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Together with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25623858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25623858 it might appear like there's a coordinated takedown of

Together with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25623858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25623858 it might appear like there's a coordinated takedown of ad tech companies going on. Google derives 80% of its revenue from ads, Facebook 99%. Imagine these giants coming down if it turns out that online ads aren't effective? EDIT: Tweaked the wording regarding the alleged "coordinated takedown" as a reaction to a comment.

coldtea 6y ago
>it might appear like there's a coordinated takedown of ad tech companies going on. Or, you know, somebody read the first article on HN, then found the other somewhere, and thought of posting it, as it relates to the same disucssion... Happens all the time with posting clusters (and the Baader-Mainhoff phenomenon).
texasbigdata 6y ago
Privately knowledgeable parties (not me) have been talking about this for ages. A close friend quoted the same %age as the podcast underlying the tweet did as being fake. By the way how impressive is the scammer level of sophistication. App level man-in—middle-esque (probably imprecise terminology) forging of attribution based on massive monitoring and siphoning of what otherwise would have been organic conversions. Super cool. And those were the ones they caught imagine what they didn’t.
ineedasername 6y ago
No need for a conspiracy: one popular article sparks the submission of something similar, and given there was enough interest to make the first one popular, it's not uncommon for another to become popular.
- f430 6y ago
  I see lot of anxious people from the ad industry commenting on these threads trying to convince the rest of us we are wrong. It's funny how quickly the word conspiracy is used by the party that has most to lose. It's more likely that people have spend the past 10 years buying into the online ad industry, got burned and finding out it wasn't because they weren't spending enough it was that they were defrauded. We should see class action lawsuits over the next 10 year horizon that will put a massive hit to the shady ad tech industry. Millions of small to big businesses were defrauded out of their ad spend and now the industry will simply make way to a whole new scam.
Nextgrid 6y ago
I don't think there is a coordinated takedown; after all, ranting about it on HN wouldn't affect anything if advertising actually worked as designed and had the intended effect. The problem is that first off, people rightfully dislike advertising so it's expected for them to rant about it, second, regulation is being worked on (whether the GDPR, CCPA, or similar) that would thwart targeted advertising, so advertising is now also facing pressure from the government and not just from people ranting about it, and third, these articles talk about brands themselves having doubts about the effectiveness of their advertising efforts and the media rightfully reports on it. Ranting about ads by itself won't change much, but in this case it seems some advertisers themselves are having doubts as to how effective it really is and both the media and HN is reacting to that. > Google derives 80% of its revenue from ads, Facebook 99%. Imagine these giants coming down if it turns out that online ads aren't effective? Just because Google and Facebook are able to make a profit off their ads doesn't mean that their ads are actually good value and not overpriced, nor that the people in charge of assessing the ROI of these ads are incentivized to look into it (which is the point I'm arguing in the thread you linked). You can very well agree that online ads are effective but still aren't worth what they are currently priced at.
Ericson2314 6y ago
Good. Advertising is a terrible zero-sum industry that just distorts market activity. It has little place in capitalism or any other system. Exceptions: - New products deserve some advertising. I would handle that like the patent system. Demonstrate your product is sufficiently different, and get access to some attention economy time slice. Some may say, well what about competition with existing products to bring down cost? Simple, get rid of stupid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopolistic_competition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopolistic_competition and start selling things in unmarked tubs with a price tag. Cheapest one wins. Of course, there has to be quality control and avoiding regulatory capture with that, but stupid brands are not a good solution to that problem.
- Anon1096 6y ago
  What makes you say advertising is zero-sum? This doesn't seem to be the case at all to me. Take diamonds for example. Prior to the mid 1900s, diamonds weren't nearly as sought after as they are currently. It took the marketing and advertising efforts (among other efforts, like monopolizing the mining process) of De Beers to convince the public that diamonds should be highly coveted. It was advertising that pushed the public to think spending X months' salary on a diamond ring should be normal. De Beers is obviously highly derided, but this a pretty clear cut case that advertising is NOT zero sum. The value of diamonds went up because of advertising, and nothing else depreciated in value as a result. I won't even touch on your other points about unbranded goods, except to say that consumers definitely show preference for branded items, and I don't really see why that is a problem.
  - visarga 6y ago
    > De Beers is obviously highly derided, but this a pretty clear cut case that advertising is NOT zero sum If you take into consideration the money wasted on overpriced stones, it's zero sum. How did people ever get engaged before De Beers?
    - Anon1096 6y ago
      That is not at all what zero sum means. If you're going to use a widely-used term at the core of an argument, you should be sure you're doing so correctly.
ericol 6y ago
I don't think that's the case. If you browse HN somewhat regularly, you'll see that a lot of times when a post makes it to the top (Or close enough) it's very likely that a related post will make the rounds pretty soon. I think it's more related to people trying to ride the karma wave than "A coordinated takedown of ad tech companies". And it is effective, because it happens way too often.
- bigdict 6y ago
  I agree, I remember reading an article or a comment explaining this phenomenon on HN, with examples. Nevertheless it would be interesting if the idea of digital ads being ineffective snowballed to the point where it became like a self-fulfilling prophecy, and led to the demise of large companies that we think of as "giants" or "monopolies".
  - pydry 6y ago
    Or a coordinated "strike" by major ad spenders. I'll bet that a lot of ad spend is zero sum. They'd probably rather share profits than boost google's.
- dang 6y ago
  Yes, this was just a standard follow-up [1] and we did the standard counter-follow-up, which is to merge the threads. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=follow-up%20by%3Adang&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=follow-up%20by%3Adang&dateRang...
  - bigdict 6y ago
    Hi dang, I'm wondering is there a list of HN phenomena that you've noticed over the years? Examples would be: 1. follow-up submissions 2. an initial wave of critical comments followed by a wave of apologist comments 3. first page of comments occupied by a single top level comment with lots of descendants (you often post to draw attention to other pages of comments in these cases)
marketingtech 6y ago
The issue is, most online ads don't work EXCEPT for G and FB. That's why they're so dominant. The average third-party ad networks are junk, rife with fraud (ads that are never actually seen or clicked by a human), poor targeting, poor measurement, limited brand safety, and opaque billing. First-party ad tech provides much better control over these factors and can generally be offered cheaper because they can more effectively allocate their clients' budgets. In what other industries are the superior products cheaper than the junk? (not rhetorical - I'm curious if this exists in other industries) G and FB are the biggest first-party ad sellers, given that their total addressable audience covers most of the free world, with Amazon rapidly gaining ground. TikTok, Pinterest, and Snapchat are building clones of G/FB's ad tech by poaching a lot of their engineers (karma for G/FB cloning their consumer products...) and are also showing strong growth as first-party sellers. If you're a website/app that monetizes through a third-party network (including Google Adsense and Facebook Audience Network), you're going to see your revenues plummet in the coming months.
dylan604 6y ago
> it might appear like there's a coordinated takedown of ad tech companies going on. Oh please let it be so, even though it's just a wild ass guess. Ad "tech" has ruined the internet (only slightly hyperbolic). Oh to be able to recover the "innocence" of the late 90s internet. Maybe I should just stop browsing so I can spend more time yelling at the kids to get of my lawn
- KONAir 6y ago
  I am at a loss to this '90s innocent internet. It scared me into using adblockers for over 2 decades (which coincidentally makes the article and this whole thread completely alien to me).
  - f430 6y ago
    You had to use an adblocker because advertisers went crazy with tracking and a lot of shady stuff. If you've been on various internet marketing forums, you will see that this is just a group of people who weren't smart enough to land a wall street jobs but morally unhinged enough to defraud businesses. I am already hearing about law firms sending out letters and emails to people who bought Google or Facebook ads in the past 10 years. With the new USGOV administration hawkish towards social media/tech (essentially ad revenue dependent cmopanies) and now seeing class action lawsuit against ad tech companies, my popcorn is being prepared in the microwave. People have no idea how lucrative ad click fraud is in the botnet market. It used to be that botnet operators DDOS for hire or install Dutch spyware toolbars, now with headless browsers and fingerprinting evasion it has become impossible to distinguish real ad impressions from fake ones. Your only tool to fight these fraudsters are statistics but over the past 10 years the "bad guys" (I don't know who is more evil, the people defrauding businesses legally or illegally) finally figured it out. They know if they are too greedy they will be caught so they now play the long milk game. It is incredibly lucrative. A single botnet victim can yield upwards of $2~4 in ad revenues from a variety of ad networks. It is IMPOSSIBLE to distinguish real from fraud ad clicks/impressions since the introduction of headless browsers and fingerprint evasion Somehow web scrapers/botnet operators have found the sweet spot. This is just like how the American Cosa Nostra working with Russian criminal groups were able to siphon off crude oil from the USGOV in the 80s. I miss the 90s when everything was more simpler and secure as a result. You can't hack an HTML document.
lasc4r 6y ago
Nice conspiracy theory bruh.
ErikVandeWater 6y ago
People tend to upvote things related to what they've seen recently. It is in fact much more likely that Google decreases the visibility of articles that in any way tarnish Alphabet's reputation.

coldtea 6y ago

>it might appear like there's a coordinated takedown of ad tech companies going on. Or, you know, somebody read the first article on HN, then found the other somewhere, and thought of posting it, as it relates to the same disucssion... Happens all the time with posting clusters (and the Baader-Mainhoff phenomenon).

texasbigdata 6y ago

Privately knowledgeable parties (not me) have been talking about this for ages. A close friend quoted the same %age as the podcast underlying the tweet did as being fake. By the way how impressive is the scammer level of sophistication. App level man-in—middle-esque (probably imprecise terminology) forging of attribution based on massive monitoring and siphoning of what otherwise would have been organic conversions. Super cool. And those were the ones they caught imagine what they didn’t.

ineedasername 6y ago

No need for a conspiracy: one popular article sparks the submission of something similar, and given there was enough interest to make the first one popular, it's not uncommon for another to become popular.

f430 6y ago
I see lot of anxious people from the ad industry commenting on these threads trying to convince the rest of us we are wrong. It's funny how quickly the word conspiracy is used by the party that has most to lose. It's more likely that people have spend the past 10 years buying into the online ad industry, got burned and finding out it wasn't because they weren't spending enough it was that they were defrauded. We should see class action lawsuits over the next 10 year horizon that will put a massive hit to the shady ad tech industry. Millions of small to big businesses were defrauded out of their ad spend and now the industry will simply make way to a whole new scam.

Nextgrid 6y ago

I don't think there is a coordinated takedown; after all, ranting about it on HN wouldn't affect anything if advertising actually worked as designed and had the intended effect. The problem is that first off, people rightfully dislike advertising so it's expected for them to rant about it, second, regulation is being worked on (whether the GDPR, CCPA, or similar) that would thwart targeted advertising, so advertising is now also facing pressure from the government and not just from people ranting about it, and third, these articles talk about brands themselves having doubts about the effectiveness of their advertising efforts and the media rightfully reports on it. Ranting about ads by itself won't change much, but in this case it seems some advertisers themselves are having doubts as to how effective it really is and both the media and HN is reacting to that. > Google derives 80% of its revenue from ads, Facebook 99%. Imagine these giants coming down if it turns out that online ads aren't effective? Just because Google and Facebook are able to make a profit off their ads doesn't mean that their ads are actually good value and not overpriced, nor that the people in charge of assessing the ROI of these ads are incentivized to look into it (which is the point I'm arguing in the thread you linked). You can very well agree that online ads are effective but still aren't worth what they are currently priced at.

Ericson2314 6y ago

Good. Advertising is a terrible zero-sum industry that just distorts market activity. It has little place in capitalism or any other system. Exceptions: - New products deserve some advertising. I would handle that like the patent system. Demonstrate your product is sufficiently different, and get access to some attention economy time slice. Some may say, well what about competition with existing products to bring down cost? Simple, get rid of stupid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopolistic_competition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopolistic_competition and start selling things in unmarked tubs with a price tag. Cheapest one wins. Of course, there has to be quality control and avoiding regulatory capture with that, but stupid brands are not a good solution to that problem.

Anon1096 6y ago
What makes you say advertising is zero-sum? This doesn't seem to be the case at all to me. Take diamonds for example. Prior to the mid 1900s, diamonds weren't nearly as sought after as they are currently. It took the marketing and advertising efforts (among other efforts, like monopolizing the mining process) of De Beers to convince the public that diamonds should be highly coveted. It was advertising that pushed the public to think spending X months' salary on a diamond ring should be normal. De Beers is obviously highly derided, but this a pretty clear cut case that advertising is NOT zero sum. The value of diamonds went up because of advertising, and nothing else depreciated in value as a result. I won't even touch on your other points about unbranded goods, except to say that consumers definitely show preference for branded items, and I don't really see why that is a problem.
- visarga 6y ago
  > De Beers is obviously highly derided, but this a pretty clear cut case that advertising is NOT zero sum If you take into consideration the money wasted on overpriced stones, it's zero sum. How did people ever get engaged before De Beers?
  - Anon1096 6y ago
    That is not at all what zero sum means. If you're going to use a widely-used term at the core of an argument, you should be sure you're doing so correctly.

ericol 6y ago

I don't think that's the case. If you browse HN somewhat regularly, you'll see that a lot of times when a post makes it to the top (Or close enough) it's very likely that a related post will make the rounds pretty soon. I think it's more related to people trying to ride the karma wave than "A coordinated takedown of ad tech companies". And it is effective, because it happens way too often.

bigdict 6y ago
I agree, I remember reading an article or a comment explaining this phenomenon on HN, with examples. Nevertheless it would be interesting if the idea of digital ads being ineffective snowballed to the point where it became like a self-fulfilling prophecy, and led to the demise of large companies that we think of as "giants" or "monopolies".
- pydry 6y ago
  Or a coordinated "strike" by major ad spenders. I'll bet that a lot of ad spend is zero sum. They'd probably rather share profits than boost google's.
dang 6y ago
Yes, this was just a standard follow-up [1] and we did the standard counter-follow-up, which is to merge the threads. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=follow-up%20by%3Adang&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=follow-up%20by%3Adang&dateRang...
- bigdict 6y ago
  Hi dang, I'm wondering is there a list of HN phenomena that you've noticed over the years? Examples would be: 1. follow-up submissions 2. an initial wave of critical comments followed by a wave of apologist comments 3. first page of comments occupied by a single top level comment with lots of descendants (you often post to draw attention to other pages of comments in these cases)

marketingtech 6y ago

The issue is, most online ads don't work EXCEPT for G and FB. That's why they're so dominant. The average third-party ad networks are junk, rife with fraud (ads that are never actually seen or clicked by a human), poor targeting, poor measurement, limited brand safety, and opaque billing. First-party ad tech provides much better control over these factors and can generally be offered cheaper because they can more effectively allocate their clients' budgets. In what other industries are the superior products cheaper than the junk? (not rhetorical - I'm curious if this exists in other industries) G and FB are the biggest first-party ad sellers, given that their total addressable audience covers most of the free world, with Amazon rapidly gaining ground. TikTok, Pinterest, and Snapchat are building clones of G/FB's ad tech by poaching a lot of their engineers (karma for G/FB cloning their consumer products...) and are also showing strong growth as first-party sellers. If you're a website/app that monetizes through a third-party network (including Google Adsense and Facebook Audience Network), you're going to see your revenues plummet in the coming months.

dylan604 6y ago

> it might appear like there's a coordinated takedown of ad tech companies going on. Oh please let it be so, even though it's just a wild ass guess. Ad "tech" has ruined the internet (only slightly hyperbolic). Oh to be able to recover the "innocence" of the late 90s internet. Maybe I should just stop browsing so I can spend more time yelling at the kids to get of my lawn

KONAir 6y ago
I am at a loss to this '90s innocent internet. It scared me into using adblockers for over 2 decades (which coincidentally makes the article and this whole thread completely alien to me).
- f430 6y ago
  You had to use an adblocker because advertisers went crazy with tracking and a lot of shady stuff. If you've been on various internet marketing forums, you will see that this is just a group of people who weren't smart enough to land a wall street jobs but morally unhinged enough to defraud businesses. I am already hearing about law firms sending out letters and emails to people who bought Google or Facebook ads in the past 10 years. With the new USGOV administration hawkish towards social media/tech (essentially ad revenue dependent cmopanies) and now seeing class action lawsuit against ad tech companies, my popcorn is being prepared in the microwave. People have no idea how lucrative ad click fraud is in the botnet market. It used to be that botnet operators DDOS for hire or install Dutch spyware toolbars, now with headless browsers and fingerprinting evasion it has become impossible to distinguish real ad impressions from fake ones. Your only tool to fight these fraudsters are statistics but over the past 10 years the "bad guys" (I don't know who is more evil, the people defrauding businesses legally or illegally) finally figured it out. They know if they are too greedy they will be caught so they now play the long milk game. It is incredibly lucrative. A single botnet victim can yield upwards of $2~4 in ad revenues from a variety of ad networks. It is IMPOSSIBLE to distinguish real from fraud ad clicks/impressions since the introduction of headless browsers and fingerprint evasion Somehow web scrapers/botnet operators have found the sweet spot. This is just like how the American Cosa Nostra working with Russian criminal groups were able to siphon off crude oil from the USGOV in the 80s. I miss the 90s when everything was more simpler and secure as a result. You can't hack an HTML document.

lasc4r 6y ago

Nice conspiracy theory bruh.

ErikVandeWater 6y ago

People tend to upvote things related to what they've seen recently. It is in fact much more likely that Google decreases the visibility of articles that in any way tarnish Alphabet's reputation.