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I am currently struggling with Google and been even considering just straight up creating a Brazilian "Yandex/Baidu" clone or something somehow. My current bus

I am currently struggling with Google and been even considering just straight up creating a Brazilian "Yandex/Baidu" clone or something somehow. My current business is heavily Google reliant, and Google been proving to be a very poor business partner: * Keeps punishing my site both in organic rank and AdWords rank (thus price) for not being mobile, despite my site being intended to be viewed by engineers with big screens. * They remove frequently whatever features they had to avoid wasting money, the one that offended me the most is that I can't anymore advertise on mobile websites unless I also allow apps too, and apps are purely fraudulent clicks, babies don't buy industrial parts... * Google refuses to take care of fraud, I've visited the top sources of clicks on my display campaigns and there was comments for example on store pages explicitly complaining it was pure fraud, and Google does nothing about it (example: one source of clicks was a flashlight app on Android that opens ads whenever the user turns the flashlight on, clicking the ad is only way to turn it off again) * Google often randomly stop my ads and search because bogus reasons, requiring me to call them to fix it. * They removed from AdWords interface the max click price when the campaign is in automatic mode, in the past this was very useful to find out if their AI was bugged (like one time it insisted on setting max cpm to 0.01 despite average cost until that day being 1.20...) or oberpricing me (charging ludicrous prices per click) Their product (ad publishing, not search) is crap, but they have literal Monopoly, all other ads publishers I tried gave me almost zero clicks... Only thing I don't tried yet is more traditional ads, but I don't have money for that (for example TV ads) I honestly don't know why so many governments with strong antimonopoly laws tolerate Google shenanigans.

whatshisface 7y ago
>I honestly don't know why so many governments with strong antimonopoly laws tolerate Google shenanigans. To build an anti-monopoly case you would have to do more than show that Google was the only good ad vendor. Are they the only ones that can give you clicks because they are smarter and better at their jobs than every other ad vendor, or are they the only ones that can give you clicks because of underhanded market tactics? If I was the best shoemaker in town, to the point where buying shoes from anybody else was a waste of time, that wouldn't be illegal. You'd have to show I was doing more to stop competition.
- amelius 7y ago
  Yes but there's a network effect here. If Google owns all the billboards in town, then you can't really find a better advertisement platform, no matter how skilled they are.
  - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    Sure, but Google doesn't own all the billboards in town. I regularly see pages with Taboola panels on the bottom.
    - catacombs 7y ago
      Taboola is scum.
      - Fjolsvith 7y ago
        Why do you say that?
        nier 7y ago
        Never heard of them so I searched the web. Wikipedia says they also provide the Around the Web and Recommended For You boxes at the bottom of web pages. Haven’t read further, but I assume the reaction was prompted by them serving that lowest quality click bait made to look like page excerpts from the site you’re actually visiting.
        hnick 7y ago
        It is often more than clickbait, it's entirely misleading to the point where if you click (for science) it's nothing like what is shown. At least that was true when I checked it out years ago when Slashdot started running them. Which is also around the time I stopped visiting that site.
      - cruano 7y ago
        Anything related to advertising is
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
buboard 7y ago
Add to that that their "upgrade" of their adwords/adsense interface is an unmitigated failure of constantly spinning progress bars and cards cards cards everywhere making it really infuriating to use. And charges and payments have become suspiciously opaque. Things like CPM swings (for adsense) in the exact same audiences. As for adwords, luckily i can afford to forgo all mobile traffic. I don't know what shit google is going through, but it seems to be pretty bad. > Only thing I don't tried yet is more traditional ads, but I don't have money for that (for example TV ads) I think we should try a webring-like structure , there is a lot of inventory that can be shared between small publishers (and they are underserved/plain ignored by google)
- speeder 7y ago
  It only works right on chrome, and you have to sometimes pay attention to memory leaks on all their sites. I built myself a workstation with 32GB of overclocked ram... A few times I left it on overnight with a google site open (adwords or gmail), the machine became unresponsive, using all 32GB of RAM and then freezing after running out of swap... I only found out what was happening on a day I was particularly patient and let windows trash for 20 minutes to open the task manager and let me see the ridiculous ram usage coming from browsers (I use both chrome and firefox on that machine... I wanted to use only firefox but as I said earlier chrome is needed to avoid the "infinite spinning bars" bug on adswords, also some types of ad editors straight up shows blank on firefox).
  - buboard 7y ago
    I AM using chrome! Let me try again: Opening adsense: 6 seconds to load a useless dashboards with 3 extra boxes "we thought you might find this card interesting" I want a sites report Clicking on "reports"... after 5 seconds the left menu loads, while the report on the right still loads... I click "sites" on the menu... The report on the right loads, but it is the default report, not the sites report. I have to click the sites report again and wait. This happens every day , every time. By the time i get there, i forgot what i was looking for. This is just a sad state Oh, they say my website has mobile access issues? But it is a bootstrap website optimized for mobile. Clicking on fix issue .... checking live version ... your site is mobile ready... yet it still says i have to fix 3 errors. I pressed validate fix 4 days ago and it's still there. Hmmm i guess i don't get their level of AI. And dont get me started on adwords campaigns. Can't set up a simple campaign without going through some extremely difficult to parse terminology. Wanted to limit my ads to desktop - turns out they removed that simple option - you have to do tricks with bidding. I just don't get why
bryan_w 7y ago
Have you tried FB ads?
- speeder 7y ago
  Those would be pointless. Most of my income comes from search, both organic and ads, my business sell industrial parts that are hard to find, people tend to contact us after they put on some search engine the code for the part (example: DIN 912, the code for the popular Allen screw), and find us there. I doubt someone would look for that on Facebook. There was a cool magazine here that was basically just ads, before internet it was just a bunch of ads printed in magazine form, intended for my target market, but even them switched to use google now (also they are the reason I got pissed with the mobile display campaign issues, I want to put my ads on that magazine, but I can't do so anymore without turning on ads on mobile apps, and those easily eat up all the budget with fraudulent clicks)
- buboard 7y ago
  Those are for different kinds of products/audiences and often not interchangeable with keyword-based ads
- LaundroMat 7y ago
  It's as big of a UX nightmare as Google Ads.
elbasti 7y ago
Out of curiosity (and I really do mean, out of pure curiosity), why do you care about fraudulent clicks? Unless the fraudulent click volume is "lumpy" or unpredictable, the only thing that matters is cost per lead/cost per purchase. Fraudulent clicks make clicks worth less, so presumably the price already takes this into consideration?
- speeder 7y ago
  After I decied to just drop mobile entirely, where 99% of the clicks were fraudulent (and indeed cheap, something like 1 or 2 cents was common), the campaigns in question had huge drops in total cost per month, one of them was sadly, literally 100%, meaning every single click on some months was fraudulent (that campaign is still active, it gets like 2, 3 clicks per month) Mind you, the campaigns with most fraudulent clicks, were the ones setup by google employees, they regularly insist in calling me to "help", explain new features and whatnot, every single time I setup a campaign following step by step their employee, the result was ridiculous amounts of fraud. The campaigns that bring me most of my real world income are the ones where I ignore what google wants for most part and do it my way.
handedness 7y ago
> I honestly don't know why so many governments with strong antimonopoly laws tolerate Google shenanigans. It doesn't take much imagination to see how governments and what is arguably the most effective spying apparatus on the planet have developed mutually beneficial relationships. https://googletransparencyproject.org/articles/googles-white-house-meetings https://googletransparencyproject.org/articles/googles-white... https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close-relationship-with-the-obama-white-house-in-two-charts/ https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close...
reaperducer 7y ago
Only thing I don't tried yet is more traditional ads, but I don't have money for that (for example TV ads) When people think "advertising" they often think TV first. But you might be surprised how reasonable some advertising rates can be for radio (especially classical radio sponsorships and news radio), regional and local newspapers, and certain magazines. A web site I used to own advertised with AdSense for a year. The second year I put the money into local public radio sponsorships and a single magazine ad, and the quality of the responses was much better.
- speeder 7y ago
  I replied this in other comment, but here even that got google enroached... The magazine that is popular on my field now focuses mostly on online ads, and they use adsense, so to buyads on the magazine you need to use adwords platform to do so.
  - WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
    Youtube (direct to creator) and Podcasts are pretty good as well. Some small targeted channels can give good return as good videos are used for reference and you'll get a burst of business at the beginning and some followup later.
- kweks 7y ago
  We had huge success with metro advertisements (in the actual trains, on one line), and no success with radio, despite having massive coverage. Mileage definitely varies with your product.
- hnick 7y ago
  I even heard an advertisement here in Sydney the other day for Mailchimp on a mainstream popular radio channel. Made me think twice about discounting radio as a channel.
behringer 7y ago
Maybe you can reach out to specific youtubers to have them do their own ads in their broadcasts?
catacombs 7y ago
> Google been proving to be a very poor business partner The company is more parasite than a partner. It'll punish you severely without remorse for not following its rules. Good luck trying to open any kind of dialog.
Tade0 7y ago
been even considering just straight up creating a Brazilian "Yandex/Baidu" clone or something somehow. That would be truly something. After all your market is what, 200mln people?
- leonidasv 7y ago
  As much as I agree with you, I don't see this happening any time soon. See, Baidu and Yandex already existed for years before reaching the size they're today. Brazil had it's internally developed search engines before (Cadê, TodoBR, Aonde). Some of them even ranked higher than Google in the early 2000s. However, with time they got out of business or were bought by Yahoo or Google itself. And when you think about it, those business (Yandex, Baidu) now offer more than just search - Yandex offers email, maps and more; Baidu has Cloud Storage, Browser and even hosts a Wikipedia-like website - or have some degree of government ties at their countries - Google being banned from China; Yandex reportedly handled information for FSB. You need to have all those advantages to replicate the success case of Yandex and Baidu. And there's one of them - time on market - that you can't buy.
scarface74 7y ago
My current business is heavily Google reliant, and Google been proving to be a very poor business partner: Google and you are no more partners than the fox and the lamb are partners. That’s your main problem. Do you know how many high profile companies have gone belly up because of a Google algorithm change?

whatshisface 7y ago

>I honestly don't know why so many governments with strong antimonopoly laws tolerate Google shenanigans. To build an anti-monopoly case you would have to do more than show that Google was the only good ad vendor. Are they the only ones that can give you clicks because they are smarter and better at their jobs than every other ad vendor, or are they the only ones that can give you clicks because of underhanded market tactics? If I was the best shoemaker in town, to the point where buying shoes from anybody else was a waste of time, that wouldn't be illegal. You'd have to show I was doing more to stop competition.

amelius 7y ago
Yes but there's a network effect here. If Google owns all the billboards in town, then you can't really find a better advertisement platform, no matter how skilled they are.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  Sure, but Google doesn't own all the billboards in town. I regularly see pages with Taboola panels on the bottom.
  - catacombs 7y ago
    Taboola is scum.
    - Fjolsvith 7y ago
      Why do you say that?
      - nier 7y ago
        Never heard of them so I searched the web. Wikipedia says they also provide the Around the Web and Recommended For You boxes at the bottom of web pages. Haven’t read further, but I assume the reaction was prompted by them serving that lowest quality click bait made to look like page excerpts from the site you’re actually visiting.
        hnick 7y ago
        It is often more than clickbait, it's entirely misleading to the point where if you click (for science) it's nothing like what is shown. At least that was true when I checked it out years ago when Slashdot started running them. Which is also around the time I stopped visiting that site.
    - cruano 7y ago
      Anything related to advertising is

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

buboard 7y ago

Add to that that their "upgrade" of their adwords/adsense interface is an unmitigated failure of constantly spinning progress bars and cards cards cards everywhere making it really infuriating to use. And charges and payments have become suspiciously opaque. Things like CPM swings (for adsense) in the exact same audiences. As for adwords, luckily i can afford to forgo all mobile traffic. I don't know what shit google is going through, but it seems to be pretty bad. > Only thing I don't tried yet is more traditional ads, but I don't have money for that (for example TV ads) I think we should try a webring-like structure , there is a lot of inventory that can be shared between small publishers (and they are underserved/plain ignored by google)

speeder 7y ago
It only works right on chrome, and you have to sometimes pay attention to memory leaks on all their sites. I built myself a workstation with 32GB of overclocked ram... A few times I left it on overnight with a google site open (adwords or gmail), the machine became unresponsive, using all 32GB of RAM and then freezing after running out of swap... I only found out what was happening on a day I was particularly patient and let windows trash for 20 minutes to open the task manager and let me see the ridiculous ram usage coming from browsers (I use both chrome and firefox on that machine... I wanted to use only firefox but as I said earlier chrome is needed to avoid the "infinite spinning bars" bug on adswords, also some types of ad editors straight up shows blank on firefox).
- buboard 7y ago
  I AM using chrome! Let me try again: Opening adsense: 6 seconds to load a useless dashboards with 3 extra boxes "we thought you might find this card interesting" I want a sites report Clicking on "reports"... after 5 seconds the left menu loads, while the report on the right still loads... I click "sites" on the menu... The report on the right loads, but it is the default report, not the sites report. I have to click the sites report again and wait. This happens every day , every time. By the time i get there, i forgot what i was looking for. This is just a sad state Oh, they say my website has mobile access issues? But it is a bootstrap website optimized for mobile. Clicking on fix issue .... checking live version ... your site is mobile ready... yet it still says i have to fix 3 errors. I pressed validate fix 4 days ago and it's still there. Hmmm i guess i don't get their level of AI. And dont get me started on adwords campaigns. Can't set up a simple campaign without going through some extremely difficult to parse terminology. Wanted to limit my ads to desktop - turns out they removed that simple option - you have to do tricks with bidding. I just don't get why

bryan_w 7y ago

Have you tried FB ads?

speeder 7y ago
Those would be pointless. Most of my income comes from search, both organic and ads, my business sell industrial parts that are hard to find, people tend to contact us after they put on some search engine the code for the part (example: DIN 912, the code for the popular Allen screw), and find us there. I doubt someone would look for that on Facebook. There was a cool magazine here that was basically just ads, before internet it was just a bunch of ads printed in magazine form, intended for my target market, but even them switched to use google now (also they are the reason I got pissed with the mobile display campaign issues, I want to put my ads on that magazine, but I can't do so anymore without turning on ads on mobile apps, and those easily eat up all the budget with fraudulent clicks)
buboard 7y ago
Those are for different kinds of products/audiences and often not interchangeable with keyword-based ads
LaundroMat 7y ago
It's as big of a UX nightmare as Google Ads.

elbasti 7y ago

Out of curiosity (and I really do mean, out of pure curiosity), why do you care about fraudulent clicks? Unless the fraudulent click volume is "lumpy" or unpredictable, the only thing that matters is cost per lead/cost per purchase. Fraudulent clicks make clicks worth less, so presumably the price already takes this into consideration?

speeder 7y ago
After I decied to just drop mobile entirely, where 99% of the clicks were fraudulent (and indeed cheap, something like 1 or 2 cents was common), the campaigns in question had huge drops in total cost per month, one of them was sadly, literally 100%, meaning every single click on some months was fraudulent (that campaign is still active, it gets like 2, 3 clicks per month) Mind you, the campaigns with most fraudulent clicks, were the ones setup by google employees, they regularly insist in calling me to "help", explain new features and whatnot, every single time I setup a campaign following step by step their employee, the result was ridiculous amounts of fraud. The campaigns that bring me most of my real world income are the ones where I ignore what google wants for most part and do it my way.

handedness 7y ago

> I honestly don't know why so many governments with strong antimonopoly laws tolerate Google shenanigans. It doesn't take much imagination to see how governments and what is arguably the most effective spying apparatus on the planet have developed mutually beneficial relationships. https://googletransparencyproject.org/articles/googles-white-house-meetings https://googletransparencyproject.org/articles/googles-white... https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close-relationship-with-the-obama-white-house-in-two-charts/ https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close...

reaperducer 7y ago

Only thing I don't tried yet is more traditional ads, but I don't have money for that (for example TV ads) When people think "advertising" they often think TV first. But you might be surprised how reasonable some advertising rates can be for radio (especially classical radio sponsorships and news radio), regional and local newspapers, and certain magazines. A web site I used to own advertised with AdSense for a year. The second year I put the money into local public radio sponsorships and a single magazine ad, and the quality of the responses was much better.

speeder 7y ago
I replied this in other comment, but here even that got google enroached... The magazine that is popular on my field now focuses mostly on online ads, and they use adsense, so to buyads on the magazine you need to use adwords platform to do so.
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
  Youtube (direct to creator) and Podcasts are pretty good as well. Some small targeted channels can give good return as good videos are used for reference and you'll get a burst of business at the beginning and some followup later.
kweks 7y ago
We had huge success with metro advertisements (in the actual trains, on one line), and no success with radio, despite having massive coverage. Mileage definitely varies with your product.
hnick 7y ago
I even heard an advertisement here in Sydney the other day for Mailchimp on a mainstream popular radio channel. Made me think twice about discounting radio as a channel.

behringer 7y ago

Maybe you can reach out to specific youtubers to have them do their own ads in their broadcasts?

catacombs 7y ago

> Google been proving to be a very poor business partner The company is more parasite than a partner. It'll punish you severely without remorse for not following its rules. Good luck trying to open any kind of dialog.

Tade0 7y ago

been even considering just straight up creating a Brazilian "Yandex/Baidu" clone or something somehow. That would be truly something. After all your market is what, 200mln people?

leonidasv 7y ago
As much as I agree with you, I don't see this happening any time soon. See, Baidu and Yandex already existed for years before reaching the size they're today. Brazil had it's internally developed search engines before (Cadê, TodoBR, Aonde). Some of them even ranked higher than Google in the early 2000s. However, with time they got out of business or were bought by Yahoo or Google itself. And when you think about it, those business (Yandex, Baidu) now offer more than just search - Yandex offers email, maps and more; Baidu has Cloud Storage, Browser and even hosts a Wikipedia-like website - or have some degree of government ties at their countries - Google being banned from China; Yandex reportedly handled information for FSB. You need to have all those advantages to replicate the success case of Yandex and Baidu. And there's one of them - time on market - that you can't buy.

scarface74 7y ago

My current business is heavily Google reliant, and Google been proving to be a very poor business partner: Google and you are no more partners than the fox and the lamb are partners. That’s your main problem. Do you know how many high profile companies have gone belly up because of a Google algorithm change?