[HN Gopher] The $300B Google-Meta advertising duopoly is under a...
___________________________________________________________________
The $300B Google-Meta advertising duopoly is under attack
Author : acconrad
Score : 253 points
Date : 2022-09-18 18:17 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Finally, an archive.org URL at the top instead of archive.ph.
| Nice one.
|
| The later has a "bot protection" page that looks like
| Cloudflare's but someone suggested it is not. Makes sense because
| archive.today and Cloudflare were in a spat some time ago.
| Archive.today wanted to allow monitoring of users' locations,
| e.g., via EDNS Client Subnet, but Cloudflare did not send ECS.
|
| Unlike Archive.today, Internet Archive does not try to force
| users to enable Javascript or make them solve CAPTCHAs. Nor does
| Common Crawl.
|
| It is interesting to contrast the Internet Archive (IA) with
| Archive.today. The later is vague about how it is funded and
| admits it could sell out to advertisers in the future.^1 There is
| obviously no small amount of data it could collect about user
| interests and behaviours that could be used to support
| advertising. For example, what usage data does it store, if any.
| How is that data used. There are no public statements about these
| details. The operator invites users to "Ask me anything" but has
| no Privacy Policy. The operator admits it sends the client's IP
| in a X-Forwarded-For HTTP header. This of course is not something
| one would experience with IA. The server hosting the page being
| archived receives an IA IP address as the client IP address, not
| an IA user's IP address. IA has a Privacy Policy, last updated in
| 2001.^2 Unlike Archive.today, I feel reasonably confident IA wil
| not sell out to commercial interests but who knows.
|
| 1. From Archive.today's FAQ:
|
| How is the archive funded?
|
| It is privately funded; there are no complex finances behind it.
| It may look more or less reliable compared to startup-style
| funding or a university project, depending on which risks are
| taken into account.
|
| Will advertising appear on the archive one day ?
|
| I cannot make a promise that it will not. With the current growth
| rate I am able to keep the archive free of ads. Well, I can
| promise it will have no ads at least till the end of 2014.
|
| 2. YMMV, but IME but the fewer "updates" to a Privacy Policy over
| time the better.
| montpeliervt wrote:
| No has mentioned Subprime Attention Crisis yet. It's worth
| reading. The whole thing is a hyper-inflated, opaque house of
| cards, and its collapse will cause a lot of pain.
| seshagiric wrote:
| I work in online search and recently expanded. In my opinion
| there are two major threats to Google and Facebook (I.e., ads
| related threats):
|
| 1. Platform power: Apple was a key supplier to Facebook in the
| sense that they provide platform driving a significant % of their
| Ads revenue. With Apple tightening privacy they have become an
| indirect but significant threat to Facebook. Google is relatively
| safe.
|
| 2. Threat of substitutes: as seen in Amazon, Ecom platforms are
| much closer to the customer. Us timer is about to make a
| purchase. I think over time Advertisers will eventually shift to
| platforms like amazon, Etsy etc so that can reach the customer
| right when they are about to make a purchase. Some what same
| appeal with snap and TikTok.
|
| Overall online ad industry will continue to flourish but will see
| big changes in who are the big players.
| xyst wrote:
| the day the ad industry dies, we will all be better off
| smoldesu wrote:
| What replaces it? People aren't going to host content for
| free. I hate ads too, but we have to be pragmatic about
| monetization; platforms like YouTube _literally cannot exist_
| without advertising to subsidize the insane architectural
| cost.
|
| The solution is proper oversight. We've gone too long without
| regulating advertisements, app stores and video platforms,
| and we've witnessed the consequences. It's time that we put
| the interests of the people before FAANG shareholders and HN
| pundits.
| oezi wrote:
| > platforms like YouTube literally cannot exist without
| advertising
|
| Why? If you consider Netflix without the cost of content
| creation, then less than 1 USD per month per user would
| cover the infrastructure cost just fine. Maybe cents
| suffice.
|
| Youtube is just one big profit center for Alphabet.
| jsnell wrote:
| YT's content isn't free. The majority of the income
| (55/45 split) from ads and Premium goes to the content
| creators. To compare, in 2021 Netflix had content
| acquisition costs of 60% of their revenue.
|
| And then on the flipside, YT has a much harder
| infrastucture problem than Netflix. There's probably like
| 1000x as much content (both new and existing), and much
| more diversity in what is being watched. That means 1000x
| more storage and transcoding, and far lower cache hit
| rates.
|
| (I've got no idea of whether/how profitable YT is. Just
| saying that if you're trying to reason about it via
| analogy to Netflix, you've got the directionality wrong
| on both of the issues.)
| xyst wrote:
| Decentralized architecture, open source. No one single
| entity owns the platform. "Payment" is in the form of
| sharing your hosted content (bandwidth, energy, time).
| Fully democratized.
| winnie_ua wrote:
| But what if you can't afford having huge server, to
| contribute to the network?
|
| And how to incentivise people in redistributing content?
|
| For example in perfect decentralized p2p world, people on
| mobile clients would be leaching content from fat
| clients. You either have to rent server, to host for your
| own phone, or go to some company to do it for you.
|
| That's complicated :-(
| smoldesu wrote:
| With blackjack and hookers, too!
| wussboy wrote:
| > What replaces it? People aren't going to host content for
| free.
|
| Perhaps. But I for one would like to try this just to see
| what that Internet would look like. I think it would be a
| refreshing change from the Internet we currently have.
| visarga wrote:
| On the medium term I see another problem for search ads - the
| raise of AI powered question answering engines. They are
| accessible through voice on mobile, but probably have much less
| opportunity for ad revenue. The research grade models are
| amazing, but deployed models like Google Assistant very far
| behind. I bet Google is dragging its feet with the deployment
| of QA technology because the shift is not in their interest.
| Site publishers won't like it either because they lose a part
| of the search traffic.
|
| In the meantime a new crop of semantic search + question
| answering engines appear (like DeepSet.ai's Haystack). It's
| time to ditch link based results. They are primitive and
| actually don't work well today.
| soco wrote:
| "Hey Siri show me the best restaurant in town!" "Sure but by
| the way did you know about this new car insurance?"
| greatpostman wrote:
| YouTube and Facebook tune their recommendation algorithms for
| censorship and ad profit. This left a massive gap in their
| product, which was filled by tiktok. Capitalism is at work here
| baxtr wrote:
| The article is based on... nothing? And a bit of TikTok mania? I
| thought this was really low quality in essence - providing no
| real proof for any substantial change.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Did you miss the graph in the article?
|
| Key quote:
|
| > _For Meta and Google's corporate parent, Alphabet, the
| cyclical problem may not be the worst of it. They might once
| have hoped to offset the digital-ad pie's slower growth by
| grabbing a larger slice of it. No longer. Although the two are
| together expected to rake in around $300bn in revenues this
| year, sales of their four biggest rivals in the West will
| amount to almost a quarter as much. If that does not sound like
| a lot, it is nevertheless giving the incumbents reason to
| worry. Five years ago most of those rivals were scarcely in the
| ad business at all (see chart)._
| baxtr wrote:
| So that's saying:
|
| - today: Google and FB have 75% of all sales combined and
| those other rivals have 25%
|
| - 5 years ago: those other rivals had 0%
|
| What does this say about the market share of FB and google 5
| years ago? Nothing. That's exactly what I'm talking about.
| Maybe it was 90%. Maybe it was 75%! But hey, whatever, let's
| publish that clickbait article.
| crazygringo wrote:
| It's an article about potential competitive threats to
| Google-Meta, not a survey of the entire online advertising
| industry. The rise of potential competitors is not
| "nothing".
|
| "Clickbait" can be used with a lot of publications. But in
| the list of publications it can be applied to... I'd say
| the Economist would be ranked about dead last. Maybe tied
| with Der Spiegel.
| baxtr wrote:
| The title is: "the ad duopoly is under attack". The term
| duopoly describes how the market is split: two companies
| make up the biggest chunk. The article provides no
| evidence that the market structure has changed. See my
| comment.
|
| A clickbait can be used by any publication. Apparently,
| including The Economist.
| pessimizer wrote:
| If I'm understanding baxtr's point, they're saying that
| the article is attempting to claim a trend without
| showing enough evidence to point to one. The fact that
| the competitors have gone from 0% to 25% within 5 years
| could be evidence that Google/Meta have growing threats,
| or it could be evidence that their competitors can't grab
| enough of the market to be sustainable so they die within
| 5 years, or that they're buying up all of the competition
| within 5 years of their launch. Google/Meta could have
| gone from 60% of the market to 75% of the market in the
| last five years.
|
| So that's the case for the headline claim that they're _"
| under attack"_ being linkbait. It isn't really affected
| by how you feel about the Economist's (or even less Der
| Spiegel's) brand.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Tiktok ads have significant better results than Google
| Facebook. Not even close.
| pessimizer wrote:
| My assumption is that Google and Facebook are pushing stories
| about how they're in a precarious position and actually have a
| lot of threatening competition, some of it dangerous, foreign,
| and in need of investigation.
| tenpies wrote:
| Absolutely, although the risk for them is retaliation,
| especially with the US deciding that it wants to be the chief
| geopolitical chaos generator in the world.
|
| Having US social media in your country is a huge geopolitical
| risk, especially if you're one of the regimes that isn't just
| doing what the US wants at all times.
| winnie_ua wrote:
| You looks like Russian :D
|
| But you are blaming US in all problems. Typical.
| [deleted]
| seibelj wrote:
| One reason I'm highly skeptical to claims of monopolies,
| especially in an industry as dynamic and volatile as tech, is in
| 5 years you already have competition from new upstarts (TikTok)
| and old hands (Apple and Amazon) that makes claims of digital
| advertising "dominance" by Google and Meta outdated. The monopoly
| claims were suspicious from the beginning but now it looks pretty
| absurd.
| cush wrote:
| They can and have swayed elections at the turn of a dial...
| rabuse wrote:
| TikTok was only able to compete so quickly because it's
| literally sponsored and funded by the CCP.
| largepeepee wrote:
| That's like saying every SV tech company is funded by the
| CIA.
|
| Oh wait..
| pessimizer wrote:
| As if the others aren't government supported and coddled
| monopolies.
| lossolo wrote:
| TikTok is better product than Youtube shorts or Instagram
| reels, money have nothing to do with it, especially while
| FAANG have more money than ByteDance.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| The claims of monopoly have always been political. The only
| company that comes close to a monopoly is Apple due to them
| locking out third-party apps on their phones.
| trhway wrote:
| "Monopoly" is just a shorthand for a range of market
| dominance abuse. I.e. if an 800lb gorilla abuses you, it
| doesn't really matter that there are several others 600-700
| lb gorillas ready to do the same to you.
|
| https://ethique.rexel.com/en/competition-law/abuse-of-a-
| domi...
|
| "A dominant position is not defined merely by market share,
| but by classification as a market leader. Typically, a
| company is considered to hold a dominant position if it has a
| market share of more than 40%, but even a market share of 15%
| may be considered dominant if it is the largest player in a
| fragmented market. "
| blululu wrote:
| Monopoly literally means a single seller. Duopolies and
| oligopolies are distinct both in theory and practice.
| nvrspyx wrote:
| I think they're saying that the word "monopoly" is used
| colloquially, by many, to simply mean dominant position
| and that those people don't mean the literal definition.
| It seems they're just trying to say that the parent
| comment is arguing about the definition of monopoly
| rather than the actual point, which is dominant position
| abuse.
|
| I agree that it's important to recognize the differences
| between monopolies, duopolies, and oligopolies in theory
| and practice, as you say, but I also don't think that
| using the wrong term nullifies validity of the actual
| point.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Fine, bring back "trust" if you prefer an archaic
| precision. Antitrust is about trusts, not monopolies.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| Did you[r quote] somehow confuse 'monopoly' with
| 'dominant'?
| zo1 wrote:
| Unfortunately, in the meantime, the "monopoly" has done huge
| and world-or-population scale damage in some way. Just think of
| how the industry has been affected (potentially negatively) by
| the heavy push and funding by big tech giants of technologies
| such as React, Angular, and Kubernetes?
| [deleted]
| warinukraine wrote:
| 13324 wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220918181734/https://www.econo...
| hardware2win wrote:
| Are MSFT and Apple safest faangs rn?
| tootie wrote:
| Did you look at the graphic? Google and Meta no longer have a
| stranglehold on the market, but the market is also bigger than
| ever. 70% of the ad market in 2022 is worth more than 90% was
| in 2012.
| screye wrote:
| Facebook and social media companies rely on viral phenomena to
| sustain their monopoly. It will take 1 inciting event for them
| to fall into an irreversible death spiral. The instagram +
| whatsapp acquisition, feeling threatened by 100x smaller dev
| shops demonstrates that.
|
| Google's big advantage is that their core product has
| fundamental value (search and by proxy: ads) and their
| secondary products are such loss-leaders that outcompeting
| those freebies (Google office suite, Gmail, maps, YT, chrome,
| ml tooling) is where the real difficulty comes in. But building
| a core-search competitor is far easier than competition with
| Apple or Msft's core products. Google has a lot more
| scaffolding that FB, but they too have a single point of
| failure. A sea-change (like Mapreduce, pagerank, the
| smartphone) can see them collapse swiftly.
|
| On the other hand, enterprise / feature-checklist companies lie
| in a stable equilibrium. You can't really beat them unless you
| invest a similar amount of resources into it. And even if you
| defeat them, they'll catch up to you in time if they're run at
| similar levels of competency and can throw a ton money money at
| it. Microsoft and Apple are exactly that. It's like trying to
| start a Boeing or Nvidia competitor. You better at least be at
| Airbus's or AMD's level before even trying to compete against
| boeing.
|
| Microsoft's weakness is best displayed by Adpbe's acquisition
| of Figma. If Microsoft is run in a similarly predatory manner
| and a competitor gets 10 free years to catch up on 1 feature
| while you continuously fail to innovate, then you feel a mild
| threat, at which point you can simply outbid and acquire them.
| That shows how remarkably comfortable of a position Adobe is
| in, and Microsft and Apple sit a couple of orders of magnitude
| above that.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| I'm fairly certain gmail, youtube, and gsuite on their own
| would be unicorns still.
| scarface74 wrote:
| YouTube is barely break even according to most reports and
| GSuite is really not that big in the enterprise.
|
| https://www.computerworld.com/article/3637079/as-google-
| move...
|
| > Google grew its share of the productivity software market
| to 10.3% in 2020, according to research from Gartner,
| taking about 2% from Microsoft. Microsoft is still the
| clear leader however, with 89.2%. Overall, the productivity
| software suite market grew 18.2% during 2020.
| IceWreck wrote:
| Youtube wouldve never grown to that size without Googe's
| money. It wouldve inevitably shut down or made huge changes
| to their model.
|
| Gmail, yes it would be huge without google but its only so
| bug because google forced it down everyone's throats with
| mandatory google accounts for android, maps, youtube,
| drive, etc.
|
| GSuite again this would never be s big without google's
| backing. Just look at its non MS competitors.
| scarface74 wrote:
| What happens if Apple decides to or is forced to stop
| accepting a reported $18 billion a year to be the default
| search engine on iOS devices? Google will lose its most
| valuable customers.
|
| Microsoft Office adoption in the enterprise dwarfs GSuite.
| screye wrote:
| Oh yeah, that's exactly my point.
|
| IMO, The vulnerability from most vulnerable to least goes:
|
| Facebook > Google >> Apple ~> Microsoft = Amazon
| bradleyjg wrote:
| Microsoft is reliant on Azure for growth. Although cloud
| initiatives are designed to save money in the long run, in the
| short run they cost money. If we go into a strong recession
| than at the least I would expect Azure to do worse than
| projected.
|
| Likewise, Apple sells luxury goods.
|
| If I had to bet on one FAAMNG in a sharp recession it would be
| Amazon. They have the most diversified revenue streams.
| scarface74 wrote:
| This could only come from someone who doesn't understand the
| enterprise.
|
| How is a luxury good affordable by over 50% of the US market?
| bee_rider wrote:
| FAANG is kind of a weird classification: 4 web companies, 2 of
| which are primarily ad companies... and then Apple, a devices
| company with real low-level chops.
|
| Why don't we put Apple in with somebody like: MAIA --
| Microsoft, Apple, Intel, AMD. Maybe add NVIDIA, you have to
| work out a good acronym though.
| [deleted]
| classified wrote:
| > a good acronym
|
| MANIA
| bee_rider wrote:
| Ah wow, that's better than the Lord of the Rings reference.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Intel and AMD are no longer dominant.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Well, it depends on how you want to define "dominant" (in
| which markets, by what metrics) and to be honest the
| ambiguous opener has not reeled me in.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Intel market cap is 120B. Apple, Microsoft, Google and
| Amazon are all worth more than a trillion.
|
| TSMCs market cap is 4x Intel's and produces far more
| processors and has a more advanced manufacturing process.
| Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote:
| Yes, but I don't think there's been a moment where they were
| not the safest.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Well except for when Apple lost most of their market share
| and almost went bankrupt.
| deepstack wrote:
| Yup there were even Mac clones then, MS actually came in
| saved Apple at one point.
| samwillis wrote:
| That was very much pre FAANG as a construct. Apple, since
| it's second coming, has never be in an unsafe position.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Apple is focused on consumer products and consumers can
| be fickle. While it won't be anytime soon, it's not
| impossible for Apple to someday lose the design mojo that
| makes their products popular. Steve Jobs and his RDF
| aren't there anymore and neither is Jony Ive.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Creating hardware at scale is hard. What company do you
| think will be able to duplicate Apple's infrastructure,
| manufacturing, chip design, retail, etc?
|
| Not to mention that even with "great design" any Android
| phone is still stuck with being Android and the lack of
| integration between software, hardware and ecosystem.
| bergenty wrote:
| Goog and Facebook are still safe as hell. Even if you think
| Facebook is waning, is going tk be hard to dislodge WhatsApp
| and instagram and I don't really think Facebook is going away.
| doktorhladnjak wrote:
| Those companies aren't going away any time soon. Heck, IBM,
| Cisco, Hewlett Packard are all still around, and all still
| making profits. Doesn't mean they're desirable places to work
| at all compared to the olden days.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Apple, Amazon and Microsoft. They have real hard to reproduce
| infrastructure.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| It's an interesting issue because it is probably Apple's fault.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/small-businesses-cou...
|
| Apple accidentally attacked small businesses that used to rely on
| geographically relevant advertising by increasing privacy
| protection.
|
| There is no easy solution here.
| wussboy wrote:
| All that geographically relevant advertising could go back to
| how it was before Facebook/Google became the only way to do it.
| It seem an easy-enough solution to me.
| samwillis wrote:
| To some extent I disagree with this, not that Google+Meta are
| under attack, but that the threat is coming from competitors.
|
| I've spent most of the last 10 years earning my living from an
| e-commerce business I own. The online advertising industry is
| unrecognisable from when we started. My thesis, in beef, is that
| the industries excessive uses of personalised data and tracking
| lead to increased regulation, and then a massive pivot to even
| more "AI" as a means to circumvent that (to some extent). The AI
| in the ad industry now, I believe, is detrimental to the
| advertiser. It's now just one big black box, you put money in one
| side and get traffic out the other. The control and useful
| tracking (what _actual_ search terms people are using, proper
| _visible_ conversion tracking of an ad) is now almost non-
| existent. As an advertiser your livelihood is dependant on an
| algorithm, not skill, not intuition, not experience, not even
| track record.
|
| Facebook, Google and the rest of the industry were so driven by
| profit at all cost, and at the expense of long term thinking,
| they shot themselves in the foot.
|
| Advertisers are searching for alternatives, but they are all the
| same.
|
| I think online advertising, as a whole, is probably f***ed...
| civilized wrote:
| > My thesis, in beef
|
| This is a delightful turn of phrase. I wonder if it was
| deliberate or an autocorrect happy accident.
| verisimi wrote:
| In brief, I think
| samwillis wrote:
| Correct.
| samwillis wrote:
| I really hate iPhone autocorrect...
| hestefisk wrote:
| It's a very beefy thesis ... Or a beef with someone?
| civilized wrote:
| The latter. Since he's complaining about the ad industry
| from what sounds like a personal perspective.
| xwdv wrote:
| Is it really much different from offline advertising in days of
| old? That was more or less also a black box.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Yes, you would know what content your ad was displayed
| between and could draw inferences and do research on that
| specific audience.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "Facebook, Google and the rest of the industry were so driven
| by profit at all cost, and at the expense of long term
| thinking, they shot themselves in the foot."
|
| If one subscribes to the idea that reducing spending can help
| curb inflation, then the "business model" of online
| advertising-supported "tech" companies seem to require that
| consumers keep spending, in spite of inflation.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Have you read "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism"? I would say
| that your observations - tho they frustrate you - are very much
| inline with what the book proposes.
|
| In short, and paraphrased a bit to speak to your context,
| you're no longer buying impressions / clicks in the traditional
| transactional sense. Instead you're buying the influence on
| behavior within the broader context of what these networks know
| about the individuals within a market, but also what other
| influence these networks have accrued on the individuals.
|
| It's a blackbox be because it's no longer a simple transaction,
| but also because the AI (?) is in a broader sense exerting
| proactive influences. Nudges on behavior that add up and
| ideally can not only be predicted but also created.
|
| The book is long and deep, but it will also change how you view
| the world and Big Tech.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capi...
| jeremyjh wrote:
| But how does an ad buyer know their ads are even displayed to
| a relevant audience?
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| You don't, but that's what's being sold. Not the old
| transaction, but instead the boarder awareness from the
| network of the market to create and deliver an audience.
|
| Put another way, the book would argue that with the
| traditional way "relevance" was a reactive guess. Going
| forward the ability to create the desired behaviour is less
| of a guess and more predictable.
| martincmartin wrote:
| > _As an advertiser your livelihood is dependant on an
| algorithm, not skill, not intuition, not experience, not even
| track record._
|
| In other words, companies now have to compete by making useful
| products at a good price, rather than gaming SEO.
| deltree7 wrote:
| Naive understanding of the world / information.
|
| Say, In a world of 1,000,000,000+ great products, reaching
| consumers through word-of-mouth is hard.
|
| I bet there are products that solves a lot of your current
| problems at a decent price. But you don't know about it and
| none of your friends or network have the same problem for you
| to give you the solution.
|
| The only way to solve this problem is for the product/service
| provider to know about you and the fact that you have a
| problem.
|
| Advertising is actually an optimal / scalable way for
| companies to reach you.
|
| In a Billion+ product world, you need at least 10 Million
| Trust worthy reviewers to give you an unbiased review of
| everything. But, how do you trust the reviewers?
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| >>"The only way to solve this problem is for the
| product/service provider to know about you and the fact
| that you have a problem."
|
| Only way?? No.
|
| No no absolutely not.
|
| If/Since we are talking ideas and hypothetical, the
| _preferred_ way would be for me to search for a product /
| indicate my need, and then marketplace to provide / compete
| for it.
|
| The whole notion that advertiser must understand what I
| need, all the time, without my involvement knowledge or
| permission, then shove what it thinks I need up my throat
| constantly, is dystopian.
|
| Basically, I think we are mixing up a pull paradigm to
| satisfy the consumer, with a push paradigm to satisfy the
| business. This is not to be naive about realities of world,
| business, saturated market, crappy products and
| differentiation, etc. But it peeves me when companies lack
| self awareness to be honest with themselves about which
| model is beneficial to which party.
|
| Edit (and if we are going to talk about consumers being
| ignorant of the realities, let us not please _pretend_ that
| the ultimate purpose of advertising is to perfectly satisfy
| a need with optimal product. Ultimate purpose of
| advertising is to make a sale. Sometimes, that sale is in
| fact optimal for the consumer. We can disagree how often
| that occurs as a percentage.)
|
| Edit edit : the more I think the more I disagree. It's the
| word "optimal" that really bugs me - there's nothing
| optimal about modern online advertising. Clever,
| persistent, pervasive, desperate, aobnoxious, hard work,
| are some attributes that come to my mind. But it feels far
| from optimal - there's so much money and effort in this
| arms race which is increasingly hostile between an
| advertiser and consumer, and knowingly so; google and meta
| are 300 billion worth of not optimal :->
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Even though this idea of visibility is often touted, the
| vast majority of advertising is in practice all about
| obfuscating the actual uses (and especially limitations) of
| a product.
|
| Furthermore, rather than trying to find the few people whom
| a product matches, it is often about pushing the product on
| people who never needed it in the first place - such as the
| diamond industry marketing inventing the practice of giving
| diamond rings for engagements, or the toy industry creating
| ads to specifically teach children to nag their parents. Or
| the vast amounta of pills promising penis enlargement.
|
| Sure, these things may not happen so much in B2B specialty
| advertising, but in B2C they are the norm, and exceptions
| are few and far between.
| deltree7 wrote:
| You can reform the Ad industry in several ways (enhancing
| "truth in advertisment")
|
| i) You can only use factual information.
|
| ii) You can't use visual props unrelated to the product
| (sexy women, beaches, fancy cars, spas)
|
| But to burn advertisements due to shortcomings is like
| hating/shutting down internet because of 4chan or QAnon
| tsimionescu wrote:
| If 4chan and QAnon were the vast majority of the
| internet, I would agree with the comparison.
|
| But as I said, the vast vast majority of advertising by
| any measure you chose to use is of the manipulative kind,
| not informative. And this despite the existence of truth-
| in-advertising laws for decades.
|
| And banning advertising is not even that harmful to
| industry - we have the case study of the tabacco
| industry, which didn't exactly die away once advertising
| of all of its products was entirely prohibited in all
| wealthy countries.
| ajl666 wrote:
| Define advertising by segmenting off of Poetry, Prose,
| and Aphorism.
|
| You can't. I don't understand how so many engineers can't
| do basic logic.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| In a funny kind of way, I'd rather have unsolvable problems
| than be advertised at.
|
| If the problems actually need solving, ill go looking.
|
| If I'm not looking, there's no problem (to be solved).
| deltree7 wrote:
| Newsflash: There are unknown, unknowns.
|
| The vast majority of the population, they don't even know
| there are solutions that would change their life.
|
| E.g: In a world of 8,000,000,000 how many people know
| that there is Coursera which has top-level courses that
| can change their lives, improve productivity and make
| impact?.
|
| "I know everything, don't tell me. I'll ask" is exactly
| the attitude that prevents learning (and prevents people
| from knowing about coursera). You are just advertising
| that personality to the rest of the world
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > In a world of 8,000,000,000 how many people know that
| there is Coursera which has top-level courses that can
| change their lives, improve productivity and make
| impact?.
|
| I would bet there are more people who know Coursera
| exists than people whose lives would literally change if
| they took a few Coursera courses (though that doesn't
| mean that there aren't _some_ people whose lives _could_
| be changed by Coursera if they knew about it).
|
| However, seeing an Ad for Coursera is not likely to help
| anyone find out whether Corusera can actually help them
| or not - since there is absolutely no way to tell from an
| ad whether the product being presented is going to be
| even close to fit for purpose. The only thing the ad
| tells you that can be trusted is "Coursera is a company
| that is trying to sell online courses" (note: that
| doesn't mean that they actually _provide_ online courses,
| you can only trust that they are trying to sell them -
| see the myriads of ads for mobile puzzle games whose
| gameplay has literally no relation to the game play shown
| in the ad).
|
| Note: I'm not trying to take potshots at Coursera here -
| they are a reputable business and have many good courses
| - which I know from my own and friends' personal
| experiences. I'm trying to look objectively of what an ad
| for a company you know nothing about can actually tell
| you.
| ajl666 wrote:
| Seems obvious. I agree. However I think you're not going
| to get through to those with central planning biases. By
| which I mean, the notion that perfect planning can beat
| the market.
|
| The Palace Economy central planner says, "give me wheat."
| The Soviet central planner says, "more steel comrades."
| The American style technocrat planner says, "we will tell
| you what you want and then deny market alternatives."
|
| I think there's no reasoning with these people
| ajl666 wrote:
| Hey downvoter. If the point is so weak, surely you can
| refute my moronic self with some cunning argument.
|
| Why are so many information scientists afraid of
| information?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| You're not making any points, and your comments are
| written to be inflammatory (unlike deltree7's, who is
| clearly advancing the conversation, even if I don't agree
| with them).
| einpoklum wrote:
| The thing is, the mass of advertising isn't about helping
| you know the unknown unknowns, it's about manipulating
| you into wanting things you know about, more, or wanting
| things you don't need / wouldn't really want in a fair
| evaluation.
|
| The thing is, in our society, institutions mostly develop
| venues for advertising rather than for listing - since
| both the owners of the venue and the entities offering
| products/services have overarching profit motives, and
| advertising is more profitable.
| batch12 wrote:
| > The vast majority of the population, they don't even
| know there are solutions that would change their life.
|
| > I know everything, don't tell me. I'll ask" is exactly
| the attitude that prevents learning
|
| This feels parental-- a version of mommy knows best. Why
| not let me, by default, decide if I want personalized
| advertisements? What if I want to be ignorant in regards
| to the new fad product? What if I don't want companies to
| mine my interests, location, prior searches, etc just to
| tell me that coursera exists? Advertisers are afraid of
| using an opt-in model because they _know_ most people won
| 't do it.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| >If the problems actually need solving, ill go looking.
|
| What if you _are_ looking, but an advertisement helps you
| find it faster?
|
| As an example, I was shopping for a keyboard the other
| day. I spent several hours looking through different
| specs. It would be handy if a website would have popped
| up "hey, here are the 3 you are probably looking for,
| pick one!".
|
| The benefit would have been for me (less time looking)
| and for three site (less server time serving pages to me)
| Larrikin wrote:
| In my experience all three options are usually crap and I
| would have been better served doing my own research.
|
| The only time advertising has been of use to me is
| advertising clothing. It's an extremely saturated market,
| so searching for "cool t shirt" or "nice jeans" is
| worthless. Before COVID I would go to a nice area in
| Tokyo, NYC, or some other major city and just load up
| when it was time to buy new clothes.
|
| I block most ads, but a couple ads have gotten through
| over the years and I've learned about new brands or
| atleast new styles and had a jumping off point.
|
| I still feel I am way better off blocking as many ads as
| I can, but can't say they've been completely worthless.
|
| Most of the HN crowd can't fathom the idea of spending
| money on clothing outside of necessity. Shirts that will
| last ten years is more popular of a topic than shirts
| that actually look good.
| plorkyeran wrote:
| When I am looking to buy something, ads actively get in
| the way of that. Ads are why we don't have websites that
| tell you "these are the 3 options you're probably looking
| for" any more because people figured out that they can
| make sites like that where the three choices are just ads
| rather than good recommendations. There's been times when
| I've simply given up on buying something because I got
| sick of wading through ads looking for any actual
| information.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| If I have a know I have problem, I'll look for a solution
| myself, and perform an objective comparison. I don't need
| some marketing asshat's stilted sales copy designed to con
| idiots into buying.
|
| Convincing people who are happy that they have problems
| they need to spend money to solve for your personal benefit
| is morally dubious at best.
| deltree7 wrote:
| Unknown Unknowns.
|
| How would you let people people know that they may be
| prone to cancer?
|
| How can you inform the world population that there exists
| coursera that teaches you skills on any imaginable
| subject that may change their lives?
|
| Most people aren't looking for those categories of
| information.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| don't you form an opinion by looking at reviews made by
| the idiots conned by those asshats?
| ajl666 wrote:
| It's too subtle a point. The argument here is not about
| logic, but about intellectual honesty.
|
| The parent you replied to believes everybody else is
| unduly influenced by 'asshats' and that his/her favored
| influencers are not 'asshats.' As if Ezra Pound or Edmund
| Teller weren't 'asshats' for nuclear explosive mining, or
| fascism.
|
| Dismissing advertisers for being into the 'filthy lucre?'
| So what should we do with all the engineers doing the
| same?
| ajl666 wrote:
| Classic central planning answer.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| I would venture a guess that companies that already made
| quality products are entirely unaffected by this, it's
| companies pushing shit that only sells thanks to ads that get
| hit, and: good. I hope those all go out of business.
| ravenstine wrote:
| The Google laughs maniacally in response and says:
|
| "No, no... we're not competing with _ad_ firms. We 're about
| bringing products to users before there's even a need to
| advertise them."
| simfree wrote:
| I have given up on Google AdWords due to the exact issue you
| describe.
|
| Trying to restrict my advertising budget to just one city and
| do a hard geographic restriction to just US IP addresses did
| not work. I filed 5 tickets over two weeks with Google trying
| to get this resolved, only to have over half my budget spent in
| another continent making impressions with people that will
| literally never buy the local specific product advertised.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Same exact thing happened to me when launching a product that
| was only available in the US.
|
| For whatever reason, Google was showing my ads to people on
| the other side of the planet and then taking my money for the
| privilege.
| missedthecue wrote:
| I have had the opposite experience. I have tried many
| different ad networks for my product and the only two that
| work are Google and Bing, but Bing has very low volume.
| Facebook's bounce rate is about 80%. I get billed for so many
| accidental clicks.
|
| Most other non-faang ad networks are hot garbage. So many
| bots. In my view, Google has a "monopoly" not because of
| anti-competitive behaviour... It's because they have the best
| ad product.
| AJ007 wrote:
| I think there is probably a record breaking class action
| lawsuit here with the right lawyers. Damages could be 50-100%
| of Google's yearly gross revenue, especially when you include
| countries outside on the US who really don't like Google.
|
| Google intentionally modified both geo-targeting and mobile
| app targeting, removing the options advertisers set. For
| example, you opted out of mobile app targeted. Then they
| removed the option and you had to set it in the domain
| blacklist. Then they removed that. This wasn't a one off,
| hid, modified, and moved these options repeatedly.
|
| Advertisers didn't know that when you geo-targeted a
| location, by default it was set to users searching that
| location. You didn't want people in India who were interested
| in NYC? Too bad.
|
| Remember the whole Adwords prescription drug settlement. This
| is an organization run by people who would be serving hard
| time if they didn't have a legion of lawyers and bottomless
| pockets.
| Covzire wrote:
| That's ridiculous, isn't selecting a target market
| Marketing/Econ 101? What possible reason would they have for
| not giving some kind of locality options?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Google Knows Best(tm) and lack of real competition or
| regulation means they can do whatever they want.
| hnick wrote:
| Yeah I found it quite hard as a novice to actually tell if my
| Facebook pixel stuff was all working and firing exactly as
| intended. The lack of data means it's hard to map a 1:1
| relationship for a certain visitor (me). "Luckily", our site
| was not successful so we could find some matches in the recent
| queries list... on a busier site it would have been hard to pin
| down.
|
| It still felt like a total money pit into which you toss
| offerings to a dark god which may or may not grant blessings.
| whatever1 wrote:
| But that is adverting in general. We have billboards, tv ads,
| paper ads, product placements. You have no clue how many
| people will buy because of these ads. But you burn your cash
| anyway.
| hnick wrote:
| The difference there - you can at least verify your ad is
| being _shown_ , even if it is not a guarantee of
| effectiveness, and use other estimates to see how many
| people see it such as foot traffic or TV viewership.
|
| I have no real way of knowing how many people see my online
| advertising, I just get a number and a bill, and I have to
| trust them. The pixel does help for visits but not views
| and other metrics.
| EGreg wrote:
| Yep, it is, and there are far better models out there.
|
| Here is just one of MANY possibilities:
| https://qbix.com/ecosystem#Decentralizing-the-Marketplace
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Ultimately as ad blocking rises im pretty sure ad hosting and
| tracking as it is now will go the same way popups went and ads
| will end up within the content itself or included in the pages
| directly so they can't be blocked.
| candiodari wrote:
| I look forward to them first AI ad blockers then.
| adbro123 wrote:
| > what actual search terms people are using, proper visible
| conversion tracking of an ad
|
| I sympathize with this position. I operate a one stop shop for
| digital advertising for huge brands.
|
| First I agree that the regulations (the government ones and
| Apple's) have benefitted no one. This is in a sense totally
| factual, and I challenge the blowhards here to like, name one
| substantive harm someone has experienced from ad ID tracking on
| an iPhone. While I believe government regulations should be
| proactive, rather than reactive, I believe the sum total
| history of ad tracking has pretty much confirmed that there
| aren't any substantive harms to correlated ad IDs.
|
| From the perspective of advertisers:
|
| An enlightening explanation of the Google value ad I read came
| from another guy explaining how he advertised dev tools on
| Google. He created a YouTube ad so that Johnny Programmer,
| watching YouTube videos on a weekend, would see a demo of his
| devops tool because Johnny searched "how to connect git to
| kubernetes" or whatever in the previous 10 days. And those ads
| converted really well. Even though the YouTube video had no
| contextual relationship with the ad the user saw.
|
| So it sounds like you are complaining about the flaws in
| Google's tracking UI. Well, I guess e-mail them some more.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > This is in a sense totally factual, and I challenge the
| blowhards here to like, name one substantive harm someone has
| experienced from ad ID tracking on an iPhone.
|
| You then give a perfect example right in the next paragraph:
|
| > so that Johnny Programmer, watching YouTube videos on a
| weekend, would see a demo of his devops tool because Johnny
| searched "how to connect git to kubernetes" or whatever in
| the previous 10 days.
|
| So now Johnny Programmer's work life is hounding him on
| weekends. Even worse, he is being influenced to buy a paid
| product to do something that could probably be easily
| achieved with open source tools as well.
| aidos wrote:
| To be fair, you should use different profiles for your work
| and personal digital lives.
|
| And if someone is likely to use an open source solution,
| they're also unlikely to be influenced to switch to a paid
| product based on an ad instead.
| kixiQu wrote:
| Why should I have to use a different "profile"?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Advertising is actively working against this - trying to
| find ways to correlate your activity across as many
| devices and accounts as possible. Especially now that
| work from home, BYOD and ZeroTrust (which reduces the
| need for corporate VPNs) are all blurring the lines and
| giving new opportunities for correlation.
|
| > And if someone is likely to use an open source
| solution, they're also unlikely to be influenced to
| switch to a paid product based on an ad instead.
|
| This is assuming that the ad isn't promising something
| too good to be true, or using deceptive pricing to make
| it seem cheap enough to be better than the OSS, or using
| psychological tricks to try to override your rational
| choice (which may not work for this particular example,
| but may well work for many others).
| senorrib wrote:
| If you make the example abstract you _might_ understand
| what the problem is.
| [deleted]
| tomcam wrote:
| > Well, I guess e-mail them some more.
|
| That will definitely work
| pnutjam wrote:
| user name checks out
| Guvante wrote:
| > This is in a sense totally factual, and I challenge the
| blowhards here to like, name one substantive harm someone has
| experienced from ad ID tracking on an iPhone
|
| Building up a huge library of data about you in an
| unregulated fashion has never backfired on the public at
| large, oh wait those exact data warehouses have been
| continuous sources of pain for users.
|
| The reality is these breaches cost the business next to
| nothing. After all even if millions of users have <$100 worth
| of damages it is impossible to recover that. So the business
| did hundreds of millions of damages at no cost to itself.
| doktorhladnjak wrote:
| > I challenge the blowhards here to like, name one
| substantive harm someone has experienced from ad ID tracking
| on an iPhone
|
| The sense of entitlement from those on the other side of the
| ads business, and their disdain for what users might want or
| how they feel, shows exactly why this business and industry
| is broken. And frankly why the whole thing is being dragged
| down right now. Figure it out. Adapt. It's what every other
| business has to do all the time.
| sameadbro456 wrote:
| > Figure it out. Adapt.
|
| I understand this is a stylized opinion.
|
| There is actually a great deal of innovation in
| advertising! I don't think the ad ID tracking is going to,
| on net, matter. For example, Fortnite already has
| unavoidable branded advertising that doesn't require
| tracking at all to work. Native ads can't be blocked by
| uBlock.
|
| The big forces at play move around where advertising goes,
| but it doesn't really get rid of it or necessarily make it
| "better". Probably we should not allow advertising to kids,
| and yet here we are, Roblox and Fortnite branded
| experiences primarily for very young children! Thanks
| Obama.
|
| > disdain
|
| I don't know, I only have a jokey disdain for the end user.
| People have rehashed these arguments a million times. You
| can't just righteous your way into being right here. I
| would just say you didn't name any harms, and then you went
| and blew very hard.
| umanwizard wrote:
| You didn't answer his question, you just stated your own
| opinion.
| kingkawn wrote:
| One bad substantive harm from ad id tracking on iOS?
|
| Making zuck and google richer.
| timfsu wrote:
| Yes, but Zuck and Google get richer because companies are
| paying them for a valuable service. It's unclear that
| destroying that value helps anyone
| callmeal wrote:
| >I challenge the blowhards here to like, name one substantive
| harm someone has experienced from ad ID tracking on an
| iPhone.
|
| How quickly we forget/forgot this proof of concept:
|
| http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-
| pranking-...
| [deleted]
| saagarjha wrote:
| > This is in a sense totally factual, and I challenge the
| blowhards here to like, name one substantive harm someone has
| experienced from ad ID tracking on an iPhone.
|
| Things don't have to cause obvious harm to still be
| inappropriate.
| sameadbro456 wrote:
| It's all tradeoffs at the end of the day. A better
| entertained, better informed public - enjoying their free
| IP paid by better ads - is worth the some-abstract-not-yet
| harms.
|
| That said I believe journalists are definitely getting
| fucked by the government, Google, Meta and even Apple, with
| the shit payouts of Apple News being unsustainable too. You
| misunderstand me, these giant corporations are definitely
| the antagonist.
|
| It's just not necessarily most advertisers, who just want
| to get you to buy shoes or whatever the fuck. Nobody forces
| you to buy anything. But someone has to feed the
| journalists.
| rs999gti wrote:
| Unless these competitors have something groundbreaking, Google
| and Meta can counter by undercutting ad spend pricing or
| acquiring potential rivals
| wharfjumper wrote:
| The main rivals referred to are Amazon, Microsoft and Apple so
| acquisition doesn't seem a realistic option.
| wharfjumper wrote:
| Since Apple, Microsoft and Amazon revenue mostly comes from non
| ad sources, a price war would weaken AlphaMeta relatively.
| nixcraft wrote:
| Is it just me, or do major tech companies turn into advertising
| businesses even for paid products like Windows OS[1] or
| iPhone/iOS[2]?
|
| [1] https://www.makeuseof.com/windows-11-remove-ads/
|
| [2]
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-08-14/apple-...
| amelius wrote:
| This is at least as old as Smart TVs.
| cowtools wrote:
| this really punches a hole in the idea that "if you're not the
| customer, you're the product"
| yissp wrote:
| Newspapers, magazines, cable TV, product placement in films,
| ... even if you're paying you can definitely still be the
| product.
| daptaq wrote:
| To be fair, you can't deduce "A -> ~B" from "A -> B". You can
| be the customer and the product.
| cowtools wrote:
| But doesn't it imply that the only way to not be the
| product is to be the customer? In this case, we see that
| being the customer is insufficient to not be the product.
| daptaq wrote:
| No, being a product or a customer stand in no relation to
| one another. You can be neither, either, or both. If you
| don't want to be a product, you have to work on that, not
| on being a better customer.
| sneak wrote:
| No, the only way to not be the product is to not provide
| PII to big tech, or their downstreams that immediately
| shuttle your PII to big tech.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Advertising doesn't technically need PII, any kind of II
| is enough (PII typically refers to things like your name
| or face or address).
| sneak wrote:
| Every app these days requires your unique and unchanging
| advertising identifier to log in. You can't get an Apple
| ID or Google account, or order a pizza or make a dinner
| reservation without it.
|
| You might know it as your phone number.
| kibwen wrote:
| It doesn't punch a hole in it. If P implies Q, that doesn't
| mean the inverse of P implies the inverse of Q. If you're not
| the customer, you're the product. But if you are the
| customer, well, sometimes you're still the product.
| tshaddox wrote:
| It certainly diminishes the usefulness of the rule of thumb
| if you add "and you're still the product anyway even if
| you're paying" to the end of it.
| chucksmash wrote:
| Cogito ergo productum
| tsimionescu wrote:
| "Cogito ergo product sum" (I think therefore I am the
| product) would be closer to the original and more
| slightly-Latin-like.
| cowtools wrote:
| Sometimes you are neither the customer nor the product.
| (e.g. a service like wikpedia or a project like linux)
|
| I think the context in which the phrase "if you're not the
| customer, you're the product" is often used implies that we
| should upgrade our relationship by paying, however this is
| not necessarily the case as shown here.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| You're always the product unless you're using freedom
| respecting hardware and software. If you're a customer, it
| just means you paid for the privilege of being someone else's
| product.
| cowtools wrote:
| You're not the customer or the product: you're the
| developer.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Okay. I'd rather be the developer than the product.
| seydor wrote:
| You re the customer, and the product
| summerlight wrote:
| Technically, advertising business basically solves a market
| optimization problem, which means you can keep improving
| revenue/profit while your business structure remaining
| transparent to customers. This gives you a definite control on
| your business as well as removing lots of uncertainties. I have
| no doubt Apple or MS want to get their hands into the
| advertising business; how to do that is a different question
| though.
| simfree wrote:
| Apple already sells ads, and has been expanding where they
| show ads over time.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| It's not just you. The business model of many tech companies
| consists of creating digital fiefdoms to lock "their" users
| into and then selling access to "their" users. They sell access
| to "their" users to other software developers. They sell access
| to the attention of "their" users to advertisers.
|
| It's pretty disgusting and dehumanizing.
| goosedragons wrote:
| I reinstalled Windows 10 on a machine recently and like half
| the setup process is now ads for other Microsoft services or
| things related to ads. Do you want Office 365? OneDrive? Xbox
| Game Pass? Can we use your location for ads? Kind of
| ridiculous. I don't think there was any the first time I
| installed Win 10? Maybe just Office 365?
|
| I can't wait for Windows 13 when Microsoft has sold installer
| ads to the highest bidder and I'm asked if I want a case of
| Mountain Dew during install.
| FearlessNebula wrote:
| Please drink a verification can
| tomcam wrote:
| OK that was really really good. Thank you.
| FearlessNebula wrote:
| Oh I can't take credit for that, it's from 4Chan:
| https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/983286-4chan
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| That's hilarious. It just keeps getting worse. It's like
| they have no self-awareness or limits.
| Liquix wrote:
| These corporations are not bastions of self-awareness nor
| moral fortitude. They are machines with the singular goal
| of making the red line go up. It will continue to get
| worse as long as people continue buying their products.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| That's funny. Whatever happened to vision and innovation?
| Improving the world and people's lives? Achieving great
| things through technology? Empowering people? I guess
| founders only talk about this stuff in the startup stage.
|
| If all these corporations will concern themselves with is
| "line go up" then it's time for society to step in and
| seriously constrain what they're allowed to do in order
| to drive that line up. Frankly, corporations making line
| go up by shoving advertising into everything everywhere
| aren't adding a lot of value. They're just increasing
| audiovisual pollution and that's an _extremely_
| charitable interpretation of their activities. What I
| actually think is they 're violating my mind every single
| time they show me an advertisement. My attention is mine,
| it's not theirs to sell off to the highest bidder. I
| couldn't care less how much money it costs them, it
| should be illegal for them to do it.
| dageshi wrote:
| Most of the most successful corporations/businesses have
| vision/innovation to begin with, they do create useful
| things that people didn't know they wanted but once they
| see it they do.
|
| After a while though, the business gets big enough that
| no new innovation can actually move the needle on the
| businesses revenues, the people at those companies who do
| have ideas are better off getting paid well for some
| period of time and then leaving to make it themselves.
|
| That's the stage google is in more or less, innovation
| won't move their bottom line very much so they're trying
| to extract as much as possible from their existing
| businesses, which basically means as many ads as possible
| in as many places as possible.
| boplicity wrote:
| Unfortunately, it's a very similar situation for MacOS.
| Seemingly endless prompts to sign up for one service or
| another. At least Linux is viable for _some_ of us.
| sithlord wrote:
| is that any different than going to Disney World and having
| coke products shoved in your face?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Of course. When I go to places like that, it's because I
| _want_ to consume. When I go to a store, when I open the
| store app, it 's because I _want_ to see products. That 's
| the whole point. In those cases, it's not advertising, it's
| information.
|
| The problem with computers today is you get advertised to
| no matter what you do. Can't boot goddamn Windows without
| it finding an excuse to show you stupid Taboola ads. Can't
| open a simple website without being literally flooded with
| ads all around the "content". This "content" is just an
| incidental abstraction, an arbitrary square on the screen
| that ads mold themselves around like parasites. It doesn't
| matter what the "content" is, it could be anything that
| draws in users, the real product is their attention being
| captured by the ads.
| grey_earthling wrote:
| I describe this problem as misaligned purposes.
|
| You want to consume plastic stuff; Disney World wants to
| sell you plastic stuff; a magical time ensues.
|
| But you buy Windows because you want a useful OS; whereas
| Microsoft make Windows as a shop-front for their paid-for
| services; your purpose and the makers' purpose are
| misaligned, and you end up frustrated and annoyed that
| Windows isn't what you want it to be.
|
| Similarly, if a website's purpose is to make money (which
| is fair enough of course), but you're there because you
| want to read interesting stuff, that's a misaligned
| purpose and a frustrating time for you.
|
| Websites that exist primarily to show off interesting
| stuff tend not to tax the content-blocker so hard,
| because the author and audience's purposes are well-
| aligned. And community-governed OSes/distros tend not to
| push other services, because the purpose for making them
| genuinely is to be a useful OS (for their intended
| niche).
|
| My suggestion for what it's worth: choose tools and
| services where the maker's purpose for making it aligns
| with your purpose for using it.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > choose tools and services where the maker's purpose for
| making it aligns with your purpose for using it
|
| What if they don't exist anymore? Because not taking
| advantage of your users by advertising to them means
| leaving money on the table. Eventually some executive is
| gonna show up, notice that and demand that it be done
| because his compensation is directly tied to revenue
| growth or something.
| grey_earthling wrote:
| Yep. I'm saying: avoid things that exist primarily to
| make loads of money.
|
| Smaller, looser, less-commercial organisations have fewer
| or no executives, less concern with making as much money
| as possible, and (in my opinion) tend to produce less
| bullshit.
|
| This is distinct from producing good-quality work --
| their output may be unpolished, but it'll generally be
| sincere, and free of over-commercialised tat.
| howaboutnope wrote:
| An OS is not a destination, it's a medium if you will. A
| better comparison would be being blasted with ads _no
| matter_ where you go.
| javajosh wrote:
| It's healthier to think of business models more like
| organisms. Animals aren't "good" or "bad" for having a
| lifecycle that involves parasitism or predation, stealth or
| deceit, or any number of behaviors, like cannibalism. Life
| doesn't care how you live, just that you live.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Businesses live because society _allows_ them to live. How
| about we make humane business models a pre-condition for
| existence?
|
| "It exists in nature" is not a solid argument for anything.
| I've read about insects that coerce their mates into
| copulation under threat of predation. Yet nobody seriously
| argues that humans should be allowed to rape because rape
| exists in nature. Such an obviously sociopathic argument
| just doesn't fly.
| javajosh wrote:
| I argue only that organisms evolve to occupy whatever
| space is available to them. This true of organisms, it is
| true of businesses. Both respond to incentives.
| humanizersequel wrote:
| > Businesses live because society _allows_ them to live.
|
| It is not a one way street from "mores of society" ->
| "business practices". Large corporations frequently go to
| extreme lengths attempting to manipulate what society
| does and does not allow.
| howaboutnope wrote:
| I am not "life". Considering something humans do as "bad"
| is kinda like the cultural equivalent of an immune system.
| I don't judge a parasite for trying it on with me, because
| there is no utility in it. Use those resources for fighting
| back harder instead.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Apple advertises their cloud services in macosx constantly and
| there's no way to permanently dismiss these advertisements,
| other than buying said services.
| berkut wrote:
| Turning off the Apple Music / iCloud / Apple Arcade
| notification badge "adverts" in iOS (just got a new iPhone)
| is also - while not _that_ difficult technically - mildly
| annoying...
| ur-whale wrote:
| >Is it just me, or do major tech companies turn into
| advertising businesses
|
| The fact that matchmakers always make way more money than the
| makers is not a new phenomenon.
|
| As a matter of fact, I'd wager that it's been this way since
| the day man invented barter.
| [deleted]
| londons_explore wrote:
| All of retail is in a way a matchmaker.
|
| Cosco doesn't _make_ the goods they sell - they are just
| being an intermediary between you and the the manufacturer.
| An intermediary that takes a 60+% fee for their work.
| ur-whale wrote:
| > All of retail is in a way a matchmaker.
|
| Disagree.
|
| A retailer does add tangible value beyond matchmaking.
|
| For example, to name a few: - transport
| - quality control - inventory management -
| fine-grained understanding of local demand and providing
| the corresponding supply.
|
| Advertising is _pure_ matchmaking.
| hsnewman wrote:
| Costco has a variety of products the make, chicken, pizza
| etc.
| hk__2 wrote:
| > Cosco doesn't make the goods they sell - they are just
| being an intermediary between you and the the manufacturer.
| An intermediary that takes a 60+% fee for their work.
|
| It can take such "fee" because it's so enormous that it can
| negociate prices in a way _you_ couldn't, as well as
| handling the logistics and having lots of different
| products at the same place. It's not "just an
| intermediary", it's an intermediary that adds value.
|
| If you want to eat a yogurt, would you prefer paying $4 a
| pack of four at Costco or $1500 for 4000 yogurts you have
| to transport from the manufacturer to your home with your
| own truck?
| otikik wrote:
| Those are not the only two options available. A locally
| produced yogurt would cost more than in Costco, but not
| that much more. Maybe $20 a pack, with a deposit for the
| glass, and you would get it at your door with your milk.
| hk__2 wrote:
| I don't think this invalidates the point that Costco is
| _not_ "just an intermediary".
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Would it? You are welcome to start the business and try
| to compete with Costco/Chobani/Dannon/etc
| meowkit wrote:
| > It can take such "fee" because it's so enormous that it
| can negociate prices in a way you couldn't
|
| So what's the solution to this problem? In one way I
| think this could be framed as rent seeking via economies
| of scale.
| hk__2 wrote:
| > So what's the solution to this problem?
|
| There's no problem; Costco is an intermediary that brings
| value and so it takes its cut. Why do people buy from
| Amazon, who is also "just" an intermediary? Because you
| can buy millions of different products from one single
| place instead of having to go see each manufacturer where
| you wouldn't be able to buy individual items anyway.
|
| This situation is a lot more effective than forcing each
| manufacturer to develop its own customer-facing business
| with all the costs and logistics that go with it.
| siliconc0w wrote:
| If you search for socks and someone shows you a promoted ad for
| socks, you are likely trading relevance for money as the best
| sock for that person is unlikely to be the most promoted one.
| This works in the short term but ultimately what should happen
| (and currently doesn't) is users then use a search or retail
| platform that gives them more relevant results.
|
| Second is using my search for socks elsewhere on the platform.
| This is essentially using user-data outside of the intent it was
| given and that should be controllable by the user and default to
| the most conservative option without annoying dialogue boxes or
| other harassment. Whether it's within the platform or not
| shouldn't make a difference.
|
| So competition is good, but unfortunately what I'm taking away
| from this that companies are going to bake more ads into their
| products because the products themselves aren't seeing much
| competitive pressure (except maybe for Meta and rightfully so).
| cetahfh14615 wrote:
| > as the best sock for that person is unlikely to be the most
| promoted one.
|
| not necessarily. I don't see how there could be a correlation
| between the two. When you see "sponsored" on a listing, that
| doesn't tell you how much the vendor paid. Also many large and
| reputable vendors will pay simply to guarantee they are at the
| top of the listing. For the vendors that don't sponsor, you
| don't know whether the amount they save goes into a higher
| quality product
|
| > This is essentially using user-data outside of the intent it
| was given and that should be controllable by the user and
| default to the most conservative option without annoying
| dialogue boxes or other harassment.
|
| Except feeding user data back into the system makes certain
| things technically possible that weren't possible before. Do
| you think modern map applications would have the same degree of
| accuracy if they weren't able to use user data to improve it?
|
| > Whether it's within the platform or not shouldn't make a
| difference.
|
| It does make a difference because keeping it within the
| platform could be used to improve the platform itself. Sending
| it outside the platform could be used for more malicious
| purposes. In the map application example, the user knows their
| data feeds into improved accuracy. But they don't know where
| that data goes outside the platform
| DethNinja wrote:
| One problem is that bot amount on the internet is now far larger
| than the golden days of internet advertising.
|
| Real-Life ads became competitive with internet advertising. In
| fact, they might be better for a large number companies.
|
| Unless they can manage to guarantee that ads are being seen by
| real humans, I think their revenue will keep dropping.
| frozenport wrote:
| Many people were paying for SEO, which you can still buy today
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Everyone here likely works for a company that advertises.
|
| It might be in our individual best interest to have super
| effective advertising (for increased revenue), but it might be in
| the world's interest to not allow that, because effective
| advertising leads to consumption... (and for privacy
| reasons,etc.)
| retskrad wrote:
| Is there a way to bypass the firewall and view the article?
| jeffbee wrote:
| The Economist is available at every magazine stand and most
| public libraries in America.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bypass-paywal...
| laserlight wrote:
| Yes, see this comment for instance [0].
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=32890467
| [deleted]
| imiric wrote:
| The entire advertising industry should burn down, as far as I'm
| concerned.
|
| Advertising ruins every form of media it touches. From radio,
| television, newspapers (it's arguably responsible for killing
| journalism), and now the internet, and all the services we use it
| for.
|
| Web search is useless because of it. Most websites are pretty
| much spyware. A large percentage of them are SEO spam, existing
| only to serve ads. Most content on YouTube, the largest video
| platform, is unwatchable due to constant ad breaks and sponsored
| content. Astroturfing is everywhere, promoted posts flood social
| media sites. Advertising is instrumental to spreading of
| disinformation, propaganda, toppling of democracies and companies
| like Cambridge Analytica. And if all that wasn't enough, _paid_
| subscription services have started serving ads. It's the same
| business model from TV, but even more intrusive and lucrative
| since user tracking and microtargetting is now possible.
|
| Stop. Just stop. Users want none of this. Of course, everyone
| loves getting services for free, but what adtech companies are
| getting in exchange for user data now is worth much more than the
| "free" services they offer. *They should be paying us instead.*
|
| We need new business models that are as easy for content
| providers to implement, yet don't come at the expense of user
| experience, and don't cause services to deteriorate into a
| privacy nightmare. This should be easier nowadays with
| cryptocurrencies. I still think the Basic Attention Token[1] is a
| step in the right direction. Are there more examples of this?
|
| [1]: https://basicattentiontoken.org/
| czhu12 wrote:
| Isn't basic attention token based entirely on advertising?
| imiric wrote:
| I'm not a Brave user, but from what I've read, users can
| choose to see ads and earn BAT, _or_ they can fund their BAT
| wallet and opt out of ads altogether. And the ads don 't seem
| to track the user or infringe on their privacy, so it's a
| substantial improvement over most adtech ads.
| riku_iki wrote:
| > The entire advertising industry should burn down, as far as
| I'm concerned.
|
| but they perform important economy function: connect buyers and
| sellers..
| LawTalkingGuy wrote:
| It feels like it's a race to the bottom where if it didn't
| exist everyone would be better off, but once it does exist
| everyone has to compete.
|
| Without ads we wouldn't pick products blindly we'd simply
| have more product-comparison sites.
| imiric wrote:
| > but they perform important economy function: connect buyers
| and sellers..
|
| Do they? I've never once clicked on an ad and made a
| purchase, and I'm a fairly regular consumer. If I have a need
| for a product, I'll search for it.
|
| All advertising does is create a false desire to own a
| product by psychologically manipulating the viewer. It is
| dishonest by definition.
|
| In order to make a purchase, I first have to have a need for
| a product. This should arise naturally, not via some
| artifically produced desire. Then I'd like to read the true
| specifications of all suitable products that I can find, and
| read hopefully real and honest reviews by people who've
| purchased them. After that, I will narrow down my search and
| will only make a purchase if I think a specific product will
| fulfill my needs.
|
| Advertising directly interferes with this concept, steps in
| as a middle man between buyer and seller, and introduces all
| kinds of psychological tricks to manipulate me to not even
| make the purchase--I just need to click on an ad, and I make
| the advertiser money. It is unnecessary at best, and outright
| harmful at worst.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Funnily enough, only Google is currently offering paid
| subscriptions that delete ads. All of their competitors are
| all-in on advertising. Google, by contrast, has that attention-
| respecting and affordable YouTube program that makes YouTube
| completely ad-free.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _Of course, everyone loves getting services for free, but
| what adtech companies are getting in exchange for user data now
| is worth much more than the "free" services they offer. They
| should be paying us instead._
|
| This solution is backwards; people should not only create
| content for you, but they should pay you for the privilege of
| having you enjoy it?
|
| It wasn't ads that killed journalism; it was the proliferation
| of free content that killed the funding for any kind of
| meaningful journalism. BAT isn't the right direction; they just
| tack on a crypto grift to make other people rich. I'd argue
| services like Netflix and Disney+ are the type of business
| models that work without ads, its just that people dont want to
| pay for content.
| scarface74 wrote:
| > Netflix and Disney+ are the type of business models that
| work without ads, its just that people dont want to pay for
| content
|
| You don't see an issue with that statement?
| imiric wrote:
| > people should not only create content for you, but they
| should pay you for the privilege of having you enjoy it?
|
| I was specifically referring to "free" services from the
| likes of Google and Meta. The value they extract from user
| data is worth much more than the value users are getting from
| their services. Tech companies paying users isn't a novel
| idea[1].
|
| For content providers I'm arguing that there should be new
| business models they can rely on that doesn't detract from
| the user experience. Patreon is also a good alternative.
|
| > BAT isn't the right direction; they just tack on a crypto
| grift to make other people rich.
|
| That's the cynical take, and, sure, I don't trust Brave Inc.
| either. That said, funding a crypto wallet from which I can
| selectively pay for the content I consume is a sound model,
| even if this specific implementation isn't ideal.
|
| > I'd argue services like Netflix and Disney+ are the type of
| business models that work without ads, its just that people
| dont want to pay for content.
|
| People are definitely paying for it. For a short while there
| a few years back, there was probably a reduction in pirated
| content. But large studios got greedy, enforced region
| locking even more, the market split up into dozens of similar
| services, and now consumers are expected to subscribe to many
| different streaming services to access content, which is
| exactly what we were trying to escape from TV by cord
| cutting.
|
| [1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2020/10/3
| 0/sh...
| UltraViolence wrote:
| There are always threats, but these companies being paranoid, are
| always on the lookout for competitors. Facebook in the past had
| success defusing the threat by simply copying the competitor's
| app verbatim (Snapchat) and is trying to repeat this by altering
| both Facebook and Instagram to work like TikTok.
|
| The reason I see TikTok as a threat is largely because the
| company ignores all the rules and regulations that protect the
| privacy of minors and adults alike and companies will want that
| data regardless. Facebook won't be able to supply it to them
| since it has to abide by our laws.
|
| OTOH TikTok being based in a nations that's a strategic
| competitor to the U.S. may well mean the company is simply
| banned. IMHO it would be more fortuitous for Meta and Google to
| lobby for a ban. Fighting TikTok will not work.
| dgudkov wrote:
| We know already how they will optimize to compete - more
| surveillance, more algorithms, and more annoyance.
| hey2022 wrote:
| A somewhat tangential question. Why is Alphabet not decoupling
| Google from Google Ads / Google AdSense? Having Google's name
| constantly in the news cycle because of their ad practices has
| ruined their reputation (deservingly). Wouldn't a separate legal
| entity also be a safer approach from the legal perspective in the
| light of the ongoing antitrust investigations?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Because Google would then become a business with virtually no
| revenue - and no chance of producing revenue. Even though
| Alphabet itself would remain just as profitable, a business
| organization can't survive long if its goals are not in some
| ways associated with producing revenue, by the nature of how
| corporate politics work.
| endisneigh wrote:
| monopoly aside the bigger threat is prolonged stagflation in the
| economy which will result in dramatic consumer pullback which
| will kill the RoI of advertising. of course, this will hurt far
| more than Google and Meta
| torginus wrote:
| Somebody always brings this point up so it might as well be me
| this time - but does advertising work at all, particularly online
| advertising?
|
| I refuse to believe I'm some kind of one of a kind special
| snowflake, but whenever I wanna buy something cheap or
| disposable, like food, socks etc. I just see it and buy it.
|
| On the other hand when I'm looking for something I'm planning to
| get a bit more mileage out of, like a laptop, a pair of
| headphones or a cordless drill, I usually read the reviews and
| buy the product I think is most appropriate for me, not what the
| ads show.
| sidvit wrote:
| A lot of the reviews are subject to the same advertising
| practices. Astroturfing on Reddit in particular has become
| especially egregious
| cryptoegorophy wrote:
| It works. It works a lot better than you think. My biggest
| mistake was relying on organic traffic. Once I switched to paid
| ads business went 10x. Don't assume everyone is like you, you
| are the 1% of the 1% of the 1%. Majority people follow ads
| that's why it still exists.
| amelius wrote:
| Ok, but it works for the wrong reasons.
|
| I.e., people buy stuff they wouldn't buy if they got honest
| information.
|
| It works against the main argument in favor of the free
| market: not the best product wins, but the one with the
| biggest advertising budget.
| bolt7469 wrote:
| Tracking users with online advertising is actually a good
| thing for economic efficiency. People tend to see more
| relevant products, and are able to allocate their resources
| to products that better meet their needs. The best ads
| aren't lying to people.
| amelius wrote:
| How is that true if the "best" ads are still paid for by
| companies who might not sell the best stuff?
|
| Ads just try to drive up sales. This is something we
| don't need given current energy/climate issues.
|
| There are better ways of bringing supply and demand
| together. Several decades ago we had yellow pages, and
| they worked fine. I'm sure in the internet age we can
| come up with an even better system that doesn't involve
| user tracking and/or distracting ads.
| granshaw wrote:
| Mind elaborating what's your general business and which ad
| platforms worked for you?
|
| I have a broad-market/horizontal smb Saas and tried google
| ads to not much success. Was getting charged ~$3/click for
| quite irrelevant searches even after lots of negative
| filtering. Suppose I could've tried some more...
| bolt7469 wrote:
| _particularly online advertising_
|
| Online advertising is far, far better than other forms.
| Marketers can tie individual sales to specific ads and improve
| ads by making them more like successful ones. This kind of
| specificity isn't possible with TV or print ads.
|
| _what the ads show_
|
| A good chunk of advertising is "brand awareness" not
| necessarily just selling one product. The point of brand
| awareness is to associate your brand with its brand values in a
| person's mind.
| huitzitziltzin wrote:
| This is a great question and one which is quite difficult to
| answer.
|
| One place to start on the difficulties is an excellent paper by
| Lewis and Rao from the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2015.
| The original title was something like: "on the impossibility of
| measuring the returns to advertising." Just getting enough data
| to reject the hypothesis "this ad campaign did nothing" is
| extremely challenging. Lewis is a great producer of research on
| this topic and has written papers based on his experience at
| Yahoo.
|
| Another great paper is by Blake, Nosko and Tadelis from
| Econometrica in... 2014? They turned off _all_ of eBay's
| keyword search ads in some markets as an experiment. They found
| that they maintained about 95%+ of their business while saving
| $50 eBay million dollars or so.
|
| Beware confident assertions from people in the ad industry that
| ads clearly work. It is not so obvious that they do. This isn't
| to say they don't work! But it's a challenging scientific
| question.
| CryptoBanker wrote:
| That experiment simply means _their_ ads don't work
| grok22 wrote:
| When you "see it" and if you not going just by cheapest price,
| one of the things you might go by is "familiarity" (for
| products in the same space that are similarly priced). That
| "familiarity" which introduces a sense of "maybe it's good"
| because you've seen it mentioned many times is sometimes
| introduced by the advertising of the product you constantly see
| as you go around the Internet. All that happens prior to you
| actually buying the product.
| franczesko wrote:
| It's not a duopoly - it's a cartel:
|
| "a combination of independent commercial or industrial
| enterprises designed to limit competition or fix prices"
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| The advertising duopoly is a crown with no kingdom in 2022.
| Online advertising is dead - most people online aren't worth
| advertising too. This isn't 2010 when most people online were
| from wealthy countries. Google and Facebook are having a harder
| and harder time finding high-net-worth individuals to advertise
| too, because they all use adblock or avoid the open internet,
| preferring to stick to walled gardens like reddit and tiktok
| (which serve their own ads).
| adventured wrote:
| > Online advertising is dead
|
| Everything you just said is voided by the fact that Google's ad
| business continues to boom. It's going nowhere. And I say that
| as someone that dislikes Google. Your pitch is emotionalism,
| I've been reading rants like that on HN for the past ~15 years.
| They're in practically every thread on Google or advertising.
| Meanwhile Google has gotten 17 times larger in that span of
| time.
|
| Their business has doubled in size since the beginning of 2019.
| Their operating income has skyrocketed.
|
| When did the death struggle begin for them exactly?
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Google booming doesn't necessarily mean OP is wrong. Go read
| some PPC forums and you'll see a pretty consistent trend on
| ad ROI going down everywhere. Folks may just be spending more
| trying to spend their way back to a low CPA.
| tbihl wrote:
| So, maybe the rot is there, but it hasn't quite died? And
| even then, we'll need the strong storm to knock it over.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Blackberry saw it's highest revenues in 2010. The iPhone has
| been out for 4 years and Android was just becoming popular.
| visarga wrote:
| That's also because they have to sell things we don't need to
| buy, 99.9% of the time. They don't have an offer for what I
| would buy today, they offer me something completely unrelated.
| The ads are not helpful. But if they focused on helpful ads
| their profits would be too small.
|
| Google once had the right approach - showing ads related to the
| search terms. It was polite and nicely delineated. But that
| wasn't going to earn them money from unrelated ad campaigns.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-09-18 23:00 UTC)