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Wow, that’s quite a revelation. Uber turns off 2/3 of ads and metrics are the same. Eventually, with optimizations, they got down to 10% of previous spend witho

Wow, that’s quite a revelation. Uber turns off 2/3 of ads and metrics are the same. Eventually, with optimizations, they got down to 10% of previous spend without loss of revenue. I wonder if the Uber story is unique or it cuts across all advertisers. How would this affect Ad Tech industry?

ghaff 6y ago
Depending on the content of the ads, I could easily believe that anyone who is remotely the market for even the occasional Uber ride already has the app on their phone and, if they want a ride will either use Uber, whichever ride-share is cheapest, Lyft if it's available because they don't like Uber, or a taxi/limo in situations where that's more convenient. I guess you can offer promotions but then you're giving money away.
xyst 6y ago
Impending crash - time to short the entire ad tech industry.
- st1x7 6y ago
  I just don't want to lose the web along with the ad tech industry though.
  - Fordec 6y ago
    I don't want to lose the web of the 90s and early 00s. But that one is mostly already gone. This version we're currently in, no it can die off for all I care. Bring on the disruption!
  - vb6sp6 6y ago
    The web existed before the adtech industry. It will live after it.
    - wasdfff 6y ago
      As a smoking crater maybe. The web was orders of magnitude smaller before the adtech.
      - skinkestek 6y ago
        yep, but it is mostly those parts I want back. I can almldt live fine with: - programming blogs that doesn't have ads - Wikipedia - three or four online newspapers/websites that I pay for anyway. - HN - all the old stuff: web rings and enthusiast web sites - I'd probably miss stackoverflow but I use that site less and less these days anyways. Most of the rest can burn and we'd maybe be better off. At least search results would be cleaner :-)
        thu2111 6y ago
        Wikipedia is constantly running ads. They're just "charity" donation ads so you don't think of them as such, but turn on the TV and you'll notice that charities advertise themselves to get donations all the time. It doesn't make it not advertising. As for HN, how long have you been using it? Are you aware it's ad supported? Some stories are ads, usually for hiring.
        jedberg 6y ago
        > Are you aware it's ad supported? This is 100% wrong. HN is paid for by YCombinator. Yes, some of the posts are hiring posts, but no one is paying for those. What pays for HN is the success of the startups that YC invested in. > Wikipedia is constantly running ads. This is wrong too. They only run ads in November. The rest of the time the site is 100% ad free.
        skinkestek 6y ago
        We were talking about adtech. You are allowed to think differently, but personally I'm fine with the banners on Wikipedia (except IIRC and AFAIK they pretended they were short on money while in reality they were expanding). I'm also fine with YC running job ads on YC. I'm however not fine with 100 - 1000 [1] ad and tracking networks pretending they have reason to log my browsing habits on a typical site. [1]: based on copying the list from "cookie banners" to Libre Office Calc and checking how many lines I got.
mrits 6y ago
The ad industry has always claimed that fraud doesn't matter because it is priced in. It's been over a decade since I worked in click fraud detection but I believe Google's numbers were around < 2-5% of clicks were fraud (someone here might have up to date numbers). So this is a huge revelation from my perspective.
idunno246 6y ago
Working in iPhone games, our biz dev people made us integrate with the shadiest of ad publishers. But we required attribution and could track how much the users spent, so could stop spending on them quickly, which was the normal result. Most of the companies were surprised we wanted attribution and had to build something custom, which to me means at the time nobody else was tracking it so lots of customers must have been getting fleeced. From the tweet, it’s crazy that they were spending 100m without tracking the quality of the users. Also worked in ad tech. There were some types of customers that cared about performance, but the largest were typically agencies and all they cared about was spending the budget they were given. Everybody knows this is happening, you can differentiate yourself slightly by doing better detecting it. But at the end of the day people really care about customer acquisition cost which includes the fraud, so if you had 0% fraud everyone would just raise their prices or margins
- Kalium 6y ago
  > Also worked in ad tech. There were some types of customers that cared about performance, but the largest were typically agencies and all they cared about was spending the budget they were given. Large companies call it "brand" spending. Which is to say they're spending to maintain brand awareness. Measuring ROI would call the practice into question.
- jsnell 6y ago
  > From the tweet, it’s crazy that they were spending 100m without tracking the quality of the users. They were high quality users: Uber didn't pay for installs, but for installs + first ride. What's being alleged is that the ad networks were detecting a user installing the app, and fraudulently creating an ad display event to make it look like the install happened due to the ad.

ghaff 6y ago

Depending on the content of the ads, I could easily believe that anyone who is remotely the market for even the occasional Uber ride already has the app on their phone and, if they want a ride will either use Uber, whichever ride-share is cheapest, Lyft if it's available because they don't like Uber, or a taxi/limo in situations where that's more convenient. I guess you can offer promotions but then you're giving money away.

xyst 6y ago

Impending crash - time to short the entire ad tech industry.

st1x7 6y ago
I just don't want to lose the web along with the ad tech industry though.
- Fordec 6y ago
  I don't want to lose the web of the 90s and early 00s. But that one is mostly already gone. This version we're currently in, no it can die off for all I care. Bring on the disruption!
- vb6sp6 6y ago
  The web existed before the adtech industry. It will live after it.
  - wasdfff 6y ago
    As a smoking crater maybe. The web was orders of magnitude smaller before the adtech.
    - skinkestek 6y ago
      yep, but it is mostly those parts I want back. I can almldt live fine with: - programming blogs that doesn't have ads - Wikipedia - three or four online newspapers/websites that I pay for anyway. - HN - all the old stuff: web rings and enthusiast web sites - I'd probably miss stackoverflow but I use that site less and less these days anyways. Most of the rest can burn and we'd maybe be better off. At least search results would be cleaner :-)
      - thu2111 6y ago
        Wikipedia is constantly running ads. They're just "charity" donation ads so you don't think of them as such, but turn on the TV and you'll notice that charities advertise themselves to get donations all the time. It doesn't make it not advertising. As for HN, how long have you been using it? Are you aware it's ad supported? Some stories are ads, usually for hiring.
        jedberg 6y ago
        > Are you aware it's ad supported? This is 100% wrong. HN is paid for by YCombinator. Yes, some of the posts are hiring posts, but no one is paying for those. What pays for HN is the success of the startups that YC invested in. > Wikipedia is constantly running ads. This is wrong too. They only run ads in November. The rest of the time the site is 100% ad free.
        skinkestek 6y ago
        We were talking about adtech. You are allowed to think differently, but personally I'm fine with the banners on Wikipedia (except IIRC and AFAIK they pretended they were short on money while in reality they were expanding). I'm also fine with YC running job ads on YC. I'm however not fine with 100 - 1000 [1] ad and tracking networks pretending they have reason to log my browsing habits on a typical site. [1]: based on copying the list from "cookie banners" to Libre Office Calc and checking how many lines I got.

mrits 6y ago

The ad industry has always claimed that fraud doesn't matter because it is priced in. It's been over a decade since I worked in click fraud detection but I believe Google's numbers were around < 2-5% of clicks were fraud (someone here might have up to date numbers). So this is a huge revelation from my perspective.

idunno246 6y ago

Working in iPhone games, our biz dev people made us integrate with the shadiest of ad publishers. But we required attribution and could track how much the users spent, so could stop spending on them quickly, which was the normal result. Most of the companies were surprised we wanted attribution and had to build something custom, which to me means at the time nobody else was tracking it so lots of customers must have been getting fleeced. From the tweet, it’s crazy that they were spending 100m without tracking the quality of the users. Also worked in ad tech. There were some types of customers that cared about performance, but the largest were typically agencies and all they cared about was spending the budget they were given. Everybody knows this is happening, you can differentiate yourself slightly by doing better detecting it. But at the end of the day people really care about customer acquisition cost which includes the fraud, so if you had 0% fraud everyone would just raise their prices or margins

Kalium 6y ago
> Also worked in ad tech. There were some types of customers that cared about performance, but the largest were typically agencies and all they cared about was spending the budget they were given. Large companies call it "brand" spending. Which is to say they're spending to maintain brand awareness. Measuring ROI would call the practice into question.
jsnell 6y ago
> From the tweet, it’s crazy that they were spending 100m without tracking the quality of the users. They were high quality users: Uber didn't pay for installs, but for installs + first ride. What's being alleged is that the ad networks were detecting a user installing the app, and fraudulently creating an ad display event to make it look like the install happened due to the ad.