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It reminds me about Soviet central planning: «Economist Paul Craig Roberts recalled, “a famous Soviet cartoon depicted the manager of a nail factory being give
by d0mine 5y ago
It reminds me about Soviet central planning: «Economist Paul Craig Roberts recalled, “a famous Soviet cartoon depicted the manager of a nail factory being given the Order of Lenin for exceeding his tonnage. Two giant cranes were pictured holding up one giant nail.”
… The singular focus on a metric imposed from the top-down obliterated any incentive to innovate or differentiate production according to what customers might actually want.»
https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilychamleewright/2020/01/15/what-soviet-era-production-can-teach-us-about-innovation-in-higher-ed/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilychamleewright/2020/01/15/w...
- ogogmad 5y agoThe grand "eBay strategy" for Google Ads was to advertise on "long tail" keywords. This in practice meant that eBay would place its adverts on Google searches for extremely specific keywords like "Charizard pokemon card". This ended up maximising metrics like Click-Through Rate and Conversion Rate, and eBay's advertising division was famous in the advertising industry for its success in doing this. It was literally known as the "eBay strategy" and was treated with some respect. It took one insistent individual to convince eBay to turn all their advertising off and see if it decreased profits; it increased profits*. The problem is that right below the advert (which eBay was paying a lot of money for) was a link to the same page which eBay didn't need to pay for. The same page was a legitimate Google search result, and so the Google Search advertising was losing eBay a bunch of money. [edit] * - Thanks to the commenter above for the correction. Note: I've tried to be more careful in not implicating eBay's entire advertising division.
- Spooky23 5y agoIt must have some value, as I searched on duck duck go for a Soviet fighter plane as the top result was an ad: “we have SU-27 in stock, seriously”
- djbusby 5y agoSounds likes it reduced expenses rather than increase revenue. Maybe I'm pedantic but those are important difference
- Jensson 5y agoThat works if you are the top, a competitor would probably earn a lot from that strategy until they become the top.
- compiler-guy 5y agoThis is exactly what happens. On the very long tail there may be no one willing to bid against you so there is no reason to buy the top slot, but if someone is, then suddenly it makes sense.