- There is 0 absolutely 0 support. All you can do is go on their community forum where no one replies to you
- There is no alternative, there are other ad networks, but they require you to have a working Adsense account as a prerequisite. I was in one once, what they did was just put Google ads on my site and take an additional 10% cut
- Google takes an excessive cut. Officially they collect a 30% intermediary fee, but according to the DOJ lawsuit there are 15% that are somehow unaccounted for. So it seems the number is more around 45%
Google is a complete blackbox that pays no taxes thanks to a web of subsidiaries and loopholes and so there is only limited knowledge about their financials (although it is a public company), there is mounting evidence that they manipulate search queries/results in a way to increase their revenue and are siphoning more money than they should from their Adexchange. They also use anti-competitive practices to maintain their monopoly on web ads and the list of malpractices is too long to put it in writing here.
This company is an absolute nightmare and I am forced to use it for ads because they control the market.
The support they do offer just tries to get you to use features to increase your ad spend.
Also with the new VPN/Proxy they are coming out with the hide ip address you won't be able to block ip addresses of people who keep clicking your ad. I would track who signed up then block their ip from adwords so they would stop clicking the ad. Google plans to make millions providing a service to mix ip addresses and make blocking excessive ad clickers impossible.
"Information Asymmetries. Because Google’s ad tech products face little or no
meaningful competition, Google has been able to operate its products within a black box,
affording publishers and advertisers limited visibility into how, why, and even at what price,
website advertising inventory is sold. One industry report suggests that approximately 15% of all
digital advertising spend is simply unaccounted for, with publishers and advertisers unable to
determine which intermediary may have siphoned this spend off for its own gain. Reduced
transparency diminishes the ability of publishers and advertisers to make informed choices in
selecting their ad tech products and hampers their ability (and rivals’ as well) to serve as a
competitive constraint."
Too bad the DOJ attorney does not "grill" over that. Instead, quote the Reuters article
> Dahlquist asked Juda if they had introduced changes to ad sales in a way that raised the cost-per-click by a consumer that advertisers pay. "I believe that's fair," said Juda.
> But Wendy Waszmer, a lawyer for Google, asked Juda on Wednesday afternoon on if there were ways that his ads quality team could raise prices unilaterally. "No," Juda responded.
"obviously" : I guess that has a secret meaning not available to normal humans.
Say what you actually mean, not some wild misstatement.
Edit: this is no different from clickbait. I could say "80% of women get raped in college" and get attention; then when it's called out say, "but it's still a big problem!"
I'm with you. Half the time that I dismiss someone's statement as just hyperbole or a figure of speech, I later find out they were serious and seriously misinformed.
I'd say it's probably 50/50 odds someone saying "Google doesn't pay taxes" literally believes that the sum of Google's corporate income, employment, real estate, etc. tax payments around the world last year was less than their personal income, social security, and property tax payments.
It's also astounding how many people think a tax write-off of $1 million reduces corporate taxes by $1 million rather than reducing the taxable profits by $1 million. Granted, there are some really astounding tax loopholes out there, but a scary percentage of people think mega-corporations literally pay less than they do in total taxes.
It reminds me of the time I was joking around with a girl I was dating at the time about stress headache "brain muscle cramps". 5 minutes into joking around, I realized she thought "Your brain is a muscle, you need to exercise it" was literal, and concentrating hard would sometimes cause the "brain muscle" to cramp up. She was a grad student in Environmental Engineering at MIT at the time. That triggered a brief argument over whether the brain was primarily muscle tissue or primarily nerve tissue.
There are also a ton of people who think they aren't among those who don't pay any federal income tax because they see the Social Security tax line on their W-2 forms.
> There are also a ton of people who think they aren't among those who don't pay any federal income tax because they see the Social Security tax line on their W-2 forms.
(rephrased) There are a ton of people who think that they pay some federal income tax because they see the Social Security tax line on their W-2 forms.
Sorry, I'm not normally one to call out double negatives. My brain just does not want to make sense of the provided sentence. Did you mean despite or because in the context of the Social Security line item? I would have thought despite but that actually changes the meaning of the sentence.
People hear that 57% of households paid no federal income tax. They look at their own W-2s and see their combined Social Security tax and income tax withholding payments exceed their tax refund, and believe they've paid income tax.
There are quite a few people who believe they pay federal income tax who don't. They do pay some taxes that come out of every paycheck, but they don't (in net) pay federal income tax.
The only viable alternative in my opinion is to do Self-Service Ads(Let advertisers directly buy the space on your site) or do affiliate marketing.
I am doing it right now, it is very time consuming, you have to go on calls, sign contracts, write invoices, find advertisers or affiliate opportunities, compare them against each other etc...
I actually never dealt with auctions. That code was in the "high intellectual property" section of the code, that was restricted even for engineers. In particular, they couldn't see it in China.
That's an interesting remark, for your profile links to Google Cinema Club, among other things, so I take it you're not based in China yourself.
Regarding the article and the auctions, I recall the internship at Google in the noughties. There was an overview talk on search and ads. One thing that was clear back then, the ads are not ranked by the bids alone. They are ranked by bid multiplied by ad score. As the ad gets displayed more and more, the score tends to be based on the click-through rate of the ad. That way, a bad ad that does not get clicked on effectively cannot be forced to display by bidding high.
On the other hands, in most reporting on these antitrust cases, folks read "auction" and the picture they have in mind is like an art auction, the highest bidder wins. Then they report on obvious things as if this was some revelation of manipulation.
I always thought gdpr was another trick to destroy the alternatives to google. Google has been left to monopolize ads for far too long , at this point it is even hard to stop them
- There is 0 absolutely 0 support. All you can do is go on their community forum where no one replies to you
- There is no alternative, there are other ad networks, but they require you to have a working Adsense account as a prerequisite. I was in one once, what they did was just put Google ads on my site and take an additional 10% cut
- Google takes an excessive cut. Officially they collect a 30% intermediary fee, but according to the DOJ lawsuit there are 15% that are somehow unaccounted for. So it seems the number is more around 45%
Google is a complete blackbox that pays no taxes thanks to a web of subsidiaries and loopholes and so there is only limited knowledge about their financials (although it is a public company), there is mounting evidence that they manipulate search queries/results in a way to increase their revenue and are siphoning more money than they should from their Adexchange. They also use anti-competitive practices to maintain their monopoly on web ads and the list of malpractices is too long to put it in writing here.
This company is an absolute nightmare and I am forced to use it for ads because they control the market.