My feeling throughout reading the article is best summed up as "Y U mad bro?"
He harps on an "anti-woke" razor company that tries to market themselves as an alternative to Gillette and Harry's — the big point is "they spend 800k/month on marketing, so it drives up the cost of the razors". Does he know how much Gillette spends (saved you a search: 600M/year)? How do they fund that I wonder?
He cites a study that says contextual ads and targeted ads perform at about the same efficiency. Why is this remotely interesting? Ads are a liquid market. If one channel was much better than another, it would be arbitraged away.
His stated thesis is this:
> Targeted advertising is incredibly expensive, and incredibly lucrative – for the ad-tech platforms that sit between creative workers and media companies on one side, and audiences on the other
It couldn't be more wrong. Ads are incredibly cheap. It's why you see so many of them. It's why little companies targeting narrow niches can afford to buy them.
You’ve clearly never worked in direct response marketing. The cost of customer acquisition vs lifetime value of a customer is terrible compared to traditional retail. In 2007, you could print money. In 2023, you’re most likely barely breaking even buying digital ads. The OPs thesis is quite correct. I’ve been in the space for 14 years and have tens of millions, if not hundreds, in DR adspend across multiple platforms / industries.
I've been in the direct response industry as well for a while and kind of at a loss for what to do.
Being a small time app developer and seller of random things. I can't afford these new CPMs, $15 - $50 is a LONG shot compared to 2019 and paying $3-5 CPM.
Mind you I've spent close to $400k between Fb/Snapchat/Tiktok.
What do I do now that these companies have shut me out? Anything I build I can't see a path forward on acquiring customers without say buying email lists or hitting SMS lists. I feel very unfairly screwed.
I think direct advertising for your products is a suckers game. You have to compete against everyone for ad spots, and there's always another company that has better margins who will outbid you.
I've had success with two strategies:
1) Maintaining a semi-popular Open Source project adjacent to my app. The website of the open source project mentions my paid app. It's free advertising that noone can outbid.
2) Word-of-mouth: My app is recommended by users to others. It's also free advertising, you just need to make a nice product...
I don’t think this is a case of “nearly perfect competition driving prices down so nobody makes a profit” (e.g., you working for a social media company trying to argue how perfect competition this is ;-) ) - BUT potentially rather a case of “monopoly power of social media charging so much for customer acquisition that it drives profits to zero”; so rather a shift in profit from high prices from the manufacturers pocket to Zuck et als pockets…
This is hard core wrong. Only the preferred buyers have access to the product that everyone wants to buy. They negotiate above and beyond the auction system and the platform obfuscates that by making it more difficult for the users who are not preferred and must participate and in the "free market" to tell why their ads perform poorly.
Spoiler alert: it's because they are being sold garbage impressions while being shown "analytics" that make the lay person believe it's their content, or ad, or targeting, or whatever... and not the fact that the platform just pooled all the valuable impressions outside the auction and gave them to a preferred customer who never touched the auction system to begin with.
If that's true, that demonstrates the sellers aren't exercising monopoly power to set prices artificially high. A preferred buyer means someone able to negotiate.
With only one seller ;-) That’s usually kind of what you call a monopoly. A bit like just a single entity selling oil and then arguing “oh this is a free market because we auction of the oil…”
Alphabet, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu, Bytedance, Yandex each have more than 1% of digital ad spend marketshare, and none of them have 50% of total marketshare. They compete in many areas too.
I think there are credible Indian competitors growing too.
I was relating an example from oil oligopolies with the Ads market.
Social media making $$$ whereas the companies buying Ads barely breaking even is not equal to an “open efficient and free market” as the initial thread suggested.
There can exist different market dynamics in different sectors?
I'm not really sure why your trying to compare oil & gas with digital ads, it doesn't make any sense. You can't extrapolate conclusions based on the market dynamics of one to the other.
I don’t agree with how you measure market share in order to try and argue that we do not see an abuse in negotiation power by Meta et al.
Here is another oil&gas comparison: OPEC countries aren’t distorting the market in their favor, because oil is just a fraction of the total energy market (e.g., nuclear, wind, solar,…)
I suspect targeted ads are a part of the phenomenon the article is talking about.
Since targeted ads got so cheap, tiny little businesses could buy super targeted social media ads for less money than they could selling their products wholesale at a store. Net result is that they can flood social media with targeted ads for some geoarbitraged thing that tiny startup found on AliExpress decided to sell DTC, and end run around consumer wholesaling and all rigamarole involved there.
The barrier to entry for that is super low. All you really need to be good at then is matchmaking some real niche product you found on Alibaba to a real niche consumer need.
Net result: lower prices, greater net profit for the company, tons of new entries to the game of social media enabled DTC.
> flood social media with targeted ads for some geoarbitraged thing that tiny startup found on AliExpress decided to sell DTC
This is a gem of a phrase. I'm going to use 'geoarbitrage' from now on.
I live in a place full of this sort of nonsense, such as resold Clevo ODM notebooks, overly-cheap 'desktop projectors', overly-cheap TVs, water purifiers, and even air-conditioners. Oh, and the 'advertisers' are typically skimpily-dressed young women barely in university.
I simply refuse to buy anything that isn't European, Korean, Taiwanese, or Japanese for home appliances and electronics.
Brands like Miele, Bosch, Samsung, LG, Sony, Brother, Nikon, Philips, Smeg, Liebherr... They're usually up to 2-3x as expensive as the equivalent on AliExpress, but the quality and service is unbeatable.
Funny, Kitchenaid and Wolf/Subzero are US made and most products I have owned from either are far superior to Japanese/Korean. For instance, my Samsun refrigerator is three years old now and has a poorly engineered ice maker that has been repaired twice, the light for freezer is now working intermittently, and the digital inverter with its obnoxious 10 year warranty sticker on the front of fridge is now is noisier than when it was brought into the house. I continue to use a kitchenaid dishwasher and microwave, 16 and 10 years old respectively, which still look and run amazing.
I never said anything at all about American brands; I simply don't get them where I live much (if at all). My LG refrigerator and dishwashers, Sharp microwave, and LG monitors + TV have all been working fairly well for several years.
That being said, personally dislike American brands but only because they usually advertise and use USC units, which make them hard to wrangle in a purely SI country.
I agree with the whole list except Samsung for appliances, I’ve had terrible experiences with them. I have a guy coming in for the 3rd time to fix my dishwasher - the first time he came in he found out the wrong chip was installed for this model
My mom has an old-ass IFB dishwasher (Indian brand) that has outlived two of my Bosch dishwashers (currently using a Miele). And it was half the price!
Your argument breaks down as soon as there are economies of scale. Gillette can probably buy the same quality as Jeremy's at a better price, because they order larger bulk shipments. That means the new niche DTC companies will most likely be a worse value to consumers than the established big brands.
Also, the article links to a study which found DTC to be 10% more expensive than traditional retail.
As someone that has not changed razor blades in 5ish years, I'll warn that you probably can't generalize how well a razor will work for all skin and hair types. I'm thankful that I don't have issues with mine, but I also don't recommend others change.
Granted, I haven't looked at prices in a long time. I am mostly assuming not insane costs.
> Granted, I haven't looked at prices in a long time. I am mostly assuming not insane costs
I'm not sure what "insane" would mean in this contect, but replacement blades for the no-name Gillette clone I bought are half the price of original Gillette ones.
My week using the former showed that, for me at least, the performance of the latter really doesn't justify its price. YMMV.
Lol I made absolutely no argument about product quality. All I point out is the underlying reason for a glut in companies selling stuff through social media advertising.
I don't think Gillette is worried about market loss to Jeremy's razors. the question is if Jeremy's is a viable business with $800k/month in ad spend, and if they're acquiring customers faster than they're losing them.
Before jeremy's there were other similar businesses with the same business model that weren't anti woke but advertised heavily online - dollar shave club, harry's, etc. They both have the same business model as Jeremy's. Dollar shave club was acquired by Unilever for $1 Billion and Harry's was acquired by Schick for $1.37 Billion. After being acquired both companies seem to have stopped advertising online anywhere near as heavily as they did before. I think Harry's started as a sort of charity buy one give one sort of company so it also had a social aspect to its promotion.
It's clearly a space where there's room for competition and the possibility of getting acquired by a giant company who doesn't want to compete with you. If you have a built in audience of "anti woke" who will buy whatever dailywire sells them, you short circuit a lot of your risk and can focus on growth. The targeted ads at people more likely to be interested is just that, looking for growth. It doesn't mean its a bad business.
I consider this phenomenon part of what I like to call the "Amazon syndrome", even though Amazon is far from being the only culprit. As China started flooding the rest of the world with cheap but decent products mass-produced in a random factory in Shenzhen, people turned away from brands they used to trust and towards no-name options from the likes of "Kxbnheb" or "Ypknwoj" in order to save a buck. Eventually the big brands themselves had to lower the quality of their products to be able to compete with the generic products, which benefit greatly from economies of scale by virtue of being manufactured by multiple companies in massive quantities.
Meanwhile, targeted ads deployed at a large scale with flexible pricing models made it possible for not-so-reputable outfits to get their name in front of millions of people's eyes. While only huge companies with a good track record could get past the ad vetting team of a newspaper or TV channel, anybody and their dog can start a Facebook ad campaign for almost no money and then keep paying as the number of impressions scales up. If on one hand this democratized prestigious ad spots that used to be available exclusively to brands everyone already knows, on the other hand it also allowed random dropshipper nobodies to establish a presence as a "niche shop" of some sort and then end up selling you rebranded Chinese no-name products you might as well have bought directly from AliExpress for half the price with free shipping (or straight up scamming you).
As much as the HN bubble likes to see a level playing field where all companies are treated equally, I think it's good to have gatekeepers in the advertising industry. But, I get it, the tech giants are all about quantity-over-quality and Facebook's ad revenue would drop to basically nothing (by their standards) if they started vetting each ad campaign manually, so here we are.
It’s not true that established brands made cheaper products to compete. Their prices remained the same or got higher, but quality still suffered. It’s just greed, no complex reasoning required. I recently bought a gym bag from Nike. Feels super cheap, like I could have gotten it from Aliexpress. The zippers keep locking into the fabric. Feels completely disposable.
Bought a pair of running shoes from Skechers early last year, had to throw away this year because the soles got worn out and I kept getting injured on one foot because I was stepping unevenly.
I bought Skechers because I had once had a pair of sneakers that lasted me the entire 5y of college. No such luck now.
I see what you are seeing. I recently replaced some major appliances that wore out after 25+ years. Sales people were quite up front about the replacements from the same name brand now being designed to fail after 5 to 7 years: Cheaper motors, flimsier construction, and especially electronics. I could pay 3x for a higher-end brand but there is no assurance that it would buy a more reliable product.
Skechers is building a sprawling set of office buildings in the expensive town of Manhattan Beach, CA. That money has to come from somewhere.
Skechers was founded in Manhattan Beach. They’ve grown their footprint. MB is a very expensive city for housing but the commercial buildings on PCH aren’t outrageously priced. Sure, more expensive than Lawndale or Gardena, but cheaper than lots of DTLA.
Appliances are a tough comparison. Yes, they will "fail" faster. However, material and energy costs means you are still way ahead in many cases. Older appliances were grossly wasteful in both, by modern standards.
And shoes are an odd one. They have never lasted a long time. Ever. Only shoes that will last, are the ones you don't use often. You can kind of make this work with a rotation of shoes. Having recovery between wearing helps. They are still very much a consumable.
I don't follow. If I have to replace a dishwasher, refrigerator, or washer/dryer every five years as opposed to every twenty, that's a lot of stuff going to a landfill. My old appliances didn't break the energy bank. What I'm hearing and reading is that manufacturers don't want things to last and are designing motors, pumps, and circuit boards with cheaper materials and less metal so they will conk out resulting in either expensive service calls or outright new purchases.
Shoes: I can't tell which brands are which anymore and it certainly looks like they're all made in one factory. I can't find a pair of comfortable day-to-day walking shoes. I have to make the best of what's available which means dealing with the discomfort and pain through trial and error.
You don't have to landfill it every five years, so that is a bit of a straw man. Even with it, though, it takes several modern dish washers to be the same raw material as older ones.
For shoes, I don't know what to tell you. They have always been consumable. And often uncomfortable. Such that I honestly think the catch is we get more sensitive as we get older. Certainly moving more weight.
I can't see how a modern dishwasher has multiple factors less material than the older ones. I get the impression that by cutting materials by 10-20%, the makers get 4x lower lifespan which helps them.
Shoes: A month ago I tried on ten pairs of shoes by six or so brands and felt little difference among them. The only difference was price: ~$60 low end, $130 high end. And these were nothing fancy, just shoes intended for daily use by non-athletes. None were good but I had to pick since my current pair were in tatters. I went with the $60 pair and am futzing with different insoles to get something usable. Maybe there is a magic $300 pair that will do the job.
I'd forego the $300 ones. But I'd also recommend 3 pairs of $60ish shoes. Wear a different one each day. And make sure to get at least 4 miles of walking in. Anything less and it likely isn't the shoes making you uncomfortable.
I have to walk a lot at work. Don't know about 4 miles but I am not sitting at a desk. Rockports used to make great shoes that fit without break-in, were suitable for daily use and in the workplace, and that didn't break the bank. Can't find anything in that style anymore so I have to go with so-called athletic shoes that come in a black finish.
I still have some old rockports. I do remember liking them. I don't remember any being particularly good at heavy use. Quite the contrary, last I tried them on, they were rather bad. Reminds me of trying converse shoes. Memory and age conspire to make things way different.
Four miles is clearly me making up a rough number. My assertion is more that many of us do not have great walking posture or ergonomics. Note I am not saying it is our fault, per se. Just that walking and techniques that lead to long term comfort are surprisingly ignored by most of us. And this has far more impact on things than your shoes will.
Related questions, can you still squat with flat feet? Do you keep your back straight when picking up things? Not just lifting heavy things. When picking a dropped pen off the floor, what do you do?
And obviously, it could very well be in your specific case it is the quality of shoe. I've seen a surprising number of folks where it just isn't. :(
> Related questions, can you still squat with flat feet? Do you keep your back straight when picking up things? Not just lifting heavy things. When picking a dropped pen off the floor, what do you do?
The bad experience with shoes has remained constant the past 10+ years through periods of good conditioning and not so good conditioning. I think my ergonomics are pretty good adjusting for age.
Unfortunately I can't go back and remeasure material and construction quality from years gone by. My perception is that the shoe uppers are now all stiffer and less flexible than years gone by and the the sole materials are hard and have no give. I've gone to multiple shoe stores looking but have come up empty.
Thanks. Didn't know about them. They have some sneakers that look like they could pass in the work environment. Intrigued by the grey soles on some of them. Remind me of the last pair of comfortable shoes I had (circa 1998) which had similar flubbery gray stuff on the sole. Put a spring in my step that I remember fondly.
Well-made leather shoes and boots can be repaired though. With regular oil/polish and a new sole on every couple of years you can keep a good pair for decades.
I walk, a lot. I've been extremely happy with shoes made by Camper - especially their higher end lines - I have several of their Pelotas (not the lite version) with the oldest nearly 20 years old... and they are still all in great shape. I'd also recommend their Beetle, Peu, Peu Stadium, Bill and Atom lines. They have a wide range of styles and different colors and other options introduced seasonally. Unless you are an investment banker on Wall Street, they have shoes that will work in most office environments and also for casual wear. I do find that their leather lines do last much longer than the other materials, and they are priced accordingly, ranging $120-280+. If that seems like a lot, just wait for their quarterly sales of 30-40% (sometimes as much as 50%) off for the best deals.
Ish. The new sole will require a surprising amount of glue, for one. For two, I maintain that this is only true for non daily shoes. I have yet to see shoes worn daily that stand up to this standard.
The most important thing with shoe longevity is to not wear the same pair every day. Buy two and switch between them - or better yet, get three pairs - and rotate. Give them some time to rest, air out, dry out, etc. between wearings. They will last longer and your feet will thank you.
There's pressure on both sides (competition to lower prices vs take profits from the reputation), but I agree with your take.
Primarily, there has been an extraction of excess profit on consumer goods rather than investment in more efficient production or better products. I have suspicions that this is because of the relative ease of growing a profitable (but easily copied) manufacturing business out of China over the last 20 years, but it really doesn't matter why.
The other example of this is Oil Majors who have very little incentive to invest in new oil production or refining (even though it may be needed for the next decade), and instead take all excess profits to pay out as stock buybacks or dividends. They are in the profit taking stage of the business not the growth and investment stage.
As a "non-runner" who just needs running shoes for the gym and walking around, I found great luck at Thrift Stores. What I found us a marathoner will buy a pair of Nike's and run that 600-700km until they are "spent" and give them to Goodwill. While they aren't good for running anymore, I found most to have plenty of sole left for 6-7 months of walking and going to the gym, all for around $10.
This is probably not the best for my feet, but when I bust a hole where my big toe goes I feel less bad because I spent $10 and not $100.
Which shoes do you use? I use ASICS GT-2000s and they usually last 350km to 400km, or a year, in my case (a couple 5k to 8k runs per week). I guess different styles of running could also cause different amounts of wear and tear.
I’ve got a take: I think the current gap in the market for a lot of product areas is “more expensive but high quality.”
I desperately want to spend more money on a product that will stand the test of time but it’s so hard to find them at times.
Sure there will always be a majority of shoppers who want the cheapest thing as fast as they can get it and they won’t mind if they have to buy 3 of them every year, but I think the market is going to start supporting a more artisanal approach for consumer goods as the pendulum swings the other way over the next decade (although current global finance which I won’t pretend to understand might make this a little trickier…)
“ I think the current gap in the market for a lot of product areas is “more expensive but high quality”
Often those products do exist, but you need to become an “expert in X” to find them.
Oh… you want to buy a high quality leather [whatever], better start learning about leather grades, leather tanneries, stitching thread, stitching types… so it doesn’t blow out in a year.
Except we can’t all become experts in all products, and many companies are perfectly happy to build a brand on quality and then slowly erode that quality to increase margins.
Oh, with leather I consider it great luck that I started learning from someone that have a lot of years of experience. I'm an amateur and sew only for myself and family/friends.
Want really good and consistent quality vegetable tanned leather made in Poland? Then she said that there is basically one place (they produce it from over 110 years, and they are quite low in Google searches). Want chrome tanned leather with a lot of colors that are consistent and ALWAYS the same as on sampler? Also only one place.
I was later learning normal sewing with her mother. When asked about good quality cotton (or other natural) materials in small quantities she basically say: "well, it will be quite hard and when I want really good materials I order them straight from Italy, available only in wholesale quantities from few manufacturers that I veted over last 40 years". She later said that in textile industry you can't really trust anybody, because they can send you few batches of great quality and then suddenly lower quality and will be telling straight to your face that "quality was always like that"...
And there are many companies that _start_ making high quality products until they have a reputation for it, and then later dial it down to improve profit margin. Even experts may have outdated information.
> Often those products do exist, but you need to become an “expert in X” to find them.
Or you rely on media and, in countries where that's available, stuff like the government-backed, independent "Stiftung Warentest" in Germany ("foundation for testing products").
> I’ve got a take: I think the current gap in the market for a lot of product areas is “more expensive but high quality.”
Misleading, dishonest marketing and bribed reviewers make it impossible for a consumer to know that a high quality product is indeed high quality without trying it before (which is often impractical)
Whatever you do to differentiate yourself will be copied by 728934712 Chinese brands which will flood the search results of whatever marketplace you're selling on, at all price points (even though they're the same product for the most part).
Faced with no reliable way to find the high quality needle in the haystack people just opt to buy the cheapest one, that way even if you know you're getting trash, at least it's cheap trash.
The only way that used to work to sell quality products was to create a brand and slowly build up trust by consistently selling high quality stuff but in the current "value extraction above anything else" climate, apparently that isn't profitable enough anymore, so pointy haired MBA types will happily destroy that quality for a few bucks.
There’s still quality brands out there. My general approach is to stick with brands until their quality declines and then ask friends and family for a reasonable option. Generally this results in companies that simply don’t advertise much because they don’t need to advertise.
Sure there’s probably a better options out there, but avoiding junk is more important than getting the absolute best product at the absolutely cheapest price.
Depending on what you're buying, I think you can rely on third-party reviews like Consumer Reports in the United States - no one accused them of being bribed.
I definitely agree there is a market for that, but the increasing problem is how consumers discover your product and sort through the trash heap of cheap alternatives. Google is useless these days for finding product reviews, Amazon largely just shows you keyboard-smash Chinese brands unless you already know what brand you're looking for, and legitimate review sites like Wirecutter have a hard time keeping up or covering all the products (also you can't find them unless you already know they exist).
I actually wonder if this will drive at least higher end consumers more towards the pre-Internet shopping word or mouth or personal experience approach to finding good products. For a while there the Internet allowed you to more easily discover and sort through new products and brands with a reasonable level of confidence so your horizons could broaden beyond products your friends and family recommended. Now the zone is so flooded with crap that the Internet seems less useful than it was 10 years ago for that task, which may lead to a reversion to more pre-Internet approaches to products, even if you might still buy it online.
The real untapped market could be a curated version of Amazon, with reviews you could trust and a high proportion of the products being legitimate brands you could rely on.
Careful, Reddit is rumored to IPO later this year so they've been turning the enshittification screws. Expect to see less and less legitimate opinions, more and more corporate manipulation and ads, and likely a lot of LLM-generated astroturfing as the profit engine dials up to 11.
When you can find older stuff or well-reasoned opinions on Reddit, it's a goldmine. But sadly that doesn't justify the pricing Reddit's owners surely want to see in the IPO so it'll likely get crowded out by short-term profitable long-term garbage priorities.
Try specialty forums and subreddits for the thing you are looking for. Need a scooter? /r/escooters on reddit would be where I would start hitting the search box. Cabinets? Search for a woodworking forum. You get the idea. There is almost always a group of incredibly experienced and knowledgeable people on the particular thing you need that have found a place to hang out with each other. Find them and ignore the rest of the noise.
YouTube used to be a decent place to get product reviews but then the company took away the Dislike count for ideological reasons, making automated scrape-and-publish trash impossible to filter out of search results.
Transparency of Galaxus/Digitec in Switzerland is pretty good with historic price charts, returns rating for suppliers etc. It does look like simple raw transparency is the key to all of that crap.
Some years from now (probably less than more) people will realise and start using cryptographic identities and cryptographic attestations for all internet comms - provable purchase, provable delivery by mailing service, provable single person identity etc. - (zero knowledge!) provable everything.
I mean why nobody wrote a blog post about it yet - it has "AI" and "Blockchain" in the title and for once it actually does make sense.
You can bundle up "fake news solution" into it as well if needed.
Sadly this is a very unstable position. No economies of scale. No consumer reach, extreme incentive to sell out once/if your product does get popular, knockoffs, etc...
'Eventually the big brands themselves had to lower the quality of their products to be able to compete with the generic products...'
I remember some brands lowering the quality of their product long before all of these random Chinese copycats sprung up.
Maybe this is why they were able to get a foothold because people like myself began to think that some cheap copies were actually better than the genuine article.
My pet grievance being branded footwear which has mostly become cheap garbage with a premium price tag.
Came here to say that. You paid for the brand and the perceived 'status' that brandishing (pun intended) the logo gave you, not the quality. This was long before the Chinese crapstream flowed richly. Maybe there's perceived quality too, as a bias that forms by paying so much for the branded article.
The brand has some inertia. Eventually word will spread out deeply that nike is trash and the perceived value will go with it or along with the generation that knew them if they’re lucky.
I think it’s the celebrity endorsements. They really live in the Jordan name/brand. Kind of like adidas lives on soccer and for a while yeezy branding.
One of the real problems is that essentially all advertising and marketing is a plague that is knowingly inflicting misleading information and insinuation on the public. It is not like they do not know how a ad will be interpreted, the entire game in almost every case is saying something that is technically correct but that the target audience will incorrectly interpret as better.
The standard of false advertising should not be: "There is at least one interpretation that is true." it should be: "Almost every member of the target audience will come to a correct understanding." If a company gets into a lawsuit and their lawyer defends the ad by saying, "Technically speaking, ..." they should lose. If a company can not accurately explain the nuances of the limitations of their product in a short time segment then they can just err on the side of caution instead of implying untrue statements.
This would absolutely devastate the bullshit advertising and branding that is used to prop up garbage products and make it easier to segment high quality products because it would be much harder for low quality competitors to make misleading me too statements without running afoul of false advertising.
There's also the opposite strategy. Making a cheaper product of lower quality at lower costs. The better quality product loses sales and advantages of mass adoption, and often can go out of business. The lower quality product is now the dominant one in the market. The resellers can freely raise prices now, to match the better products price and greatly increase profits. The public is now stuck with a lower quality product being the only thing available at same price.
Eg. I went to look at dishwashers at Costco, and the thinest of the metal used amazed me. You could bend things with two fingers. I shopped around, and bought some Samsung model, looks space age, but its pretty terrible at actually washing dishes. The marked for Dishwashers optimized for profit, and appearance of being functional. But at this point, I'm pretty convinced a GE dishwasher from the 70s was better.
In the case of a dishwasher, I wonder how much environmental regulations factor into that. Modern dishwashers use less water for a cycle, but they also do a poorer job of actually washing dishes. So, what do you do? Prewash? Run multiple times? It's also concerning that the regulations on dishwashers are going to get tighter yet in the US if the certain organizations get their wish.
Likewise with toilets. Low flow toilets are mostly terrible and do a terrible job at flushing. Literally the only thing they're designed to do. If you have to flush 2-3 times with a low flow and maybe even involve a plunger, are we really ahead?
Just to add one more factor, what happens overtime in old toilets is that sediment stone develops on the inside, and causes enough friction for the toilet paper to catch and plug up. So you can probably except even shorter life span from the new toilets as they flush less water, so more likely for that stone to develop. So you're more likely to need to replace the toilet in the future. Also the flushing mechanism is proprietary, so if anything goes bad, more likely to have to replace the toilet.
Really debatable if having to replace toilets more often is environmentally friendly. It will make more money for the toilet manufactures.
> what happens overtime in old toilets is that sediment stone develops on the inside
An easy way to get rid of that is to go to the hardware store and get a jug of muriatic acid. Then research the hell out of how to use it safely before you even think of opening it. Then pour a bunch in your toilet.
> But, I get it, the tech giants are all about quantity-over-quality and Facebook's ad revenue would drop to basically nothing (by their standards) if they started vetting each ad campaign manually, so here we are.
Facebook makes well over 20 billion dollars in net profits annually. They could easily invest a couple billion dollars into moderating better advertising and content, but since "user happiness" and "cost externalized to society" (e.g. people injured by bad products, cost of buying a new gadget because the old one barely lasted a year, costs of viral "challenges") is harder to quantify than "amount of dollars in profit", they all don't.
This is why government regulation is needed: to hold companies accountable for externalized costs.
I imagine some kind of marketing for these fabricating a myth that if you can pronounce the brain you get one pair for free, a la tiktok brainless meme without any basis in reality
My default assumption is that if a product is using targeted (or really any digital ads) that it is garbage. I don't think I have ever seen a product advertised on social media that wasn't a drop shipped Chinese rebrand or just a straight up scam.
For a while now when ever a thing in my daily life needs replacement (or I have a need for a new thing) I spend a good amount of time researching those products to find the
often hidden gem buy it for life alternative. Wirecutter, Consumer reports, sometimes delving deep into hobbyist territory to find out what the true eccentrics are using and valuing. I'll do this with everything from new sponges, pots and pans, gym bags, audio equipment, umbrellas, luggage, boots, whatever. Although often times yes these options have a higher upfront cost, sometimes the better product costs the same or only marginally more, its just not as well advertised..
I think its probably some sick consumerist enjoyment, but I really do love investing in BIFL products. You have to replace them far less frequently, the experience of using a well made product is often far superior, and I get a lot of satisfaction out of taking care of and maintaining things rather than treating everything as disposable. Especially the seemingly menial things you use and interact with on a daily basis I love the feeling of upgrading my "kit".
I'm not saying that an $80 indestructible stainless steel dish rack changed my life, but after a long day - cleaning up after dinner, being able to fit my entire kitchen into a super sturdy rack that doesn't topple over, and is banked to drain into my sink instead of spilling onto my counter top and then onto the floor every single night really makes a difference.
I’ve found this one to be incredibly hit or miss in the last several years. I completely ignore their recommendations now and only find value in reading the “how we picked” part.
Yeah completely agree. It's been a downward trend since the New York Times acquisition I feel. I still get a lot of value from them like you said, but I really can't blindly trust their "top picks" like I used to.
OXO makes a ton of fantastic kitchen and household products that I use. Dish Brushes, Cutting boards, toilet scrub brush, measuring cups, ice trays, vacuum sealed containers etc.)
I'd recommend r/buyitforlife. I'm not a big spender but the few products I have gotten after reading recommendations from there, I've been quite happy with.
I hate to be one of those "you lost me at the second paragraph" kind of guys, but....you lost me at the second paragraph:
> stuff that's pushed to you via targeted ads costs an average of 10 percent more,
> and it significantly more likely to come from a vendor with a poor rating
> from the Better Business Bureau.
The BBB is pay for play organization whose ratings mean little more than "they paid their membership dues" or "they responded to complaints quickly". You can get a million complaints, but if you reply quickly to consumers you keep your A+ rating. You can also get zero complaints but cancel your BBB membership and Ohhhhhh what a shame you've got an F rating.
The author seems to have referenced BBB as a generic for a firm that rates businesses (ala using Kleenex for tissues or Xerox for photocopies). It’s unfortunate that the most well-known firm of that type is a pay to play scam.
If an advertising platform doesn't work well, it can only support extremely high profit margin luxury goods because cutthroat commodities can't afford ads that don't work.
The real story is social media marketing is ineffective, not that the products are trash.
> The real story is social media marketing is ineffective, not that the products are trash.
You'd need to evidence that claim a lot before you could write a compelling post about it. I'd totally be down for a detailed post that goes into the numbers and comparative effectiveness of different ad spends though. That could be quite interesting for understanding the direction of the web going forward. If Social media marketing is useless then large segments of the current web and current economy is going to end abruptly.
I hadn't really thought about that. Advertisers on social media are basically only competing for impressions, while on search they compete on keyword and impression, so there's room for both high and low-margin businesses since they're segmented by keyword.
Just use any kind of adblocker (uBlock, NextDNS) and ads don't bother you anymore. I honestly never ever bought anything just beacuse of seeing ad. It simply never worked on me. Or targeting was just terrible.
What frustrates me more is absence of quality of reviews of products that I think of buying. Usualy there are bunch of generic reviews that was clearly writen for money (cold be called ad) or without deep knowledge or using that product at all. Youtubers usually repeat same phrases and numbers that says absolutely nothing about quality or usability of promoted product.
This is unrelated to the article, but you presumably see ads outdoors? I hate it how the most interesting things to look at on the subway are advertisements. I should try to purposefully not look at them.
I have a book with me a lot of the time but I find it difficult to concentrate on reading (or anything, for that matter) when I'm not somewhere quiet.
I recently paid 10$ to access a site that reviewed keyboards. It for example let me listen to the typing sounds. I think a niche rewiev site can be a lucrative buisness.
I’m astounded how many people blindly buy name-brand advertised crap. The advertising has gone so deep that many just default to buying name brand of everything under the assumption it will be better. I do the exact opposite: store brand everything unless there’s a compelling reason.
This is a really great summary (with reference links) of the problem.
As an anecdotal experience that supports this: I’ve ordered products from Instagram ads exactly twice, with the same experience in each case: a higher quality, lower price alternative was available elsewhere. And, in both cases, the products shipped from overseas and took weeks to arrive.
I've got three kids. We have so much crap all around the house. We buy the junk that is constantly advertised to us. We purchase from Walmart which mostly sells crap too. If we stopped for a minute and got off the social media train of consumption, and bought only high quality things, but a lot less of them, we would have a much better life and no clutter. But we don't.
As someone who is as immune to advertising as one gets, I find your post intriguing, and I feel like asking what is probably a naive question: can’t you just not buy the stuff? Where does that break down?
Because kids. It's easy enough to say "don't buy it", but the family members buy the juke, the kid comes home bawling his eyes out because everyone else has product X, and it's only $Y, so you get it, because it's been a long week, and it's really only Wednesday and you can't really deal with something valued at only $19.95 right now and just maybe it will buy you 20 minutes of peace so you can cook dinner.
In the most inoffensive way I can put this, this is a personal issue of parenting style rather than a problem with the junk or advertising. This is exactly the kind of "it's easier to just give in" mindset that is the ideal target customer.
> This is exactly the kind of "it's easier to just give in" mindset that is the ideal target customer.
Exactly, be on-call, have 20 minutes to get home to deal with an alert, while at the same time trying to get a toddler to comply, it's not exactly the ideal situation for making sane choices.
I am insanely impressed by anyone who regardless of how their day have been can stick to a rule of always making the correct choices and never giving in. I haven't personally meet anyone like that yet.
If you never say no, sure. I'd be rather surprised though if most parents haven't just said: "Screw it, get the cheap plastic car, I really don't have time for a 30 minute session of combined anger and crying right now".
Personally I also sometimes make the "mistake" of letting my kid pick a toy, snack, t-shirt, and forgetting that she'll pick cheap colorful junk every single time.
Shopping addiction. There's a lot of info about that. Happens both in general, people that buys tons of assorted junk, and in niche hobbies like wristwatches, garments, shoes, perfumes, cars or car models.
Any source for better quality products? Because I have a feeling, that some things might be more expensive, but in the essence it is the same crap with better packaging. Dreaming about buying water pistol, that doesn’t break within 2 weeks. Dreaming about not instantly breaking nerf gun. About pants, that lasts more than 4 months. My list is long.
There were a theory a while back, but I still think it's mostly valid. Originally you essentially had a three tier level of quality for basically everything, clothing, food, furniture, electronics, everything. Then marketing became an issue of price, and a race to the bottom started, to keep prices low, quality suffered. Still, a few people would, and could afford the high end options. The profit margin on the extreme high end is still large enough that it's profitable to service that segment, and the volume is in the low price/quality tier, but the middle tier isn't large enough to be as profitable, so it's not worth the trouble.
Over time the market adapted to a two tier system, low quality and low prices or high quality, and high prices (sometimes high prices and low quality). The entire middle tier disappeared, to even if I wanted a slightly higher quality steak or shirt, I can't buy it, because it doesn't exists, and I'm priced out of the high quality tier.
Jeremy's Razors spends a fucking fortune on ads. According to Facebook's Ad Library, the company spent $800,000 on FB ads in March, targeting fathers of school-age kids who like Hershey's, ultimate fighting, hunting or Johnny Cash:
This is why Meta stock has been such a great investment since 2012 iPO and will continue to be, same for Alphabet. Multiply this by thousands of companies. Insane earnings, and very high profit margins. Very consistent too. No shortage of brands, advertisers. CPCs (cost per clicks) are super-expensive and increase with inflation too, and especially for mobile US users, which is the most desired demographic. You cannot think of a better company when it comes to printing money.
I bought a Manscaped electric razor after seeing it on a social media ad. It was one of the worst products I've ever used, and it proceeded to cut me significantly worse than other electric razors.
I'll add a data point to your search, here's my results of scrolling Facebook ads. This ignores the "suggested" posts from places like daily mail, which really, are also an ad. This list of ads looks really poor for anything claiming to be targeted.
1 the barbie movie
2 join the us military (I'm australian, and probably too old)
3 KFC
4 jb hifi. This definitely doesn't fit the narrative, this ad offers Apple hardware for less than the Apple store, something they've been threatened over before
5 nrma. A classic case of advertising to someone who has already purchased everything they sell
6 something entirely in a language I can't read. Well done Facebook.
7 vote for some Texas politician
if you love God( Australian....)
8 something in Arabic
9 a presumably hacked account where a Persian rug gallery promotes an onlyfans account
10 nrma again
Nothing on this list strikes me as overpriced or otherwise supporting this narrative, but damn the targeting is terrible and I'd hate to be paying for this stuff to get shown to me
I doubt it. Surveillance advertising is mainly the domain of huge businesses, because you need scale to get eyes on all the people. Small companies may find it easy to be scofflaws. Large companies tend to be quite conservative, because they are big and slow, making them easy regulatory targets.
A good example here is cheating standards. It's in the interests of pretty much every car company to cheat on mileage standards, safety standards, emissions standards, etc. But very few cheat and then pay the fines. Why? Because the regulators know how to size a fine to make them pay attention. Volkswagen got hit with a $2.8 billion fine for the emissions scandal, and total costs to them were estimated as over $30 billion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
This. People like slapping laws on issues when the outcome is usually higher costs in the form of never shrinking burocrazys, little to no actual enforcement (unless you are rich or connected) and the red tape involved in compliance will likely make it worse.
The answer is by adopting different behavior on our end. Add blockers avoiding services litterer in ads (its why i no longer use Instagram, google search, etc)
>Give me one example when this approach succeeded, without any corresponding legislation
I think he's describing when the market dethrones an entrenched player without legislation. This happens quite often. Cable companies come to mind. Kodak, Novell, Sun Microsystems, etc.
Like he said, regulation today serves the wealthiest companies, because startups, the ones that do the dethroning, have extra costs that are more difficult to afford. I believe it fits in the Barrier to Entry category.
If you want real regulation, you need to look to the anti-trust laws, but our current politicians don't have the stomach for that. Today's regulation really tends to serve the already entrenched, because the entrenched usually write the regulation.
Ah ok. Yes, I remember it companies changing their behavior due to boycotts in the 80s and 90s but not since. I suspect companies are too big and too global and have too good PR.
Of course it depends on enforcement. But individuals literally cannot solve this problem alone. That's why we have government in the first place: to level the playing field and avoid these prisoner's dilemma situations. Only an entity as powerful as the government has the resources to disincentivize surveillance advertising. If they set penalties high enough, it will not "just become a business cost."
The solution is to make the fine a percentage of global turnover, not a static fee. That way the "cost of business" will be big enough to put the fear of law even to the largest corporation.
No. Yes. Also, there's a psychological effect around shopping and it's worse for online shopping. I know people that are daily scanning a handful of online shops for "offers" of "collectibles" and pay hundreds of euros a month for things they don't need.
Seeing this blamed on Amazon and the like is... Awkward. Have folks never seen dollar stores? Or paid attention to most mall stores? Been to a local market? This is nothing new. Nor is lamenting the decline of quality.
It’s happening on every e-commerce platform because it’s profitable. Etsy and Walmart for example have the exact same random cheaply manufactured Chinese goods on there
By and large, it happens everywhere. You can try to blame capitalism, but that feels like a trap. My view is that "high quality" is largely an illusion. And you start changing your view of it as you get older.
I can find high quality just fine, for the most part. It just doesn't mean the same thing. As an example, check out what most kitchens use, if you want a quality blender. And be willing to pay for it. And don't be shocked to find they have several so that they can spread the use out.
My view is seeing my friends and family fall into the trap that one quality thing will last forever. It has never worked that way. All things need maintenance. And all things that last do so in the ship of Theseus style.
Now, do we also have a problem of fully disposable things? Probably. Single vendor items will be worse at this. But I'm not convinced from evidence that it is actually worse today. So many of the "made to last" things were not used for their lifetime. Such that that is its own form of waste.
No it's not. For example, you are paying $7 million for a Superbowl ad and assuming 100 million viewers, you are getting 14 impressions for a dollar for your old spice after shave lotion. You could have gotten 100 impressions per dollar from people who actually shave had you used YouTube ads. So, targeting is and will always be cheaper... so you're over-paying for products which use non-targeted ads.
To the headline-only readers, be aware this article is largely not about advertising making products more expensive, but instead mostly lamenting ad-tech, terrible modern search, and proposing privacy regulations.
IMO, the cat is mostly out of the bag at this point. I don't think there will ever be regulation meaningful enough to "untarget" advertising to the degree that privacy advocates might hope. At best you'll be able to regulate some of the more egregious abuses, like phone apps surreptitiously listening to conversations to pick up keywords for advertising, or installed apps sending your phone's location data while in the background. It's simply too easy to track usage data these days to expect advertisers to not fingerprint visitors, especially when almost all visitors to major websites are logged into Google and Facebook.
Regulation will continue to be mostly toothless like GDPR, which as far as I can tell has been a largely bureaucratic way to extract extra money from Google/Meta/Amazon in the EU by fining them for unclear cookie consent banners and privacy statements. Which, to be clear, is a good thing, but extremely ineffective at doing anything about the actual invasive tracking they do.
Props for the heads-up to "headline-only readers".
> a largely bureaucratic way to extract extra money from Google/Meta/Amazon in the EU
This can not be overstated. The EU should concentrate on creating things of value of their own, like privacy first services, not constantly prioritizing leeching off innovation and progress in other countries.
Speaking as a concerned European here, with plenty of criticism of the way the potential for liberating human knowledge and interaction using the fantastic technology at our disposal has largely been corrupted by FAANG et al and ad tech.
The issue is not dichotomic. There is value in enabling advertisements for products and services, the problem is in the unfettered overreach: the grotesque amassing of personal information and the near unchecked marketing of products that are (or close to) scams.
Case in point: the cryptocurrency scams that littered Facebook as late as a few months ago (I don't think they have ceased but I was kicked out then, maybe because I habitually reported these scams to no effect - except being bombarded with even more of them ...).
The problem is that’s hard for everyone downstream. I used to sell stuff on Amazon and EBay from surplus auctions as a side hustle. Initially you could run a sustainable business with 20-30% gross margins. When I got out, you needed 60-70% margins.
So you really need to be selling a lifetime customer with value beyond the first sale, sell some bullshit story, or junk/scam/stolen product high margins.
That’s why drugstores get looted… people sell toothpaste on Amazon.
My hypothesis, in many consumer cases such as razors, is newer brands are concentrating on growth, not profit, therefore a better deal is often had than buying the established brands. Meaning, as a consumer brand loyalty is expensive over time as new companies are competing with free (VC) money to fund your purchase and build metrics for eventual sale to older brand.
s/is overpriced junk/costs 10% more on average and may be lower quality/g
I've been very happy with some purchases from companies I found out about on Facebook. Cognitive Surplus, for example. Love their stuff. Is 10% of their price due to their choice of advertizing platform? Shrug.
Having said that, a lot of it IS overpriced junk, or outright scams. I had some cool-looking shoes show up on my feed for "50% off" a price that was more than twice the amazon.com price. I bought an espresso machine from a facebook ad that turned out to be an elaborate scam. I'm only really objecting to the use of the word "everything" here -- that makes this title false.
I clicked the link and went to the website, which at the time went to sarisell.com , a professional-looking storefront (they move to a new domain and update the ad every week or two). I thought there was a pretty good chance it was a scam since this is an $800 machine supposedly selling for $300, but I figured I would be reimbursed if it was, so gave it a go. Here's the elaborate part: they took my money and sent me a delivery tracking link at sodopro.com which appeared to be a delivery service like DHL. The link went to a map that showed the product travelling very slowly from Europe, and it would change every few days. Eventually the location disappeared and the status just stayed at "on the way" or something. I filed a claim with my credit card and got the charge removed.
It might not be the case here, but lot of these are drop ship outfits that don’t do any kind of stock check and are susceptible to whatever the actual manufacturer in China is up to. I learned about it buying a moon lamp and it taking over 6 months. When it arrived it was a lopsided 3d printed thing (isn’t that relatively expensive at any kind of scale?)
I also discovered a lot of these drop shipping outlets are the product of get-rich-quick passive income courses that give you a Shopify template to copy. It being passive income is an impulse for allocating zero budget for customer support.
Interesting; that could be what was going on here, although at the price I kind of doubt it. I bought one of those floating moon lamps from a facebook ad too and it came quickly and was pretty great! Guess I got lucky. Mine is not lopsided, but it's definitely a decent 3D print, looks like low-quality stereolithography or maybe some kind of jetting. It hovers about an inch over the base and spins slowly. Great conversation piece; everyone thinks it looks impossible.
Right, mine is the VGAzer one. I'm a little less pleased with it since I realized that the highs and lows don't correspond to lunar topography... the low (thin) areas are the areas that are light-colored on the moon. That way at night it looks like the moon... but the craters aren't physically craters, the maria are high instead of low. Now I'm thinking about upgrading!
If it makes you feel better, I got scammed the same way but in Walmart.com. Bought an espresso machine that was a little too good to be true - the purchase wen through like a normal Walmart.com order. They sent a tracking link through fedex/other - but it was delivered a to a different address in my city. Called up fedex, turns out the company never intended to ship something to me and they shipped an empty (weight wise) box to a warehouse to trick Walmart.
At least after a few days of effort Walmart did refund me and said they were investigating the vendor.
I remember reading marketting was 50% of many mattress in box brands when they were being pitched on podcasts. So I decided to buy a Zinus off Amazon for ~50% cost and it's held up better than my friends named brands. Gambled that they were founded in the 80s in South Korea so at least had slightly more experience dealing with durability of goods that's suppose to last 10+ years than marketting team with a number to a foam factory.
The combination of the author's clearly simmering rage (arguably even reaching a boil at some points in this post) and some fundamentally incorrect assertions make this tough for me to take seriously.
Not far into the piece, we get:
> The point is that Jeremy's has to spend $800K/month to reach its customers, which means that it either has to accept $800K less in profits, or make it up by charging more and/or skimping on quality.
...what? Acquiring new customers for a business via advertising means less profits or lower quality? How does that follow?
I own an ecommerce business, and Facebook/Instagram ads are my main avenue of new customer acquisition (though to be clear I'm not in the ballpark of $800k/year). My products are somewhat seasonal, so I can only really profitably advertise from about April-September. The rest of the time, I'm just continuing to sell to existing customers.
During the April-September window, I make much more money, because I am selling to my existing customers and also selling to new customers via profitable advertising. The quality of my product does not decline during the time that I am advertising. My prices don't change during that period, either.
My company makes decidedly more money because I'm able to advertise. It doesn't cost me to lose profits; it causes me to gain them. Yes, if you look at my books, you'll see that advertising is a big red number, but if that's where you end your analysis, you just don't have a basic concept of how advertising works.
For all of the author's complains about "enshittification" (cute the first time, but beaten equine carcass style by the end) of products, this kind of targeted advertising is an enormous boon for small businesses that sell good products. I can't afford a TV ad campaign, and even if I could, I couldn't measure it enough for it to be useful, given that I'm trying to keep things tight and well-understood financially.
He complains about "ad-tech intermediaries scooping up 50% or more of every advertising dollar," but there is a reason for that! They are delivering a service that is valuable for businesses in an immediate and measurable way. The amount of market share the ad-tech companies get is proportional to the quality of the service they provide to advertisers relative to other media.
Now to be clear, I agree with much of what the author takes issue with in terms of data collection and the like. There are lots of privacy issues with Facebook, Google, etc. that should be taken seriously, and people should clearly understand what it is they're sharing and how it's used. But even with that in mind, the author is conflating his frustration with adtech and concern about privacy issues with the idea that they aren't delivering tremendous value to small businesses like mine, and that's just incorrect.
I assume Jeremy’s is a blatant attempt to mimic Harry’s and Dollar Shave Club which were known for acceptable (less so with Harry’s) products and disrupted the existing offering to where Dollar Shave Club got a billion dollar buyout from Unilever. Harry’s went for $1.37B to Schick.
> Specifically, stuff that's pushed to you via targeted ads costs an average of 10 percent more, and it significantly more likely to come from a vendor with a poor rating from the Better Business Bureau.
So, in other words, the venue that is being paid to present the advertisement makes money.
Anecdotally I get great targeted ads on Instagram: beautiful, interesting products that appeal to my needs and sensibilities. Unfortunately they are all very overpriced and I don't trust the vendors, so I won't buy the products.
The best purchases(the ones I am quite grateful for) I have made, ever, are the following brands/products:
1. LLBean. Running aparell, shoes, bedcovers.
2. Apple. I still have 2012 mac books that work well after a few repairs. M1s are good.
3. Peugot pepper mill.
4. American Apparel T Shirts.
5. FoamByMail top line Luxe maximum firmness foam mattress(Queen) costing a few hundred $ (after trial and errors and $$$$ down the drain on scammy mattresses before)
6. MS One note.
7. A grandfathered T-Mobile plan that gives me upto 6 lines for 120$ max(but I use 2 lines for 90$) and 6 GB of high speed data per line.
8. Camelback hydration backpacks.
9. Watering cones from Blumat (Have lasted 8+ years of use through 1-2 weeks of vacation) https://www.blumat.com/en
10. Benq 1080p projector(~1 hour a week of watch time since 2014), we don't use a tv.
I list these because they have lasted me a lifetime time and the most use and/or money saved over time.
There is a bunch of old stuff like watches and stereo systems my mom has from Japan that are still good and working from the 1970's and 80s
He harps on an "anti-woke" razor company that tries to market themselves as an alternative to Gillette and Harry's — the big point is "they spend 800k/month on marketing, so it drives up the cost of the razors". Does he know how much Gillette spends (saved you a search: 600M/year)? How do they fund that I wonder?
He cites a study that says contextual ads and targeted ads perform at about the same efficiency. Why is this remotely interesting? Ads are a liquid market. If one channel was much better than another, it would be arbitraged away.
His stated thesis is this:
> Targeted advertising is incredibly expensive, and incredibly lucrative – for the ad-tech platforms that sit between creative workers and media companies on one side, and audiences on the other
It couldn't be more wrong. Ads are incredibly cheap. It's why you see so many of them. It's why little companies targeting narrow niches can afford to buy them.