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Wasn't there some regular company who decided to delete all adsense/ad networks from their sites for a quarter and at the end of the quarter found no difference

Wasn't there some regular company who decided to delete all adsense/ad networks from their sites for a quarter and at the end of the quarter found no difference in ordering/sales, etc. Online ads is snakeoil

dredmorbius 5y ago
Freakonomics two-parter on whether or not advertising works is worth listening to: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-1/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-1/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-2/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-2/
g_p 5y ago
Even better than this, large sites have found they actually made more from non-targeted ads [1]. Same for the NYT - revenue continued growing after turning off ad exchanges for European visitors [2]. There's also the question around whether the levels of fraud mean companies buying targeted ads are ever getting what they paid for [3] - Uber cut $120m of $150m ad spend without any impact on installs (which is what they were trying to drive) [1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/03/stop_tracking_increase_revenue_effectiveness/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/03/stop_tracking_increas... [2] https://digiday.com/media/gumgumtest-new-york-times-gdpr-cut-off-ad-exchanges-europe-ad-revenue/ https://digiday.com/media/gumgumtest-new-york-times-gdpr-cut... [3] https://indica.medium.com/how-uber-discovered-that-80-of-its-ads-were-useless-bb4d96ee46c8 https://indica.medium.com/how-uber-discovered-that-80-of-its...
skinkestek 5y ago
> Wasn't there some regular company who decided to delete all adsense/ad networks from their sites for a quarter and at the end of the quarter found no difference in ordering/sales, etc. > Online ads is snakeoil No doubt in my mind. I helped start a webshop in 2009 and got to see it first hand: We used a service called Kelkoo and according to their dashboard almost every customer we had came through them. We were suspicious so we cut them out for a couple of weeks. Turned out sales hardly dropped at all. We had good luck with Google ads back then but I don't for a second think Google doesn't happily fleece advertisers: As I've said a number of times before I have been targeted for scammy dating site ads for a decade, more specifically from around the time I started dating my wife and until our youngest was about a year old. Google knows fairly well I'm a conservative Christian who has had no problem getting a date the usual way, but has had no issues showing me these ads, probably because they pay most pr impression. This was back when I felt I owed site owners to not enable adblock all the time so I tried a number of times to report the ads as irrelevant. Problem is, when I reported Polish girls as irrelevant, the next ads was for Ukrainian girls, then Thai girls, Chinese girls, Taiwanese girls, Filipino girls and I don't know what else until it went full circle and started on Polish girls again. Not a bad word about people from those countries, but I was already married and Google know very well since I look for family holidays, toys and food ideas for families with kids. Point is it seems that relevancy doesn't count anything now that advertisers pay for impressions instead of clicks.
- fineIllregister 5y ago
  >Google knows fairly well I'm a conservative Christian who has had no problem getting a date the usual way... >...I was already married and Google know very well since I look for family holidays, toys and food ideas for families with kids. It's interesting you describe Google as "knowing" information about you. Google may have the data, but a human did not read it to develop some understanding of who you are as person. They just ran it through some software based on the targeting criteria they have. I would guess that advertisers didn't set their ads to exclude married men who are Christian with children, just because that's a very specific profile to care about--they might just set it to target men of any age and be done with it. Or it's possible that married, Christian men with children are one of the most profitable targets for scammy dating sites, and either the site creator or the targeting software are going after them specifically.
  - ozfive 5y ago
    Or it's possible someone else in his close circle was using a computer on his network that was looking for things that would trigger those types of ads. Cable DSL routers usually only have 1 dynamic IP.
    - bigiain 5y ago
      It's just as likely that nobody was bidding for his target demographic, so the bottom feeding dating sites that take the cheapest of the cheap ad slots bought the top 20% of his screen for millipenny CPCs.
      - skinkestek 5y ago
        I have given it a thought, but it doesn't make sense to me: Nobody wanted to target a well paid dev with small kids and holiday plans except the cheapest of the cheap? The explanations I find more likely is either - my account got grouped up with a demographic 14 years ago when I worked in an environment that certainly did have those kinds of signals and that signal was too strong. - scammy dating sites like expensive credit cards pay extremely well and Googled fudged their data to make me fit the criteria.
drevil-v2 5y ago
It was Uber in it's early days. I recall a blog post from their chief marketing officer(?) at the time. The gist of it was - they accidentally disabled digital advertising for a few months and found that disabling it had no effect on the metrics they were tracking.
jimbob45 5y ago
I’d imagine results like yours would vary wildly industry to industry. For example, any old-people products would greatly benefit from the typical inability of the old to install ad-blockers in the first place (nothing against the old, of course).
mensetmanusman 5y ago
Repeat the experiment over a decade.
- barkingcat 5y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if over the time span of a decade, companies which invested significantly into online ads would have gone out of business entirely, and those that didn't even use online ads would still be around. As a conjecture, it's possible that online ads is anti-commerce - as in those who put money into it die. Over the last 10 years, it's very obvious that internet focused non-tech companies do very poorly in the long run.

dredmorbius 5y ago

Freakonomics two-parter on whether or not advertising works is worth listening to: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-1/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-1/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-2/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-2/

g_p 5y ago

Even better than this, large sites have found they actually made more from non-targeted ads [1]. Same for the NYT - revenue continued growing after turning off ad exchanges for European visitors [2]. There's also the question around whether the levels of fraud mean companies buying targeted ads are ever getting what they paid for [3] - Uber cut $120m of $150m ad spend without any impact on installs (which is what they were trying to drive) [1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/03/stop_tracking_increase_revenue_effectiveness/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/03/stop_tracking_increas... [2] https://digiday.com/media/gumgumtest-new-york-times-gdpr-cut-off-ad-exchanges-europe-ad-revenue/ https://digiday.com/media/gumgumtest-new-york-times-gdpr-cut... [3] https://indica.medium.com/how-uber-discovered-that-80-of-its-ads-were-useless-bb4d96ee46c8 https://indica.medium.com/how-uber-discovered-that-80-of-its...

skinkestek 5y ago

> Wasn't there some regular company who decided to delete all adsense/ad networks from their sites for a quarter and at the end of the quarter found no difference in ordering/sales, etc. > Online ads is snakeoil No doubt in my mind. I helped start a webshop in 2009 and got to see it first hand: We used a service called Kelkoo and according to their dashboard almost every customer we had came through them. We were suspicious so we cut them out for a couple of weeks. Turned out sales hardly dropped at all. We had good luck with Google ads back then but I don't for a second think Google doesn't happily fleece advertisers: As I've said a number of times before I have been targeted for scammy dating site ads for a decade, more specifically from around the time I started dating my wife and until our youngest was about a year old. Google knows fairly well I'm a conservative Christian who has had no problem getting a date the usual way, but has had no issues showing me these ads, probably because they pay most pr impression. This was back when I felt I owed site owners to not enable adblock all the time so I tried a number of times to report the ads as irrelevant. Problem is, when I reported Polish girls as irrelevant, the next ads was for Ukrainian girls, then Thai girls, Chinese girls, Taiwanese girls, Filipino girls and I don't know what else until it went full circle and started on Polish girls again. Not a bad word about people from those countries, but I was already married and Google know very well since I look for family holidays, toys and food ideas for families with kids. Point is it seems that relevancy doesn't count anything now that advertisers pay for impressions instead of clicks.

fineIllregister 5y ago
>Google knows fairly well I'm a conservative Christian who has had no problem getting a date the usual way... >...I was already married and Google know very well since I look for family holidays, toys and food ideas for families with kids. It's interesting you describe Google as "knowing" information about you. Google may have the data, but a human did not read it to develop some understanding of who you are as person. They just ran it through some software based on the targeting criteria they have. I would guess that advertisers didn't set their ads to exclude married men who are Christian with children, just because that's a very specific profile to care about--they might just set it to target men of any age and be done with it. Or it's possible that married, Christian men with children are one of the most profitable targets for scammy dating sites, and either the site creator or the targeting software are going after them specifically.
- ozfive 5y ago
  Or it's possible someone else in his close circle was using a computer on his network that was looking for things that would trigger those types of ads. Cable DSL routers usually only have 1 dynamic IP.
  - bigiain 5y ago
    It's just as likely that nobody was bidding for his target demographic, so the bottom feeding dating sites that take the cheapest of the cheap ad slots bought the top 20% of his screen for millipenny CPCs.
    - skinkestek 5y ago
      I have given it a thought, but it doesn't make sense to me: Nobody wanted to target a well paid dev with small kids and holiday plans except the cheapest of the cheap? The explanations I find more likely is either - my account got grouped up with a demographic 14 years ago when I worked in an environment that certainly did have those kinds of signals and that signal was too strong. - scammy dating sites like expensive credit cards pay extremely well and Googled fudged their data to make me fit the criteria.

drevil-v2 5y ago

It was Uber in it's early days. I recall a blog post from their chief marketing officer(?) at the time. The gist of it was - they accidentally disabled digital advertising for a few months and found that disabling it had no effect on the metrics they were tracking.

jimbob45 5y ago

I’d imagine results like yours would vary wildly industry to industry. For example, any old-people products would greatly benefit from the typical inability of the old to install ad-blockers in the first place (nothing against the old, of course).

mensetmanusman 5y ago

Repeat the experiment over a decade.

barkingcat 5y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if over the time span of a decade, companies which invested significantly into online ads would have gone out of business entirely, and those that didn't even use online ads would still be around. As a conjecture, it's possible that online ads is anti-commerce - as in those who put money into it die. Over the last 10 years, it's very obvious that internet focused non-tech companies do very poorly in the long run.