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The long term danger for Google and others is when lots of companies realize they probably didn’t need to make all that spend in the first place. Ad spending i
by goatinaboat 7y ago
The long term danger for Google and others is when lots of companies realize they probably didn’t need to make all that spend in the first place.
Ad spending is an arms race and Google has very deliberately set it up so that the only way to succeed on their near-monopoly platform is to out-spend your competitors who are also trying to do the same to you. But it’s a zero sum game the end state of which is Google captures all of your profits while you scramble to cut costs in a race to the bottom.
The only way to win is not to play.
- kerkeslager 7y agoNo, because then your competitors win. The only way to win is for everyone to agree as a society that advertising is harmful, and have nobody play. Enforcing that is difficult, but I think it's the right direction.
- brainwad 7y agoThat's very extreme. To solve the problem of capturing all profit, society just needs to agree some k so that all ad bidders only bid so much as would give them ROI of 1+k, instead of bidding all the way down to ROI of 1.
- goatinaboat 7y agoIt’s not extreme at all. Ad people justify what they do as informing the public of new products. So let ads be regulated to plain black text on a white background to be shown only on ad pages that people must specifically visit, and we’ll see the truth of that assessment. The real truth of advertising is that it is engineered to exploit flaws in the human psyche to hack a human into acting against their own best interests. To buy a product they don’t need, or to vote for a candidate that will harm them. It is toxic, and those who create it and distribute it are toxic.
- kerkeslager 7y agoHacker News, where the problem with lying to people to sell them inferior products they don't need is that it costs too much.