It's a lot like the credit card issuing banks. Two notable big names, Wells Fargo and Bank of America both "illegally used or obtained consumers’ credit reports, and then applied for and enrolled consumers in credit card accounts without consumers’ knowledge or authorization." [1][2]
Banks had each employee need to sell 50 credit cards a month. Employees sold 50 a month.
Banks needed "line goes up" for every quarter. Banks had each employee sell 100 a month. Employee's tried to sell 100 a month.
Banks needed "line goes up." Eventually market was saturated, yet banks said sell 1000 credit cards a month. Employees replied, "we cannot, market is saturated." Bank said "sell 1000 a month." Employee's responded with "make shit up, open accounts without consumers knowledge." Fraud.
Advertisers are locked into an arms race for attention with each other. Even if you were stuck with the same slice of eyeball time, you can still grow by selling it for more, and in many ways that's what google's auctions are set up to do. But google's investment in youtube in particular has steadily grown the eyeball-time they have access to as well. I'm not ruling out fraud but I don't see how these facts prove fraud, it seems more like google continuing to naturally benefit from the decline of traditional print and television media.
Sometimes I wonder what fraction of people employed in advertising think they're making the world better by exposing customers to good products and what percentage aren't in denial about the fact they're weaving dollars out of human misery.
Never worked in ad tech so no incentive to see things one way or the other. I do think it’s sad that so much brain power has gone into it, but “weaving dollars out of human misery” is a bit much.
Attention has a common resource problem. If you (google) don't overgraze your cattle on it, the facebook will because they both are getting the same users at the same time. It's a race at this point. I am getting ads from same company being recommended on both Meta and Google ads real estate.
Is total available human attention actually relevant here? It implies that all the possible attention is available already for advertising purposes which doesn't seem true at all.
In my experience, the ads are the _least_ harmful parts of social media. It's the regular accounts that are causing FOMO and mental health issues by displaying unrealistic lifestyles that the majority of people won't ever achieve.
That's only one fragment of social media though, it's not helpful to focus on this part of social media alone; another big one is the rhetoric hidden in otherwise normal / legitimate content that seems to be a nontrivial factor in a hard shift to the right, politically.
This is like watching Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class but upgraded for our Attention Economy Age.
In the past the Signal was - look at me, look at all these luxury items I have accumulated, look at my leisure activities, you want to be like me - do what I say.
Today the Signal is - I am so smart, Farmer Joe and his herd of illiterates has validated I am a genius, look at my networth, look at my ideas, you want to be like me - pay ATTENTION to me - do what I say.
This seems like a pretty unhinged reaction to this. What triggered you? By your reference which indicates an aversion to status, I guess his failure to endorse Marxist orthodoxy or recite woke catechisms?
Are you aware it comes across rather transparently as envy and self defeating rage? Rather than hate on success, why not make some choices to create improvements in your life to actually get results you might feel happy with? The path of the fake payoff of hating on a clearly well informed and intelligent analyst of current affairs, while it may make you temporarily feel better, can only ultimately be compensatory and not actually yield results to improve your life. Rather it is more likely to act as a substitute! Be warned of that path, the path of no personal responsibility and claiming victimhood, it doesn’t lead anywhere good :)
Btw - “do what i say” is more echoed in your “shamed if you disagree” leftist strategy than anything Marc says here. You might want to bring a bit of a mirror and self awareness to enhance your stance. Hopefully this helps! Haha :)
As business complexity grows it just gets hard for Tech, Engineering, Science & Creative folk to keep pace with the skills of Finance/Business folk.
And this has a huge impact on trajectory of the majority of businesses. Cause with scale, they become dependent on other experts from Finance, Marketing, Sales, Logistics etc who take over decision making and leadership as firms grow in size.
You can see it in every sector of the economy. Not just Tech. James Cameron, Steven Spielberg or Peter Jackson don't end up creating and running a Disney anymore cause the amount of time to specialize in their own field keeps increasing.
Look at Finance. As soon as an org has more than a few offices in different countries they very quickly learn how to take advantage of difference in labor costs, interest rates, forex, corporate tax rates, rent, real estate costs, subsidy differences, regulatory differences etc. Now scale that up 20 offices in 20 countries and the Financial Engineering dept suddenly a huge say in where the story goes.
Replace Finance with other specializations(Marketing, Sales, Supply chain etc) and the same story plays out.
If you want to have influence you need to have skills across specializations, or know specialists who share your values.
Good points. But it does feel like people have made the "available attention" grow in recent years by not doing other things (offline). Perhaps we are now hitting the true limits. Overproduction should adjust in a market...
More probably supply related. I worked at an incubator once upon a time, there was no dearth of funds to pull in from rich donors and investors.
The issue was always finding quality teams and people. We ended up funding lot of poor quality output. But its all par for the course in how progress works. Keep planting seeds all over and hope for the best.
The sanctions don't have a goal. So anyone can say anything. Besides Air Transport is a small ass part of GDP. Their MIL complex is on over drive, more than compensating for whatever hits the other sectors are taking. Their GDP is growing faster that all other major Western Economies. The US & EU are not serious about winning this war, mostly because they don't have confidence in themselves that they can.
> Their GDP is growing faster that all other major Western Economies
Growth that depends entirely on government spending can only last so long... First you blow all your reserves, then if/when you start printing money and hyperinflation kicks in even if the nominal GDP in the domestic currency appears to be rising, real GDP falls fast.
Because Russia's essentially a petro-state, they had sizable cash reserves with which to prop up their economy. Now you can see with the price of the Ruble that they've run out of the will to prop it up using foreign reserves (probably running low on foreign currency) and most estimates of their economic growth is that it'll stall or they'll see a recession for 2024 and beyond.
> The US & EU are not serious about winning this war, mostly because they don't have confidence in themselves that they can.
You're right that the west isn't serious. It's not that they don't think we can, it's that they're afraid the slightest hit to our living standards will erode support. While they might be right, we're sleepwalking into an even worse scenario...
>Now you can see with the price of the Ruble that they've run out of the will to prop it up using foreign reserves (probably running low on foreign currency)
It’s not that simple. I don’t think Russia is low on foreign currencies. Due to sanctions and effects of war spending Russian economy doesn’t behave as a normal one. Recession is going to happen, sure, because the current high demand on domestic market is matched by credit-driven growth of supply. As soon as war spending drops, demand weakens and interest rate drops, but some of the businesses which play the chicken game with central bank will have problems. So yes, recession is going to happen. But they will not burn foreign reserves to zero, simply because some of them are frozen and some are in rupees and yuan, which are not easily convertible.
I don’t think Russia is low on foreign currencies.
It's definitely "low" on the $327B or so in its sovereign foreign assets that were seized Brussels shortly after the 2022 invasion -- apparently about half its total (of $600+).
The seizure obviously didn't kill the economy, but it would be surprising if it didn't set off a chain of effects within the Russian economy. We may be seeing that now in the form of the precipitous rise in the benchmark interest (to 21 percent).
The rise of the interest rates is not related to seizure of foreign assets.
It’s macroeconomic basics: government is spending a lot, domestic demand increases and doesn’t match the supply, which cannot be balanced by imports (which would require spending of foreign reserves). The economy is gradually overheating, inflation is rising, so the central bank attempts to control it, because its only target is the inflation. That’s as simple as that.
1. Sanctions on financial sector and airlines are annoying at most and hit the most more liberal Russian middle class and elites, which has had enough in 2012 and would not dare to oppose Putin directly today (so, it's a reason to go to therapy or have a vacation in Asia rather than going to the streets). Russian financial authorities are one of the most competent in the world and it shows, the system is relatively stable and will go through the coming recession with minimal damage (not the first time).
2. Some manufacturing sectors of Russian economy do have problems, which do not hinder manufacturing capacity today but will have more long term effects. Chances are high that this will simply help China to become more competitive at the cost of Western producers of manufacturing equipment and electronics. They do not want confrontation with the West, but will use any opportunity to replace Western companies. Civilian aircraft production is going to be even more localized without the Western engines and may gradually catch up with the demand.
3. Sanctions on oil and gas trade simply do not work and are bigger pain for Europe than for Russia. You cannot cut off major supplier of hydrocarbons without full support of all the biggest consumers. It still goes on, just in other currencies (which may have negative long term impact on use of USD in international trade). Yes, Russian producers do suffer, but nothing really bad is going to happen to them.
4. Unofficial "Cancel culture" sanctions (Western brands pulling off Russia) have negative effect mostly on the Western businesses which may have lost one of their biggest customers, like some German companies. The assets are simply being taken over and they continue to contribute to Russian economy (and paying taxes) after some delay, switching to Chinese supply chain (e.g. car production). At best they will be paying double or triple price to return to the market later, at worst they will get more competition. It will be interesting though to see, how competition in digital services will evolve. For example, YouTube cannot be replaced by anything even when it does not sell ads or premium accounts in Russia.
To summarize, sanctions did not work. They did not and could not stop the war. The most damage Russia has inflicted on itself: excessive military spending increased inflation, from which civil servants and pensioners are going to suffer the most. Attempt to control it is going to result in major recession soon. Besides, massive emigration wave has put a lot of pressure on the job market and immigration from Central Asia can no longer mitigate it, because the attempt to recruit more soldiers from immigrants has scared many of them.
I still believe that the best strategy for the West should have been avoidance and deescalation, and then, when all opportunities were missed and the war started, US and UK should have deployed their military in Ukraine honoring the spirit of Budapest agreements. It was not wise for Ukrainian leadership to choose a side and push for NATO membership, but it was stupid for USA to leave the doors open, promise things that led to more escalation and then let the country slowly burn. This war is a major failure of Western diplomacy and lack of adequate strategy in Eastern Europe.
To summarize, sanctions did not work. They did not and could not stop the war.
Well it's pretty clear the sanctions were never intended, by themselves, to stop the war. But it's not like the Western nations really had any other choice.
Fundamentally, sanctions are more about framing -- making it clear to Russia's regime that it simply won't be possible to continue doing "business with usual" with the West after it crossed the line that did.
I agree with you that Western pre-war policy was largely a failure, and certain things should have been done differently. But now that Russia's regime took the action that it did --- it must be opposed, and in any case not simply "greenlighted". Which a refusal to impose sanctions (or substantially help Ukraine in its defense) would have amounted to.
How is it clear? Their foreign currency reserves decreased just by 15% since December 2021 and their total reserves actually increased. Yes, some of that huge pile of money was frozen, but it’s nowhere close to “giving up” trying. So no, you are wrong, they did not give up, they simply did not have intention to keep ruble strong. The central bank intervenes to prevent high volatility, but that’s it, since 2015 they focus only on inflation.
It's clear based on the exchange rate. You absolutely can't trust whatever data they put out there, but you can see based on their behaviour. I mean, they're literally asking North Korea and Iran for help, trading oil and gas directly...
There's no advantage for them to have the Ruble so weak because they absolutely want to import Chinese and Western products, namely technology, to fund their war machine. Even against the Yuan, the value of the Ruble has nearly halved since June 2022. That's not good for a nation that needs to import things...
You make wrong assumptions about the exchange rate. I suggest you learn more about Russian economy, rather than speculate.
The fact is, they do not target exchange rates in their policy, only inflation. Their trade balance with China is positive (unlike USA), so yuan reserves are growing and they have no problem to buy Chinese goods. The weakness of ruble has nothing to do with it.
The exchange rate is now directly controlled by the Central bank. Trade with China is very problematic - sometimes it takes several months to complete a single transaction.
> The exchange rate is now directly controlled by the Central bank.
This is false. I don’t know where you have got this, when all information is public and easily available. Here’s how the official exchange rate us determined:
They just collect the data on OTC transactions from banks. The only way for Russian central bank to influence the exchange rate is to sell/buy and they do it only to stabilize the market when volatility is high. They do not have exchange rate targets and do not enforce specific rates in transactions.
> This is correct. The Russian economy is doing fine.
The Russian economy is doing "mixed". It's a war economy which can be propped up for quite a while but it has significant structural issues that will take years to repair. The country won't fail, but it will further struggle because of the decisions made my leadership.
I find this general attitude of "Russia has no issues" that are going around on the internet quite confusing if pretty much every economic indicator says otherwise. Let alone the fact that a meaningful part of the working population is fighting or left the country rather than engaging in the economy.
> country won't fail, but it will further struggle because of the decisions made my leadership
It’s removing itself as a conventional threat to Europe for generations to come. And as much as Beijing is a rival to Washington, they’re rational in a way Moscow is not. Russia as a Chinese suzerainty is probably a better world configuration than Russia as a sovereign regional power.
> find this general attitude of "Russia has no issues" that are going around on the internet quite confusing if pretty much every economic indicator says otherwise
The sanctions’ goal was to cripple the Russian economy in a militarily-relevant way. On this they failed and that has been widely discussed. Folks might be extrapolating that discussion inappropriately.
Taking into account relative sizes of the invaded and invading country, Russian government showed themselves a complete laughing stock. And this is without involvement of any NATO troops by the way.
Any limited success they had before was in what can't be called a conventional confrontation, like separatist movements.
What? The EU and US aren’t in the war at all. We’re almost 3 years into Russia being unable to conquer a country 1/3 their size right on their border.
On top of all the damage done to them, and their advanced EW capabilities that have been captured and sent for analysis in the US, and exact knowledge of things like Kinzhal, the lost flag ships and submarine, the modern sea drones - this war is a disaster for Russia.
The US and EU aren’t even involved and Ukraine is holding its ground. Russia is doing so poorly that they’re not even considered a threat anymore in the West.
Their “GDP” numbers belie systemic economic weaknesses that show up when they have to BARTER for food. That’s how worthless their currency is.
Russia is basically completely pathetic at this point - they can terrorize countries that share a land border with them but can’t project power even past Ukraine.
They had to import starving North Koreans with antique shells and Iranian RC toys. Some superpower.
The US and EU don’t care about the war in the same way someone with a Ferrari doesn’t have to race someone with a Honda Civic - because they’re not a threat. Let the person in the Honda rev their engine and scream that they’d win - they’re just stupid. They look stupid.
They’ve lost what, 500k soldiers? They’re so much weaker than the Soviet Union it’s laughable.
The rest of the world disrespects them so much that they had $300B worth of Russian assets outside their country - and they were all seized. That was half their famed “sanction proofing”! What are they going to do about it? Nothing.
They have “hot” GDP based on faux demand for wartime goods - as they trade Rubles for oranges because nobody wants their currency. Does that sound viable to you? Laughable.
Waste of time. Just talk in terms of what they want to hear. They are just interested in the payoffs (not in the details).
As info explodes and specialists dive deeper into their niches, info asymmetry between ppl increases. There are thousands of specialists running in different directions at different speeds. Leaders can't keep up.
Their job is to try to get all these "vectors" aligned toward common goals, prevent fragmentation and division.
And while most specialists think this "sync" process happens through "education" and getting everyone to understand a complex ever changing universe, the truth is large diverse groups are kept in sync via status signalling, carrot/stick etc. This is why leaders will pay attention when you talk in terms of what increases clout/status/wealth/security/followers etc. Cause thats their biggest tool to prevent schisms and collapse.
> Their job is to try to get all these "vectors" aligned toward common goals, prevent fragmentation and division.
This is overthinking it. People with power tend to be interested in outcomes. They can't evaluate all the reasoning of all their reports. It comes down to building credibility with a track record and articulating outcomes, when you want to advise decision makers.
So how does Adtech generate more and more revenue and sells more and more ads year on year?
Simple answer - Fraud.