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> Recode’s Peter Kafka recently interviewed Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti, and Peretti said something really insightful: what if Google’s ads really aren’t that go

> Recode’s Peter Kafka recently interviewed Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti, and Peretti said something really insightful: what if Google’s ads really aren’t that good? What if Google is just taking credit for clicks on ads just because people would have been searching for that stuff anyway? I’ve been thinking about it all day: what if Google ads actually aren’t that effective and the only reason they make so much is billions of people use Google? Key paragraph of the article. You don't have to be good at ads when you have a firehose of most of the world's population coming directly to you, telling you exactly what they want to buy/find/learn/read/do in their native language combined with their geolocation and search history. It would be hard not to serve up relevant ads in that case.

Disruptive_Dave 7y ago
But that's precisely what makes Google "good at ads." They built the firehose. Own a destination where billions of people go everyday, find a way to measure their intent, serve my information to them. That = fantastic at ads.
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  I think it's pretty clear what Peretti was talking about--let's make an effort to respond to his intended meaning and not get caught up in semantics. Peretti is talking about quality versus quantity: maybe Google doesn't serve up quality ads, maybe they just serve up quantity ads.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
    He may be right, but if Google is bad at ads, it's not for any lack of incentive alignment. They make more money by serving up the most efficient (i.e. high-paying + likely to be clicked) ads. It's not impossible, but it's hard to picture another organization having both the economic means and incentives to do it better than Google does. As to the question posed by the article, isn't the answer obvious? I don't know if users even "trust" Google's responses now. But it is manifestly the case that they will cease to do so when Google's answers cease to be the least efficient for whatever purposes users have for those answers. As long as Google is still the best way to search up information on, e.g., obscure aspects of Stardew Valley's economy, users who want to do searches about such things will continue to prefer Google. If Google ceases to surface good results for queries compared to e.g. DDG, users will migrate to DDG.
    - kerkeslager 7y ago
      > He may be right, but if Google is bad at ads, it's not for any lack of incentive alignment. They make more money by serving up the most efficient (i.e. high-paying + likely to be clicked) ads. It's not impossible, but it's hard to picture another organization having both the economic means and incentives to do it better than Google does. Yeah, I think the only way that would happen is if someone came up with a novel superior approach to search and managed to legally protect it so Google couldn't just copy it. That's a very unlikely at this point. > But it is manifestly the case that they will cease to do so when Google's answers cease to be the least efficient for whatever purposes users have for those answers. I don't think I agree with this. Users don't necessarily behave rationally in self-interest: they can be (and are) manipulated, and unwilling to try new tools.
      - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
        I can believe that if there were another solution that were marginally better it might not be enough to unseat the top player in the market. But switching costs in search are extremely low so it would be surprising if people did not switch for a substantially better experience. In particular, it would require us to believe that what happened when Google showed up on the scene would not happen again, and to me that just does not seem likely.
        kerkeslager 7y ago
        Perhaps switching costs are low, but they're certainly higher than people are willing to pay in many cases. Switching costs as high as "changing the default search provider" are demonstrably prohibitive.
  - calibas 7y ago
    Peretti is talking about the quality of the ad service, not the quality of the ads themselves. Peretti is suggesting that maybe Google's service isn't anything special, and their success is due to their insanely large audience. The comment you replied to goes even further to suggest there's no real talent to serving ads at all, and that everything depends upon the audience size. That's not just semantics.
    - deleted 7y ago
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  - grawprog 7y ago
    >quality ads I've seen this term for years but I still don't understand what it means. I don't want to see ads. There are no 'quality' ads. All ads are designed to sell me things period. I don't need anyone telling me about what I might want. I understand ads exist to make money and if they didn't we wouldn't have the internet etc. But there's no 'quality' to them, they're a necessary evil i've come to accept and adapt to over my life. I dislike them, I have no need for them, there'll never be a time I say 'well gee, sure am glad I seen that ad, it showed me just what I didn't know I needed.' Ads exist to sell crap to people, they're not good or bad, they just are. Some are invasive, some are reasonable, but they're all shit.
    - milesvp 7y ago
      You may have never seen a good ad then. There was a period of time I would actively look at ads on penny-arcade, because the owners of the site only ever allowed ads (mostly for games) that they themselves could at least tangentially endorse. This meant I basically got hand curated ads for products I was genuinely interested in, by people who’s taste I understood if not agreed with. That said this ended up being the exception to proof the rule about ads being mostly noise, and I agree the world would be better with less of them. And almost certainly the current state of algorithmic ad serving is a disaster.
      - ksaj 7y ago
        Just like the guitar mags I grew up with. I looked at all the ads, and even bought stuff based on what I saw in competing ads along with gear reviews. For that matter, the same goes for motorcycle magazines, and just about every other kind of magazine that caters to a niche market. Those kinds of ads can be great, even.
      - kerkeslager 7y ago
        Okay, but did those ads contribute anything beyond reading Penny Arcade's reviews of games? For you as a user, how does the ad improve your experience?
    - clairity 7y ago
- titzer 7y ago
  After all this time watchin me, everything I ever asked it, all the ads I never clicked on, all the videos it watched me watch, all my emails it read, heck even after I worked for the dang company for nearly ten years, Google does not understand a very basic, essential thing about me. I hate advertising, damn it! I am sick of looking at it, I am sick of it looking at me. I am sick of hearing about how advertising is necessary to support a $130 billion in revenue and a trillion dollar valuation and some of the world's richest people. It's a lie. I'm sick of hearing about how I don't really hate advertising, I just want to see better ads. It's horseshit. I want to stop being bothered. I wanna stop being followed around. I wanna stop being monetized. We could have a smaller, more useful web that better benefited humanity, we could make education free or nearly free, we could actually have a chance to realize the dream of the original pioneers of the internet, if we weren't so obsessed with making it into the world's largest commercial marketplace, the world's biggest casino and TV show, and Google wasn't intent on extracting its ludicrous "fair share". If access to the internet is a human right, then its gateways can't be commercial entities, let alone ones hell-bent on growth. It is fundamentally incompatible.
  - scarejunba 7y ago
    You don't need Google. The Internet is fairly decentralized. You can build your small web even today and just block Google via robots.txt, never use it yourself, and link via webrings. The Internet is very good at overlay networks. Search engines aren't even required. If you want Google's features then they ask that you pay their price. But if you don't want to play with the rest of us, you can host on your own, you can choose to browse via a free web directory you and others like you maintain, and all that. It's all there for the taking. It's just that the rest of us derive utility from being part of the network that's growing.
    - munk-a 7y ago
      Unfortunately their price is excessive and their income mostly comes from rent-seeking the contribution they make to the value of the internet is negligible and they leverage their position to take an outsized chunk out of income streams. Google is a literal barrier to entry when it comes to running a web based business - if you can't secure traffic you die and traffic breeds more traffic so it's price is highly inelastic. It's (essentially) the same issue as market driven healthcare if you are dying then prolonging your life (generally) has infinite value and the market price for treatment becomes as much cash as you can get your hands on.
- bluGill 7y ago
  Which ads? The ads on the google search engine, or the ads that random website is getting from google. Are the google ads at me.com any good? I'm surprised more companies don't take this in house. 20 years ago little small town newspapers and radio stations had their own in house ad sales. Seems like a no-brainier for web news to sell targeted ads to their customers.
  - thebean11 7y ago
    Because a newspaper does not have enough user targeting data; their ads would not be as valuable since they would not be as well targeted.
    - maigret 7y ago
      The ads I see on my paper newspaper are often better “targeted” than the ones I see (or block ;) ) on their website. Of course this is not data, but the parent post has an interesting stance.
    - eitland 7y ago
      I'm tired of saying this but either I've been caught in a fluke of some kind or Google really isn't so good at advertising. Or they are optimizing to fleece dumb advertisers or I am extreme outlier. Instagram however, a service that I hardly use, manages to present ads that look interesting again and again.
    - earthboundkid 7y ago
      Newspapers used to be relatively well targeted. You know people reading the Podunk Times are probably in the Podunk region. But now the competition has surged ahead, and you can target on Facebook "people who run as a hobby and are African American and live in a metro with great than >500K population" or whatever. But from a consumer point of view, is it better to be targeted in a loose way by people guessing about your demographics or an exact way by people who know your demos? And as a publisher, how the hell are you supposed to make content if all the money is gobbled up by the platforms? I think we should return to status quo ante by just banning the collection of targeting data. We know that the old ad ecosystem worked because we observed it working, and we know that the new one sucks because we observe publishers going bankrupt and privacy being violated.
- modriano 7y ago
  Sometimes I type the name of a site into the URL bar, but I don't include the top-level domain. Most of the time, the top link is an ad for the site I wanted, and the second link is a non-ad link to the site I wanted. I always try to click the non-ad link, as I like the sites that I remember the names of and I don't want them to have to pay the troll toll, but sometimes I accidentally click the top link and I feel bad (only very very little, though) about it. Yesterday, I accidentally made Hackaday pay the toll. I refuse to say that that is being good at ads. It's kind of slimy, forcing sites to do SEO to put themselves at the top of the list when someone is searching their name. I've actually switched over from chrome to firefox (on the machines where I have the option) because of this (and the fact that the top ~7 search results for many queries are SEO'd garbage).
blackearl 7y ago
Same as any other monopolistic company. Comcast isn't necessarily good at providing internet, in fact most of their customers would say they're shit at it. But most people don't have a choice.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  I am forced to use Comcast, and I really wish I had another option. I have numerous complaints about them. But I have to say -- the quality of their internet service is not one of them. It's been consistently solid and well-performing for me for years.
  - mehrdadn 7y ago
    Their upload speed doesn't bother you?
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      Not really, no. Their price tag and their billing shenanigans sure do, though.
      - mehrdadn 7y ago
        I guess, but the price tag seems intertwined with the quality of service? Hard to separate them (at least for me).
        JohnFen 7y ago
        The pricing is much higher than equally good service that can be had from other companies in other parts of my city, so I consider it overpriced. But the bigger problem is that you have to scrutinize every billing statement from them, and then when they start charging you for things they shouldn't be (every 2 or 3 months), you have to spend a couple of hours on the phone with them to get it straightened out. Until the next time.
bryanrasmussen 7y ago
The question really is then if those billions went to Bing or DDG and searched for their stuff there, would approximately the same percentage click through to the ads.
- ummonk 7y ago
  Or the organic links for the same sites.
president 7y ago
> what if Google ads actually aren’t that effective Did anyone besides Google sales and marketing people actually believe that?
- xyzzyz 7y ago
  Indeed, who are all those people giving Google $100B a year, with 20% growth YoY, to run their ads? They must all be fools to believe that Google is giving them anything of value.
  - munk-a 7y ago
    Possibly? Or they think that their payments are required to be ranked fairly on Google's service and view it more as blackmail than anything else. Searching for "amazon" brings up an Ad paid for by Amazon, searching for "books for sale" brings up paid Ads for four different book sellers - if any of them stopped paying google they'd be, at best, the fourth result - and the first Ad result is for the first organic result, the next organic result is the fourth ad, the one after it a sub-page in the last result and the fourth organic result is craigslist which didn't pay for an Ad. In fact, Amazon isn't even on the first page of results except for their Ad.
    - jborichevskiy 7y ago
      Related tweet by Jason Fried about Basecamp result placement: "When Google puts 4 paid ads ahead of the first organic result for your own brand name, you’re forced to pay up if you want to be found. It’s a shakedown. It’s ransom. But at least we can have fun with it. Search for Basecamp and you may see this attached ad." https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016?lang=en https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016?la...
- summerlight 7y ago
  A significant portion of the modern digital advertisement is heavily data-driven, and those numbers are available to advertisers as well. Based on the numbers, many advertisers actually believe that Google is one of the best options available on the market. It's possible that this is not necessarily due to their modeling technology but infrastructure though.
summerlight 7y ago
> What if Google is just taking credit for clicks on ads just because people would have been searching for that stuff anyway? This is about incrementality. Google/advertisers are well aware of this fact and have been doing lots of ablation studies to understand advertisement's effectiveness. Don't underestimate the industry; you may spend millions of dollars but not billions of dollars without good justifications. I don't know the exact numbers (and I wouldn't be able to tell it even if I know it) and it heavily depends on the type of particular ads (e.g. brand ads will show much less incrementality), but the general consensus is that more than half of those ads can take the credit for conversions. Given that conversion tracking and attribution is not perfect, it's fair to take the money.
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awb 7y ago
And searching for any company name almost always returns an ad for the company in the first position. This generates revenue for Google with virtually no added value.
- tterrace 7y ago
  Recently there's been cases where searching for a company name will actually return an ad for a competitor. Companies are being forced into a bidding war to win back the top position for exact searches on their own name. See: https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016 https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016 and the SS in the reply: https://twitter.com/webiyo/status/1205534848192045056?s=20 https://twitter.com/webiyo/status/1205534848192045056?s=20
  - gowld 7y ago
    "Forced how"? Because otherwise a web user might buy something "better than Basecamp" and that's unfair? If Basecamp can't sell to a prospect who knows their name unless basecamp is top search result, why does Basecamp deserve the sale? Basecamp seems to generate more free advertising from playing the victim in the media than they lose from whatever they complain about.
winternett 7y ago
I have a feeling that we'll arrive soon at StatGate... The point where we find that many companies have been providing erroneous and/or outright false web stats, recommendations, reviews and other metrics to users in order to steer and increase profit. Social media sites offer the ability for everyone on platforms to pay for primary placement now. This is a big conflict of interest in how posts are shown to users, and why very protected/secret algorithms are now applied to creatively show posts to some users and not others on all of these sites and services. Once a company like Google has cornered the search market,and they also have tentacles everywhere through their collected data form other sources (e.g. google maps, gmail, google trends, Android, etc) there are few ways of backing out. They are now deeply ingrained in our society, and they'll know about anyone who is inventing an alternate path before it even happens and possibly operate in an anti-competitive manner. This is the modern realization of Skynet in a way I guess. :/ At the end of the day, how can we trust companies that manipulate us to boost profits? We simply can't, and we shouldn't really allow monopolies to get this big and embedded into critical services.
- jborichevskiy 7y ago
  I suspect the same. And it wouldn't be unprecedented: WSJ: Facebook Overestimated Key Video Metric for Two Years (2016) https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-overestimated-key-video-metric-for-two-years-1474586951 https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-overestimated-key-vide...
  - bryanrasmussen 7y ago
    Well even a company of exemplary moral character like Facebook might make a simple mistake every now and then.
    - fbrep 7y ago
      Such upstanding member of the community!
netcan 7y ago
"Good" is hard to define, when we're talking about monopolistish scenarios, at least in this era. Google's ads make good money because: (1) The overture model for running a search ad market works well (Google acquired and adopted a mature system). (2) targeted ad markets get better with scale. The larger the market share, the smaller a& more targeted a segment is. (3) Ads are also search results. Over time, Google has nudged users to select ads... on high value searches. On that last point: The value of a click varies in orders of magnitude 18c for this one $12 for that one. In the early days, this meant you could buy clicks for pennies. These days, Google limits the supply of low value ads and increases the supply of low value ad clickers. On average, users might even see or click on fewer ads than 10 years ago. On high value search terms, advertising prominence & click-throughs are through the roof. If Google is "playing dirty," this is where the incentive is highest... and achieves the goals which Google has strategically used to grow revenue for years now. Playing dirty is even a weird term here. A newspaper may have a journalistic ethos whereby ad-selling squares don't get to editorialise journalism... whether they stick to it or not. By what ethos is Google not supposed to let ad selling concerns influence organic search?
- gowld 7y ago
  > By what ethos is Google not supposed to let ad selling concerns influence organic search? So ad-selling squares don't get to editorialise journalism. Search is (automated) journalist. Why would you think otherwise? If a search treats users as mere eyeballs to trick and hijack instead if inform well engine, then users learn not to trust the search engine, same as any other kind of journalist
lawlorino 7y ago
> What if Google is just taking credit for clicks on ads just because people would have been searching for that stuff anyway? At least for my company, we run blackout experiments and measure/estimate the incrementality of the ads.
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rednerrus 7y ago
I can tell you that Instgram serves up ads for things I didn't know that I wanted that I end up buying.
AlchemistCamp 7y ago
I've both read trials of 3rd parties and run campaigns where ads are a significant boost to the site already ranking #1 in organic results. The price of AdWords has certainly gone up, but the value hasn't declined.
- gowld 7y ago
  Unless you compare to an ad free version of search, you can't prove that the value of placing an ad is more than the negative value of an ad being sold to a competitor.
  - AlchemistCamp 7y ago
    Haven't ever wanted to prove that!
reeddavid 7y ago
I frequently see people click through a Google Ad just because they didn't type in the whole domain name. Example: type "NYtimes" into address bar, click on top-most link (an ad). In these cases, the ads are entirely extractive compared to organic results.
hysan 7y ago
One way to read this is “Google is serving up ads for what would have been the top search result anyway.” This makes you then wonder, why pay for ads? Because if you don’t, a competitor will and that is where the article takes the turn into talking about the new layout, occlusion, etc. It’s an interesting discussion about trust and how far Google can push before that trust is broken. However, I’m almost certain I’ve had this conversation a decade ago.
johnx123-up 7y ago
Possibly a related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465873 (Original title: The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising)

Disruptive_Dave 7y ago

But that's precisely what makes Google "good at ads." They built the firehose. Own a destination where billions of people go everyday, find a way to measure their intent, serve my information to them. That = fantastic at ads.

kerkeslager 7y ago
I think it's pretty clear what Peretti was talking about--let's make an effort to respond to his intended meaning and not get caught up in semantics. Peretti is talking about quality versus quantity: maybe Google doesn't serve up quality ads, maybe they just serve up quantity ads.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  He may be right, but if Google is bad at ads, it's not for any lack of incentive alignment. They make more money by serving up the most efficient (i.e. high-paying + likely to be clicked) ads. It's not impossible, but it's hard to picture another organization having both the economic means and incentives to do it better than Google does. As to the question posed by the article, isn't the answer obvious? I don't know if users even "trust" Google's responses now. But it is manifestly the case that they will cease to do so when Google's answers cease to be the least efficient for whatever purposes users have for those answers. As long as Google is still the best way to search up information on, e.g., obscure aspects of Stardew Valley's economy, users who want to do searches about such things will continue to prefer Google. If Google ceases to surface good results for queries compared to e.g. DDG, users will migrate to DDG.
  - kerkeslager 7y ago
    > He may be right, but if Google is bad at ads, it's not for any lack of incentive alignment. They make more money by serving up the most efficient (i.e. high-paying + likely to be clicked) ads. It's not impossible, but it's hard to picture another organization having both the economic means and incentives to do it better than Google does. Yeah, I think the only way that would happen is if someone came up with a novel superior approach to search and managed to legally protect it so Google couldn't just copy it. That's a very unlikely at this point. > But it is manifestly the case that they will cease to do so when Google's answers cease to be the least efficient for whatever purposes users have for those answers. I don't think I agree with this. Users don't necessarily behave rationally in self-interest: they can be (and are) manipulated, and unwilling to try new tools.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
      I can believe that if there were another solution that were marginally better it might not be enough to unseat the top player in the market. But switching costs in search are extremely low so it would be surprising if people did not switch for a substantially better experience. In particular, it would require us to believe that what happened when Google showed up on the scene would not happen again, and to me that just does not seem likely.
      - kerkeslager 7y ago
        Perhaps switching costs are low, but they're certainly higher than people are willing to pay in many cases. Switching costs as high as "changing the default search provider" are demonstrably prohibitive.
- calibas 7y ago
  Peretti is talking about the quality of the ad service, not the quality of the ads themselves. Peretti is suggesting that maybe Google's service isn't anything special, and their success is due to their insanely large audience. The comment you replied to goes even further to suggest there's no real talent to serving ads at all, and that everything depends upon the audience size. That's not just semantics.
  - deleted 7y ago
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- grawprog 7y ago
  >quality ads I've seen this term for years but I still don't understand what it means. I don't want to see ads. There are no 'quality' ads. All ads are designed to sell me things period. I don't need anyone telling me about what I might want. I understand ads exist to make money and if they didn't we wouldn't have the internet etc. But there's no 'quality' to them, they're a necessary evil i've come to accept and adapt to over my life. I dislike them, I have no need for them, there'll never be a time I say 'well gee, sure am glad I seen that ad, it showed me just what I didn't know I needed.' Ads exist to sell crap to people, they're not good or bad, they just are. Some are invasive, some are reasonable, but they're all shit.
  - milesvp 7y ago
    You may have never seen a good ad then. There was a period of time I would actively look at ads on penny-arcade, because the owners of the site only ever allowed ads (mostly for games) that they themselves could at least tangentially endorse. This meant I basically got hand curated ads for products I was genuinely interested in, by people who’s taste I understood if not agreed with. That said this ended up being the exception to proof the rule about ads being mostly noise, and I agree the world would be better with less of them. And almost certainly the current state of algorithmic ad serving is a disaster.
    - ksaj 7y ago
      Just like the guitar mags I grew up with. I looked at all the ads, and even bought stuff based on what I saw in competing ads along with gear reviews. For that matter, the same goes for motorcycle magazines, and just about every other kind of magazine that caters to a niche market. Those kinds of ads can be great, even.
    - kerkeslager 7y ago
      Okay, but did those ads contribute anything beyond reading Penny Arcade's reviews of games? For you as a user, how does the ad improve your experience?
  - clairity 7y ago
titzer 7y ago
After all this time watchin me, everything I ever asked it, all the ads I never clicked on, all the videos it watched me watch, all my emails it read, heck even after I worked for the dang company for nearly ten years, Google does not understand a very basic, essential thing about me. I hate advertising, damn it! I am sick of looking at it, I am sick of it looking at me. I am sick of hearing about how advertising is necessary to support a $130 billion in revenue and a trillion dollar valuation and some of the world's richest people. It's a lie. I'm sick of hearing about how I don't really hate advertising, I just want to see better ads. It's horseshit. I want to stop being bothered. I wanna stop being followed around. I wanna stop being monetized. We could have a smaller, more useful web that better benefited humanity, we could make education free or nearly free, we could actually have a chance to realize the dream of the original pioneers of the internet, if we weren't so obsessed with making it into the world's largest commercial marketplace, the world's biggest casino and TV show, and Google wasn't intent on extracting its ludicrous "fair share". If access to the internet is a human right, then its gateways can't be commercial entities, let alone ones hell-bent on growth. It is fundamentally incompatible.
- scarejunba 7y ago
  You don't need Google. The Internet is fairly decentralized. You can build your small web even today and just block Google via robots.txt, never use it yourself, and link via webrings. The Internet is very good at overlay networks. Search engines aren't even required. If you want Google's features then they ask that you pay their price. But if you don't want to play with the rest of us, you can host on your own, you can choose to browse via a free web directory you and others like you maintain, and all that. It's all there for the taking. It's just that the rest of us derive utility from being part of the network that's growing.
  - munk-a 7y ago
    Unfortunately their price is excessive and their income mostly comes from rent-seeking the contribution they make to the value of the internet is negligible and they leverage their position to take an outsized chunk out of income streams. Google is a literal barrier to entry when it comes to running a web based business - if you can't secure traffic you die and traffic breeds more traffic so it's price is highly inelastic. It's (essentially) the same issue as market driven healthcare if you are dying then prolonging your life (generally) has infinite value and the market price for treatment becomes as much cash as you can get your hands on.
bluGill 7y ago
Which ads? The ads on the google search engine, or the ads that random website is getting from google. Are the google ads at me.com any good? I'm surprised more companies don't take this in house. 20 years ago little small town newspapers and radio stations had their own in house ad sales. Seems like a no-brainier for web news to sell targeted ads to their customers.
- thebean11 7y ago
  Because a newspaper does not have enough user targeting data; their ads would not be as valuable since they would not be as well targeted.
  - maigret 7y ago
    The ads I see on my paper newspaper are often better “targeted” than the ones I see (or block ;) ) on their website. Of course this is not data, but the parent post has an interesting stance.
  - eitland 7y ago
    I'm tired of saying this but either I've been caught in a fluke of some kind or Google really isn't so good at advertising. Or they are optimizing to fleece dumb advertisers or I am extreme outlier. Instagram however, a service that I hardly use, manages to present ads that look interesting again and again.
  - earthboundkid 7y ago
    Newspapers used to be relatively well targeted. You know people reading the Podunk Times are probably in the Podunk region. But now the competition has surged ahead, and you can target on Facebook "people who run as a hobby and are African American and live in a metro with great than >500K population" or whatever. But from a consumer point of view, is it better to be targeted in a loose way by people guessing about your demographics or an exact way by people who know your demos? And as a publisher, how the hell are you supposed to make content if all the money is gobbled up by the platforms? I think we should return to status quo ante by just banning the collection of targeting data. We know that the old ad ecosystem worked because we observed it working, and we know that the new one sucks because we observe publishers going bankrupt and privacy being violated.
modriano 7y ago
Sometimes I type the name of a site into the URL bar, but I don't include the top-level domain. Most of the time, the top link is an ad for the site I wanted, and the second link is a non-ad link to the site I wanted. I always try to click the non-ad link, as I like the sites that I remember the names of and I don't want them to have to pay the troll toll, but sometimes I accidentally click the top link and I feel bad (only very very little, though) about it. Yesterday, I accidentally made Hackaday pay the toll. I refuse to say that that is being good at ads. It's kind of slimy, forcing sites to do SEO to put themselves at the top of the list when someone is searching their name. I've actually switched over from chrome to firefox (on the machines where I have the option) because of this (and the fact that the top ~7 search results for many queries are SEO'd garbage).

blackearl 7y ago

Same as any other monopolistic company. Comcast isn't necessarily good at providing internet, in fact most of their customers would say they're shit at it. But most people don't have a choice.

JohnFen 7y ago
I am forced to use Comcast, and I really wish I had another option. I have numerous complaints about them. But I have to say -- the quality of their internet service is not one of them. It's been consistently solid and well-performing for me for years.
- mehrdadn 7y ago
  Their upload speed doesn't bother you?
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    Not really, no. Their price tag and their billing shenanigans sure do, though.
    - mehrdadn 7y ago
      I guess, but the price tag seems intertwined with the quality of service? Hard to separate them (at least for me).
      - JohnFen 7y ago
        The pricing is much higher than equally good service that can be had from other companies in other parts of my city, so I consider it overpriced. But the bigger problem is that you have to scrutinize every billing statement from them, and then when they start charging you for things they shouldn't be (every 2 or 3 months), you have to spend a couple of hours on the phone with them to get it straightened out. Until the next time.

bryanrasmussen 7y ago

The question really is then if those billions went to Bing or DDG and searched for their stuff there, would approximately the same percentage click through to the ads.

ummonk 7y ago
Or the organic links for the same sites.

president 7y ago

> what if Google ads actually aren’t that effective Did anyone besides Google sales and marketing people actually believe that?

xyzzyz 7y ago
Indeed, who are all those people giving Google $100B a year, with 20% growth YoY, to run their ads? They must all be fools to believe that Google is giving them anything of value.
- munk-a 7y ago
  Possibly? Or they think that their payments are required to be ranked fairly on Google's service and view it more as blackmail than anything else. Searching for "amazon" brings up an Ad paid for by Amazon, searching for "books for sale" brings up paid Ads for four different book sellers - if any of them stopped paying google they'd be, at best, the fourth result - and the first Ad result is for the first organic result, the next organic result is the fourth ad, the one after it a sub-page in the last result and the fourth organic result is craigslist which didn't pay for an Ad. In fact, Amazon isn't even on the first page of results except for their Ad.
  - jborichevskiy 7y ago
    Related tweet by Jason Fried about Basecamp result placement: "When Google puts 4 paid ads ahead of the first organic result for your own brand name, you’re forced to pay up if you want to be found. It’s a shakedown. It’s ransom. But at least we can have fun with it. Search for Basecamp and you may see this attached ad." https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016?lang=en https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016?la...
summerlight 7y ago
A significant portion of the modern digital advertisement is heavily data-driven, and those numbers are available to advertisers as well. Based on the numbers, many advertisers actually believe that Google is one of the best options available on the market. It's possible that this is not necessarily due to their modeling technology but infrastructure though.

summerlight 7y ago

> What if Google is just taking credit for clicks on ads just because people would have been searching for that stuff anyway? This is about incrementality. Google/advertisers are well aware of this fact and have been doing lots of ablation studies to understand advertisement's effectiveness. Don't underestimate the industry; you may spend millions of dollars but not billions of dollars without good justifications. I don't know the exact numbers (and I wouldn't be able to tell it even if I know it) and it heavily depends on the type of particular ads (e.g. brand ads will show much less incrementality), but the general consensus is that more than half of those ads can take the credit for conversions. Given that conversion tracking and attribution is not perfect, it's fair to take the money.

deleted 7y ago

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awb 7y ago

And searching for any company name almost always returns an ad for the company in the first position. This generates revenue for Google with virtually no added value.

tterrace 7y ago
Recently there's been cases where searching for a company name will actually return an ad for a competitor. Companies are being forced into a bidding war to win back the top position for exact searches on their own name. See: https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016 https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016 and the SS in the reply: https://twitter.com/webiyo/status/1205534848192045056?s=20 https://twitter.com/webiyo/status/1205534848192045056?s=20
- gowld 7y ago
  "Forced how"? Because otherwise a web user might buy something "better than Basecamp" and that's unfair? If Basecamp can't sell to a prospect who knows their name unless basecamp is top search result, why does Basecamp deserve the sale? Basecamp seems to generate more free advertising from playing the victim in the media than they lose from whatever they complain about.

winternett 7y ago

I have a feeling that we'll arrive soon at StatGate... The point where we find that many companies have been providing erroneous and/or outright false web stats, recommendations, reviews and other metrics to users in order to steer and increase profit. Social media sites offer the ability for everyone on platforms to pay for primary placement now. This is a big conflict of interest in how posts are shown to users, and why very protected/secret algorithms are now applied to creatively show posts to some users and not others on all of these sites and services. Once a company like Google has cornered the search market,and they also have tentacles everywhere through their collected data form other sources (e.g. google maps, gmail, google trends, Android, etc) there are few ways of backing out. They are now deeply ingrained in our society, and they'll know about anyone who is inventing an alternate path before it even happens and possibly operate in an anti-competitive manner. This is the modern realization of Skynet in a way I guess. :/ At the end of the day, how can we trust companies that manipulate us to boost profits? We simply can't, and we shouldn't really allow monopolies to get this big and embedded into critical services.

jborichevskiy 7y ago
I suspect the same. And it wouldn't be unprecedented: WSJ: Facebook Overestimated Key Video Metric for Two Years (2016) https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-overestimated-key-video-metric-for-two-years-1474586951 https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-overestimated-key-vide...
- bryanrasmussen 7y ago
  Well even a company of exemplary moral character like Facebook might make a simple mistake every now and then.
  - fbrep 7y ago
    Such upstanding member of the community!

netcan 7y ago

"Good" is hard to define, when we're talking about monopolistish scenarios, at least in this era. Google's ads make good money because: (1) The overture model for running a search ad market works well (Google acquired and adopted a mature system). (2) targeted ad markets get better with scale. The larger the market share, the smaller a& more targeted a segment is. (3) Ads are also search results. Over time, Google has nudged users to select ads... on high value searches. On that last point: The value of a click varies in orders of magnitude 18c for this one $12 for that one. In the early days, this meant you could buy clicks for pennies. These days, Google limits the supply of low value ads and increases the supply of low value ad clickers. On average, users might even see or click on fewer ads than 10 years ago. On high value search terms, advertising prominence & click-throughs are through the roof. If Google is "playing dirty," this is where the incentive is highest... and achieves the goals which Google has strategically used to grow revenue for years now. Playing dirty is even a weird term here. A newspaper may have a journalistic ethos whereby ad-selling squares don't get to editorialise journalism... whether they stick to it or not. By what ethos is Google not supposed to let ad selling concerns influence organic search?

gowld 7y ago
> By what ethos is Google not supposed to let ad selling concerns influence organic search? So ad-selling squares don't get to editorialise journalism. Search is (automated) journalist. Why would you think otherwise? If a search treats users as mere eyeballs to trick and hijack instead if inform well engine, then users learn not to trust the search engine, same as any other kind of journalist

lawlorino 7y ago

> What if Google is just taking credit for clicks on ads just because people would have been searching for that stuff anyway? At least for my company, we run blackout experiments and measure/estimate the incrementality of the ads.

deleted 7y ago

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rednerrus 7y ago

I can tell you that Instgram serves up ads for things I didn't know that I wanted that I end up buying.

AlchemistCamp 7y ago

I've both read trials of 3rd parties and run campaigns where ads are a significant boost to the site already ranking #1 in organic results. The price of AdWords has certainly gone up, but the value hasn't declined.

gowld 7y ago
Unless you compare to an ad free version of search, you can't prove that the value of placing an ad is more than the negative value of an ad being sold to a competitor.
- AlchemistCamp 7y ago
  Haven't ever wanted to prove that!

reeddavid 7y ago

I frequently see people click through a Google Ad just because they didn't type in the whole domain name. Example: type "NYtimes" into address bar, click on top-most link (an ad). In these cases, the ads are entirely extractive compared to organic results.

hysan 7y ago

One way to read this is “Google is serving up ads for what would have been the top search result anyway.” This makes you then wonder, why pay for ads? Because if you don’t, a competitor will and that is where the article takes the turn into talking about the new layout, occlusion, etc. It’s an interesting discussion about trust and how far Google can push before that trust is broken. However, I’m almost certain I’ve had this conversation a decade ago.

johnx123-up 7y ago

Possibly a related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465873 (Original title: The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising)