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The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising (2019)
- itcrowd 6y agoDiscussion from 6 months ago with the author chiming in (Jesse Frederik, jessefrederik on HN) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465873
- jp555 6y agoI've been thinking more and more that when it comes to advertising, trying to squeeze irrational behaviour into a logical system just isnt going to work long term. Rory Sutherland's "Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life" convinced me that advertising has not changed at all, no matter how much Silicon Valley wants it to. Their delusions WILL come home to roost eventually. Only ~10% of advertising $ is spent on direct response. ~90% of advertising is brand advertising, with no immediate conversion as a goal. It's about slowly nurturing the creation of a STORY inside the heads of prospective customers.
- ahelwer 6y agoAt the start of covid lockdown I realized I needed a new pair of sweatpants. Where was the first place my brain thought to look? The nike store. Why was that? What specific ad or celebrity sponsorship can you trace that back to? Probably something to do with basketball but I honestly do not know. Regardless, I ended up buying a pair from nike.
- antsar 6y agoAnd now your comment planted the seed for a bunch of other readers. It's infectious!
- smolder 6y agoNot for me. When there are low-advertisement brands available, I tend to pick those because less of the revenue I give them goes into advertising. I potentially get a higher value product, and I make the world a better place by voting with my money to discourage aggressive advertising. Nike fosters fanaticism around its products and has long been on the unofficial boycotts list for me.
- jp555 6y agoAdvertising is only one tool in creating a brand story. Design is often just as much about what you leave out than what you put in.
- lotsofpulp 6y agoI would have thought to go to Costco. Because of decades of quality experiences and knowing their business model. Or Uniqlo, also based on experiences and knowing they are moderately priced. I've never seen an ad for Uniqlo though. All of my experiences with Nike are it's either overpriced garbage, or very expensively priced good stuff, but not good enough that it makes it worth the marginal cost over what's at Costco.
- jlbnjmn 6y agoI bought Adidas...at Costco.
- lotsofpulp 6y agoI just bought Adidas socks at Costco too, but I would have bought whatever brand they had. I know the Adidas (and Nike) brand products of varying quality for various price points at Walmart versus Costco versus their outlet stores versus their Soho stores in manhattan.
- lostgame 6y agoMy feet and overall posture have thanked me relentlessly from my choice to spend $50-100 more on footwear every year or so since I have started buying Nike shoes. I mean, the difference is literally night and day from when I used to just grab a cheap or even ‘reasonably’ cheap ($50-70?) pair of shoes. Sweatpants, screw that - I’ll quote Macklemore here, “$50 for a t-shirt, that’s just some fucking ignorant shit,” - go buy them from freaking Wal-Mart - who is going to see you in them anyways but your partner - but Nike’s core business is shoes, and my God, they do it exceptionally well.
- lotsofpulp 6y agoYes, I wouldn’t go to Costco for my shoes, since I’d want to maximize for quality.
- pjc50 6y agoYou bought a branded article from their official store? That pretty much guaranteed paying the maximum price.
- lotsofpulp 6y agoI would assume a Nike product purchased at full price on their official website is better quality than a Nike product sold at a lower price at a discount store. That turns me off from buying Nike, as I want to reward brands that are consistent quality at whatever price, but Nike is betting they can get more revenue by using price discrimination to target different customers with the same brand.
- reaperducer 6y agoYou bought a branded article from their official store? That pretty much guaranteed paying the maximum price. It depends on the product. Lately I've seen a lot of items on brand stores lately that are cheaper than in any online marketplace, with the added benefit of being 100% guaranteed to not get something that's fake/used/Amazon/knockoff.
- rchaud 6y ago> Where was the first place my brain thought to look? The nike store. Why was that? The first place was a Nike store and not a retailer that you had purchased your last pair from? I suppose it depends on how much importance you place on having a varied wardrobe. For me, past the age of 25 I could no longer care about spending hours in a mall trying on different brands, comparison shopping, and figuring out the fit. If Brand A is of suitable quality, price and fit, I'm buying Brand A for as long as they keep making that article of clothing.
- jjgreen 6y agoFantastic piece, particularly the "Lagrange multipliers"
- _Microft 6y agoRegarding Lagrange multipliers: I don't know if this is fake or not but it made me laugh when I saw it for the first time: https://htbimporter.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/wow_customer_support_math.jpg https://htbimporter.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/wow_customer...
- mrbonner 6y agoThat’s my favorite part, too. I deal with a bunch of OR people at work so I couldn’t resist to bring this similar question up next time. Let see what they have to say!
- loeg 6y agohttps://idlewords.com/2015/11/the_advertising_bubble.htm https://idlewords.com/2015/11/the_advertising_bubble.htm (2015)
- barbegal 6y agoThis is from November 2019 so pre-COVID-19
- PeterSmit 6y agoThe original Dutch article is a few months older even. This article is great journalism.
- jlbnjmn 6y agoI dislike ads and ad platforms as much as the next person. But this isn't good journalism. "Is online advertising working? We simply don’t know" In study 5 (e-commerce) the answer was clear, and yet ignored. Is there a bubble? Yes. Are ads magic? No. Do they work? For the right products, yes. Extremely well.
- ksec 6y agoThanks. Wish they could add 2019 in the title.
- rossdavidh 6y agoI've come to the tentative conclusion that advertising is, in most cases, kind of like money spent on good luck charms. The company wants to spend money on convincing people to buy their product (or service or etc.). Telling them, "there is no good way to do that, you'll have to just make a better product", is never going to be believed. They want to think that they can just spend money, and get money back. Improving your product also requires money, probably, but in addition it would require good planning, a realistic vision, organizational competence, and a lot of other things that are harder to deliver than just buying ads. Executive buy ads because it's easy to do, compared to making a better product (or service or etc.). So your ad company doesn't have to deliver better sales, it just has to be at least as good as other people's ad services. Because most executives are not going to promote the guy who says, "there is no easy way to spend money to get higher sales, you're going to have to do it the hard way".
- ashtonkem 6y agoAs best I can tell some advertising is probably necessary; if customers don’t know about your product it genuinely doesn’t matter how good it is. But chances are most of the programmatic ads are a waste.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agoThat's the problem... I'm currently doing a Brother hackathon and have started noticing brother ads as I browse into and out of their developer documentation. I wonder if there is some theory on clickthrough rate on ads you have seen versus never seen versus companies you know or don't know.
- toast0 6y agoRetargetting is the name for what you're seeing. The idea is that you were looking at their products, but didn't buy, and a reminder might help close the sale. The ROI on these seems to be pretty high, so the bid prices are higher than a lot of other ads you might see. Especially for larger dollar items (if you look at cars, you're going to see way more car ads than normal for about 3-6 months, regardless of if you bought a car or just stopped looking ... the ad networks don't know if you converted).
- toddmorey 6y agoBeen realizing how the global pandemic is exposing what a complete and utter disaster advertising supported journalism has become on the web. It's really now a race to the bottom--even the largest media brands basically exist to make you click fake articles. (It's bad even without considering astroturfing comments, entirely fake news sites, etc.) Newspapers had their yellow journalism days and have always been adverting supported, but it's never been this bad. The internet solved the information availability problem, now we have a huge trustworthiness / curation problem. My hope is a marked return to subscriptions, the way the NYT has done. I just loathe any hybrid where you subscribe and _still_ get ads. I want to leave that crappy model way behind.
- buboard 6y ago.
- toddmorey 6y agoI agree, though sites like CNN do work really hard to make the ads look just like their other articles. It's similar to how advertising on search has become so much less distinct from organic results (if you even get any on the page now).
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoCNN is now just a distributed chumbox.
- Nasrudith 6y agoThey can still have control but it makes them less money. Ironically the ones with more control tend to be less trustworthy in many cases as their sponsor often brings in more bias or effective astroturf.
- whatshisface 6y ago>but it's never been this bad I would argue that the true low point of American news media was during the WWI wartime period where good reporting was illegal, and as a result impossible to find even if you sifted through all of the chaff.
- jlbnjmn 6y agoA copy of Scientific Advertising and some thinking are about all that's needed to do the job well. There are essentially 4 rules for effective advertising: 1) ignore all metrics from online platforms (especially the ones that sell ads) 2) ignore all metrics from ad agencies 3) run tests that make sense* 4) measure in dollars The hard part is convincing the founder/owner to stop messing with stuff long enough that you can actually measure the results. Also, companies tend to way overspend on ads and data scientists while underspending on skilled advertisers. (They can be forgiven for the latter, there are too few skilled advertisers, and lousy advertisers usually sell themselves as experts.) *Example: your job is to advertise a business with 20 locations in 2 cities. You want to know if radio ads are better than search ads. So you do the obvious thing: buy radio ads in city A and search ads in city B, then compare sales. If the difference in sales is big enough that managers get defensive and start pointing out why the test wasn't valid, you may have a winner. Run it in both cities and see if it still works. (Rule of thumb: if nobody is upset with the outcome, the variations were too similar. Run bigger tests.)
- libertine 6y agoThe problem is that the outcome of some campaigns doesn't reflect in dollars, and still you have a winning campaign. In fact, probably the most expensive campaigns are used to consolidate market shares, brand positioning and notoriety. People just seem to forget that advertising existed before the internet, and it worked without the bloat of metrics.
- jlbnjmn 6y ago> The problem is that the outcome of some campaigns doesn't reflect in dollars, and still you have a winning campaign. All winning campaigns reflect in dollars. The question is when. That's why it's imperative to separate markets entirely. Radio ads for a "branding/awareness" strategy. Search ads for a direct response strategy. The majority of people viewing/hearing one should never hear/view the other. If it takes 6 months to properly test a branding campaign, decide ahead of time whether your organization has the patience to wait. If not, just stick with direct response. Also, Scientific Advertising was written in 1923.
- qppo 6y agoI wonder if the only tangible value in advertisement isn't to increase your revenue by convincing consumers to buy your product, but to decrease your competitors' by convincing consumers they don't exist.
- Nasrudith 6y agoAdvertising spending is already recognized as sort of a prisoner's dilemma so even if not literally true the effect are similar. Barring existing infamy or a backfire that makes them worse than generic like say Evony a sole advertising party would be priveledged in name recognition but if everyone does it is just an expense boost to enter in the red queen's race.
- wastedhours 6y agoThat's the case for a lot of FMCG marketing - the aim isn't to drive immediate conversion, but to be so pervasive you take up all of the possible mental capacity a user has for (example) a "cola brand".
- jlbnjmn 6y agoA lot of people use Google to find things. A lot of those people click the first search result that matches what they're looking for (low cost, certain feature, prestige, there's no right answer, just right answer for them). Some of those clicks are for products and services with short buying/lead gen cycles. Once they've clicked, many are only going back if they don't like what they find. The value of search ads is being the link they clicked. You can buy that click. You can literally insert your website into a demand/supply match. If you don't mess it up after they click, those clicks become transactions. In dollars. Oil changes are a great example. Some of the people who type "oil change near me" in maps don't really care about the brand. They click the top result, schedule an appointment, and get their oil changed. If the click was $3 and it took 10 people/bots clicking to set one appointment, that's $30. Now let's say the oil change is $39 so profit is ($39 - oil $7, - filter $3, - labor $5, - ads $30) = -$6 before the cost of skilled advertiser. Are those ads profitable? It depends. If you can upsell 1/10 on replacing a cabin air filter for 10x cost, then yes. Every other upsell becomes profit. Also, at a car dealership you can sell 3-5% a car while they're there for a nice $1700-$3200 profit, which nicely covers the cost of the skilled advertiser.
- jlbnjmn 6y agoRunning ads is like running a VC fund. 95% of your money is wasted, but if you do it right, that last 5% makes up for it.
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- tiborsaas 6y agoThis makes me very sad because I fear it's true. I want to play around building successful side projects, but to get traction I need to play around with ads. To buy ads with my own money and knowing 95% of it will be wasted is too much of a blocker.
- ryanwaggoner 6y agoI’m a fan of using ads to accelerate growth, but you don’t have to. I bet most profitable side projects got there without ads. And you probably shouldn’t spend money on ads in the early days, for a bunch of reasons. In general, I’d focus on organic growth channels to start with and only switch to ads when you have that working, you have revenue that’s growing, churn isn’t too high, etc.
- tiborsaas 6y agoI know I don't have to, but I don't know how to get to these organic channels. Tried Instagram audience building, but got bored with it, zero sales. I also can't hire a marketer since they will probably just want to spend $ on ads and the circle closes. It's not SAAS, but e-commerce.
- jlbnjmn 6y agoAds are just conversations at scale. Elon Musk has conversations at scale on Twitter, no ads needed. If you know who would use your product, find them and have conversations. Talking to real people is the first step to great ads anyway. If you don't want to have conversations with your users, or don't know who they would be, maybe you would be better off building something else.
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 6y ago> Web-based retailers and Web sites supported by advertising revenue have proven to be the two most failure-prone types of Internet business, and there are lessons to be learned from each segment. https://money.cnn.com/2000/11/09/technology/overview/ https://money.cnn.com/2000/11/09/technology/overview/ The year 2000 - how is this a new bubble?
- ping_pong 6y agoGood online advertisement is very effective. My friend worked in online gaming, similar to Zynga. Their strength wasn't in the games itself, because they mostly ripped off other games. It was in their advertising channel. They had around 10M active users and whenever they had a new game out, they would advertise it to their existing customers, and they would get instant users for their new games. Not 100% conversion, but enough to get traction. By having their own home-grown advertising network, they didn't have to spend money on Google or Facebook ads, the could just milk their existing channel. I think things like this are pretty effective once you have things up and running, because it's free.
- gbrindisi 6y agoIsn't this kinda the same of what the article is explaining with selection bias?
- lostgame 6y agoWell, I think they’re corroborating the article with a relevant anecdote, which is fair.
- ambicapter 6y agoIsn't that just "branding"?
- jcfrei 6y agoI would call this upselling rather than advertising. You can only do that if you have already established a distribution channel to your clients and I would guess a large part of advertising is intended to create such a first channel.
- toast0 6y agoThis example is more crossselling than upselling. Upselling is when you come for one thing and leave with the bigger thing. Crossselling is more about you having one thing and using that relationship to sell you something else.
- melicerte 6y agoThe post is interesting. The only thing that bugs me is that it only covers companies with well established names and/or products. It would be interesting to know the conclusion for small companies and or startup products. Being on top of a search is so hard, maybe impossible (except if someone knows exactly what it searches, like the company or product name).
- SeanFerree 6y agoExcellent article!
- grativo 6y agoI guess conditioning over time has enabled consumers to develop resistance to ads, companies have to change things up otherwise they will see no value in online advertising. I will say that it's ironic that often companies buy in to the marketing produced by advertising agencies.
- loosetypes 6y agoSell your own dog food?
- nullsmack 6y agoGetting so sick of the ads and such online. And every website has an adblocker detector now. You can't just look something up any more and end up on a website where someone wants to help you. You always end up on a website where someone is trying to make bank off of you.
- karatestomp 6y agoThe kind of copy Google encourages is at least as big a problem, I'd say. Do you ever search for something, click a result, and find you have to skip down fifteen paragraphs to get what you wanted? It's a real problem on the Web these days. Pages with incredibly low information density, on purpose. Even the simplest piece of information may be buried way, way down a page with no actual content above it, just inane rambling. This is a real problem for search results on all kinds of topics. You may have seen it yourself, these garbage pages with high search rankings. How bad a problem is it? Often the entire first page of results is nothing but pages that waste your time on purpose. (but seriously, imagine the sheer count of person-hours wasted writing and reading this useless fucking crap, making the Web worse on purpose, and it's been going on long enough that I guess... Google just thinks that's fine? Ugh. I swear it's like they just gave up on good search results around '08 or '09 and settled for whatever as long as the pages serve ads and get clicks)
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago>Do you ever search for something, click a result, and find you have to skip down fifteen paragraphs [...] // Nevermind that, how about when you go to a result and the _quoted_ "keyword" isn't even in the page? That was probably the straw that broke me and sent me to DDG, I don't think it's better, but I'm over being sent results for whatever their reason is rather than because they are what I'm trying to find.
- friendlybus 6y agoI agree with this wholeheartedly. I think theres a hole in the market forming for another mega-information sorter and searcher now that google is losing its edge. Quite possibly a new format for organising information on web platforms.
- steve76 6y agoThe article is about big brands. What if the big brands launched thousands of smaller brands a day based on advertising value and user trends? Think of paying for customers like paying for electricity or water. $3 will get 1,000 people to look at it. $10 will get 20 people to sit down and listen. Instead of buying ad space, you are buying purchases and customers outright like a utility bill. Scared? That's nothing. Imagine the supplier of customers changes your product on that same scale. Not little things either. You start off buying investors for waterfront development. You end up selling beverage racks for gas station convenience stores. <-- that really happened. No one knows what's what anymore!
- franze 6y agoI made a simple model using churn, referral, paid ad spend. In any scenario where Churn > Referral -> Ads are a trap. If Churn < Referral -> Ads are a halfway decent accelerator. Challenge is you can not really determine if Churn < Referral as long as you run ads. I wrote about it here if someone is interested https://medium.com/@franz.enzenhofer/ads-are-a-trap-80df01d2fbaf?source=friends_link&sk=ed2680c921a7bb5a0b147b44a9a14b1e https://medium.com/@franz.enzenhofer/ads-are-a-trap-80df01d2... (free to read medium link, will migrate away from medium soon)
- duxup 6y agoI feel like for a long time there has been talk about online advertising collapsing because it is bad or not useful or something else. Now I expect it will if only due to economic activity, but outside that I personally suspect online advertising continues to be used generally because folks don't see a lot of alternatives. What are they going to do? Radio ads? The system might suck, but the internet is where folks are, anyone advertising likely needs to go there / try.
- cs702 6y agoAs this excellent article points out, lots of research shows that most online advertising is a waste of money, due to phenomena such as targeting people who are already looking for the advertised product or service: > Picture this. Luigi’s Pizzeria hires three teenagers to hand out coupons to passersby. After a few weeks of flyering, one of the three turns out to be a marketing genius. Customers keep showing up with coupons distributed by this particular kid. The other two can’t make any sense of it: how does he do it? When they ask him, he explains: "I stand in the waiting area of the pizzeria." It’s plain to see that junior’s no marketing whiz. Alas, the incentives everywhere are stacked in favor of wasting money: > Within the marketing department, TV, print and digital compete with each other to show who’s more important, a dynamic that hardly promotes honest reporting. The fact that management often has no idea how to interpret the numbers is not helpful either. The highest numbers win. > "Bad methodology makes everyone happy,” said David Reiley, who used to head Yahoo’s economics team and is now working for streaming service Pandora. "It will make the publisher happy. It will make the person who bought the media happy. It will make the boss of the person who bought the media happy. It will make the ad agency happy. Everybody can brag that they had a very successful campaign." Moreover, the online advertising complex has evolved mechanisms for 'manufacturing' more demand for online advertising, for example, by relying on zero-sum games like "crowding out" in which no one wins except the online advertising complex: > If, for example, BestBuy was the only buyer for "BestBuy" search ads, brand name advertising would only lead to a mere 2% to 3% additional clicks. More than nothing, but it is hardly enough to warrant the investment. But there was one group of advertisers with a valid reason to purchase own brand name ads. Not that they were any more effective for this group, but because their competitors were "crowding them out" by buying ads that targeted the brand owner's name (so you search for "Bestbuy" but a sponsored ad for "Walmart" tops the list). This can enable Walmart to steal 20% of Bestbuy's organic search traffic. In the aggregate, all this wasteful advertising feeds a quarter-trillion-dollar "industry" that seems to add little or no value to anyone, and may in fact subtract significant value from everyone's quality of life. Is it a "bubble?" I don't know. Is it a net negative for everyone else? In my personal experience, the answer is a big YES.
- RivieraKid 6y agoIt might be a Ponzi-like bubble to a (probably small) extent, there is this feedback cycle: Online advertising revenue goes up -> companies that plan to sell online ads get more investment and some of it is spent on online advertising -> online advertising revenue goes up.
- kposehn 6y agoAs this is a repost (no offense to OP), I'm going to repost my original comment (thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21468505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21468505) about this which is still applicable: Reliably someone comes along every few months to question digital ads. I always come back to analyses of incrementality as the real proof. Take an audience of X people. Divide them in two. Show ads to your test group, don't show to control. Watch your business grow and gauge the lift between the two audiences. The companies that know how to advertise at scale do this constantly and can gauge the real effect of their ad dollars. Facebook, Google and others make these tests possible in their platforms, while other software suites such as Impact Altitude and VisualIQ allow you to do this kind of analysis and testing as well. In the end, most of it proves out to be incremental. There are notable exceptions of course, but when are there not?
- 0xDEEPFAC 6y agoThe thing is I am not sure a large percentage of advertisers are aware of such things and adjust their expectations. Facebook and their ilk encourage you to believe their numbers even though they are mostly phony - I mean how many people do you know that haven't block ads that actually click on them without them making their ui so confusing that you do it by accident? The market is overhyped
- jakear 6y agoI block ads on desktop, but on things like mobile Instagram, there’s not much you can do. To some extent I’ve learned to stop worrying and love the tracking, and I will with some regularity tap through to story ads I see with genuine interest in the product (generally outdoorsy things). I’ve not bought anything yet because the websites have failed to convince me the product isn’t junk, but that’s their problem — Facebook has successfully completed their side of the deal (get eyes on the website).
- throwaway8941 6y agoHave you tried DNS-based ad blocking like pi-hole or https://nextdns.io/ https://nextdns.io/ ?
- libertine 6y ago>For more than a century, advertising was an art, not a science. Hard data didn’t exist. An advertising guru of the Don Draper type proclaimed: "What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons" – and advertisers could only hope it was true. Man... one of these days I'll poke my eyes out if a read this Don Draper quote again on a online article about advertising... It's not the quote itself, it's the lack of context when/how/whom behind that quote. At best that quote can be used in the context: "The shit advertisers say to try to hook a whale (big account)". Yet journalists use it like it was the wet dream motivates advertisers, that are so delusional and naive to believe it...
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- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y agoI wonder how close ad markets are to zero sum. In the limited cases where ads are good for an individual firm, being close to zero sum would make ads a drain on the industry. In the article, they talk about how in most experiments, the most of the people who click your ad would have clicked your link anyways without the ad. In a really important footnote they talk about how this is crazy with a hugely important exception: if you don't bid, your competitor will. Like amazon bidding on searches for "walmart." The effect is obvious and obviously wasteful for brand name searches, but it must extend to other searches as well. I search for "levi's" and your ad isn't going to make me materially more likely to buy jeans, but it will make me more likely to buy them from Levi's. Or, and here's the point, if I just search "jeans," your ad isn't going to make me materially more likely to buy jeans. But you have to bid or else I won't buy your jeans. It strikes me as just as wasteful as Levi's having to bid on the "levi's" search term. The money that was going to go towards the jeans industry still goes there, except that now Google and Facebook get a cut and the jeans industry's margin shrinks a little. This article does a brilliant job convincing me that most ads aren't incremental for a firm because of selection effects, which convinces me that most ads that are incremental for the firm aren't incremental to the market. It seems so wasteful.
- Chathamization 6y agoIt's even more wasteful if you look at it at a societal level. There's an incredible amount of economic output that's devoted to advertising, so much so that there are large secondary industries (broadcast television, radio, social media, etc.) built around being advertisement delivery vehicles. Yet all of this economic activity is going towards something that's a net negative to society - an enormous amount of distracting material meant to manipulate a persons actions so that they're more beneficial for a company, and often less beneficial for themselves. Advertising isn't alone in this. It seems like parasitic industries take up a large and growing part of our economic output.
- jlbnjmn 6y agoIf Google didn't show ads, the money would all go to the SEO companies.
- jariel 6y agoMaybe the article is written by someone who doesn't actually make a product and sell it online? Marketing is a 'grey game' of course it's going to full of bad spending. But far from being 'a bubble' - the growth is just beginning. Online ads are relevant overall and they're only going to grow and grow.
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- q92z8oeif 6y agoLove they got a online ad revenue graph that ends in 2017 and then just "predict" a dashed line moving where it left off, always up. despite that we all know it took a nosedive, along most other revenues, in 2020 ;)
- Supermancho 6y agoOnline Advertising margins have been gutted year over year. Demand (people willing to pay for advertising) , today, has fallen to so few players (the largest brands and programmatic) anymore. Users have become so ineffectual to interacting with ads (and effective at blocking them) that measurement has become a black art of approximation, at best. There is no bubble, as that time passed sometime before 2016.
- ngold 6y agoIn house advertising is essentially non existent. Any newspaper would have in house ads printed next to the article. All have given up their autonomy to 3rd party vendors. You wouldn't be able to block in house advertising, but you sure can block all 3rd party skeezy advertising that want nothing but analytics. That largely do nothing better than an ad printed next to an article.
- jstanley 6y ago> You wouldn't be able to block in house advertising I think you would? You'd just have to write rules that are specific to each publisher instead of each advertising network.