networks. Or, individual ad executives just want people to talk about their ad at the water cooler, so don't purchase ads to most efficiently use their employer's marketing budget, but rather maximize impressions to inflate their personal brand. Like I said, I don't know; maybe everyone knows about all of these things and they think untracked ad impressions are worth what they're paying. It's a mystery to me, but I'm somewhat surprised the traditional ad industry is alive and well.
(The really insidious new form of advertising are paid endorsements and rigged reviews. If you search for "best X 2023", 100% of the results are ads presented as research. Truly evil and ruined ... everything.)
What you're missing is the effect of brand visibility on people's internal thought processes. When you see something regularly, you internally gain a sense of permanence about the item as if it's a naturally-occurring part of the environment. This creates a floor for the brand's perception. It may not be a "I'll go out and buy it now" floor or even an "I'll choose that brand when a purchase decision is made" floor, but it will certainly be "I've heard of that brand" and possibly even "that brand is probably the market leader." For products which are undifferentiated, or for which buyers lack deep insight, that can be a strong advantage.
It's also not an entirely logic-free assumption to make. If a brand can afford prominent and consistent advertising over a multi-year period then you can reasonably assume that it's making enough money to sustain its existence. That makes a costly, long-running ad campaign a decent proxy signal for market strength and/or social proof. Is it 100% accurate? Definitely not, but none of this behavior by the consumer or the advertiser is logic-free.
There’s a couple of different reasons that this happens.
- Things like Red Bull events are for general awareness and can provide a source of content that is used on other platforms. This is similar to TV or billboard advertising where you can’t measure direct impact but it’s getting eyes on your brand. There’s also the element of “we’re a big important company and you can tell because we wasted all of this money”
- In some cases brands buy a package of ad space from an agency and don’t pick where it shows up - the agency is supposed to fill ad space in front of the desired audience but can’t find enough inventory. Rather than give the money back and have a smaller budget to renew next quarter they dump it in lower quality spots.
- Some advertising is also defensive in that you’re denying space that your competitors can buy
- Occasionally brands will get a discount for a larger ad buy knowing that the ads will show up in lower performing locations - but they still got the bulk discount
- In some cases people just screw up and don’t manage budgeting, retargeting, frequency, or other limits so the automated systems find somewhere/anywhere to show the ad since the platform is guaranteeing some amount of visibility
- Content placement is definitely on the shittier end of ad quality but it can be much cheaper or may be included as part of an ad package for a specific site or publisher
Generally advertising seems to be a net negative and the increase in ad space drives down costs so ad platforms need more ad buys and more advertisers to fill the ever-growing inventory but how else are you going to tell people about your product at scale?
I work in adtech, and built a product tried to measure the impact of advertising, that Google/Facebook/Twitter all immediately copied. So going to answer from my experience.
> I could never figure out if advertisers don't know what's going on
This is largely not true. The big advertisers all have a pretty good idea of which spends were accomplishing their goals better than others. It's the goals that might not be obvious from the outside; everyone always assumes click-through or call-to-actions but for the big spenders that tends to be pretty low on the priorities list.
> , or they merely don't want to know.
This is also true. So while everyone knows what the underperforming ad products are, no advertising executive wants to be the one sticking their neck out doing the work proving advertising _doesn't_ work. That's their livelihood, once you question the necessity of an established market leader, you're more likely to invite question the necessity of you instead. Is it "Google advertising doesn't work" or "you don't know how to make Google advertising work"?
> I get the feeling that companies value brand perception so heavily they don't know they're getting ripped off by the distribution networks.
When we asked major advertisers and agencies what their top priorities were: all of them put brand safety at the top of the list. Above reach, above cost efficiency, above click through, above conversions. Brand perception is a subcomponent of brand safety. It takes years to build up good brand perception and very few mistakes to undo that progress.
> Or, individual ad executives just want people to talk about their ad at the water cooler, so don't purchase ads to most efficiently use their employer's marketing budget, but rather maximize impressions to inflate their personal brand.
Most ad executives never hear much about their ad campaigns. But if they do at the water cooler in a positive light, you've probably made their whole career.
> Like I said, I don't know; maybe everyone knows about all of these things and they think untracked ad impressions are worth what they're paying. It's a mystery to me, but I'm somewhat surprised the traditional ad industry is alive and well.
Tracked ad impressions are relatively a very new thing for this very old industry. Generally at the scale advertising works at, they don't need full comprehensive impression tracking to know if they're accomplishing their generally unambitious goals, it's easy enough to get a representative sample and extrapolate with statistics.
If you're trying to sell something, it's way easier just tracking how many sales you got than trying to divine how impressions and click through rates could impact sales. There's a bunch of A/B testing going on with how campaign spends are broken out. Different products or regions can be intentionally left unadvertised to use as control to measure effectiveness.
Basically there's a lot of data (and very few it from the adtech platforms themselves, since they had to know this before the era of digital advertising) that supports advertising as a whole works really damn well, and most of the work is just determining what advertising strategies are working better than others.
Plus, the data from Google/Facebook is largely junk anyway (same as everyone else to be fair). Just check out your advertising profile on those respective sites. You'll probably get a big laugh on the accuracy of your interests.
I'm clicking somewhat often on youtube ads, because there's no way to escape them without the content blocker, so you have to watch the ad anyway. So if I have to wait anyway until the ad ends, I just waste aditional click. But I never buy anything nor have any interest in the advertised product. I do this mainly for 2 reasons:
- waste the budget of annoying/scam ads in hope that in the future I'll see less of those
Do realize that unless the content creator is in the YouTube Partner Program, clicking on the ad does not support them at all, you only waste your time making Google more money.
Ads are becoming way more complex entities than a banner/image that you click on. Companies are recognizing this and investing accordingly - think of influencer sponsorships, video inserts, in-game tokens, campaign based mobile apps. There are constantly more pipes to market through, there is restructuring the same way billboard/print advertising started to drop in the 2000s.
>Personally I have never intentionally clicked on a
>Google/YouTube/etc ad. Never.
You may not have clicked on a YouTube ad, but you still needed to _watch_ some or part of that ad. Maybe you weren't influenced, but you were at least exposed to whatever the advertiser was selling.
In other news Google's search continues to get worse at finding what you want. Randomly dropping words from your query, even when you quote them and + and allintext, even when they claim they haven't ctrl+f shows the word ain't in the result.
They just want to get the easy money of you clicking the ad for $someco that they put in before the "i'm feeling lucky" spot where $someco should be.
Want to find something you know you read a couple of months ago and recall a lot of details about? Good luck. Not sure what the best search engine is for that but it seems it is no longer google.
Are these twin declines, service quality and revenue somehow causally related? If so in which direction?
I'm trying to pay for Kagi search to see if it's better. Not sure if it is, but at least it's not worse. In my tests they seem to get most of the results from Google, but just jumble them about a bit. They do have a "programming" mode though, which is useful.
If nothing else, it's refreshing to pay for search, to support non-ad-driven revenue models for the most important feature of the web.
Interesting, I specifically do that in order to get a general feeling of what people think of a topic.
Reddit is moderated and curated. Makes sense that it’s often more useful than say, SEO spam. However please note that there’s a ton of advertising hidden in sheep’s skin.
One caveat is that you have to pay attention on which subreddit you are to be sure you get a real variety of opinion and are just not in an echo chamber with bot parroting the current "wisdom" of that sub to farm karma. I've seen a lot of small subreddits make full 180 regarding a product or practice after a few months / years when the hype is gone.
Thanks, yeah I don't necessarily take it as "the word", but honestly, it's good to as you said, "gauge things", and there's a lot of human experience documented on Reddit ha
Honestly it should be viewed as a utility at this point rather than a private company with too many rights. It's critical to find businesses, medical information, hell, you can say democracy itself can be affected by what happens in search results.
Google is treading a fine line. I imagine the smart people in the room know their days of infinite monopoly are numbered.
Earlier today I was watching a legaleagle video about Alex Jones' argument that he has to keep pitching dietary supplements to pay his civil debts. YouTube interrupted this video to play an ad for... dietary supplements.
They treat those customers worse than Android customers. At least Android has human customer service.
If you self-served your way into those advertising/workspace/GCP and didn't sign a paper contract guaranteeing a human client executive and support, support is gonna be zilch.
yup. People make it sound like it's impossible to predict the market. On the other hand, what is the logic in overhiring - we expect search revenue (bulk of the revenue) to spike in the next few years, so we will hire 50,000 more engineers to... do what? build more search that's already built? and if things don't work out, we'll just get rid of them?
They didn’t? Metas revenue was down year over year for the latest quarter, whereas googles grew. Net income for the same quarter was down 55% for meta, as compared to down 34% for google (the headline of the featured article you are commenting on).
FB works when you don't have a strong need to target specific keywords. If you do, there is really no substitute no matter how ugly the UI (maybe that's why it's ugly, too)
Meta started getting beat up about a quarter before Alphabet. They were 6 months ahead on a hiring freeze, and 3 months ahead on layoffs. They've been thinking about this a lot longer, and markets respond to if you beat the number the market was expecting, not if you beat internal or external forecasts.
Meta genuinely has a good ad product. It's not hard to setup a campaign that very cost effectively hits an otherwise difficult to target audience that actually has potential for a conversion. It's very easy for Facebook ads to mix media and textual information because it's well integrated with their products that display the same thing.
Google's ads are either contextual to the query, thus, predatory (to both the client and the user) since it's trying to pass off marketing as information, and companies practically have to defensively advertise targeting their own keywords so they outbid competitors doing the same. Or they're video/display ads which are pretty much garbage in their conversion rates because they tend to be interruptive to the product experience and creatively restrictive since they can't mix images, videos, and text in the same ad container. It's also difficult to set up a successful campaign and it's very easy getting burned with expensive mistakes. Nevermind the high amount of fraud in their network and very poor brand safety (ad sharing a context with undesirable content). You can only burn advertisers so many times with poor returns before they start to drastically cut their spend.
This is possibly an existential moment for many of us, a feeling we have not had in a long while; Google, since probably 2007-ish has been 'unnassailable'. This could be shift in market conditions and internal cultural conditions, combined with exernal threats like ChatGPT ... I suggest they will linger on a very long while, but we could be in a 'new era' wherein there can be legit competition on a number of surrounding things because they just are not good enough anymore to do it all.
I wonder when we'll start holding Google response for the ads they serve. Lately there were ads for fake Blender and Rufus which installed some malware.
What is the chance that adtech is all a house of cards? Meaning that all of the "precision targeting" for segmenting married men over 30 who speak German and English while having house cats doesn't work at all? For a while, I was getting ads on Instagram in Spanish, and I don't speak Spanish.
If someone clicks on an ad, don’t you think it is because it resonated with them?
Even from first principles, it stands to reason that the more precisely you can craft a message (e.g. an ad) for your audience, the higher the chances that it would resonate, and be something you can monetize.
That does indeed stand to reason. But GP got an advert in a language they didn't speak, so they are arguing that even if great targeting would improve ad conversion/monetization, after the > 1 decade of this being worked on, targeting doesn't really work.
And I tend to agree, I am in the minority who always clicks "accept all cookies", primarily because if I have to consume ads then they might as well be relevant to me. But they are very often not relevant at all, e.g. for cars (I live in a city with great public transport and have no desire to drive) etc.
Maybe. Or maybe there's an uncanny valley effect where overly personal ads seem intrusive, and something that plainly describes the product will appeal more. Even if there is an improvement, is it a big enough improvement to be worth paying for?
Well it’s possible! Solid user traffic numbers are hard to come by these days, but the anecdotes about search result pages full of trash keep piling up. I doubt my usage has changed much, but I’m ripe for poaching over to a better product. Google is in danger of being disrupted.
I've been using kagi a paid search service. It's good, better than ddg. It doesn't have ads and the results are better for my location, I don't have to add "NZ" to every query to get the NZ sites at the top, which I do with Google, even though it knows my location.
There's also a shift away from products to services, but I'm not sure how different those ads yield for Google. I assume ecommerce does better because it's easier to track conversions.
Inflation also. If the ones buying adds have not managed to fully transfer their input cost increases to output price. They have to cut that money from somewhere. And adds are pretty reasonable place as it is not mandatory to function in short term.
And elsewhere, you have VC driven companies who have tougher situation for getting money to burn on adds for growth.
