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To some extent I disagree with this, not that Google+Meta are under attack, but that the threat is coming from competitors. I’ve spent most of the last 10 year

To some extent I disagree with this, not that Google+Meta are under attack, but that the threat is coming from competitors. I’ve spent most of the last 10 years earning my living from an e-commerce business I own. The online advertising industry is unrecognisable from when we started. My thesis, in beef, is that the industries excessive uses of personalised data and tracking lead to increased regulation, and then a massive pivot to even more “AI” as a means to circumvent that (to some extent). The AI in the ad industry now, I believe, is detrimental to the advertiser. It’s now just one big black box, you put money in one side and get traffic out the other. The control and useful tracking (what actual search terms people are using, proper visible conversion tracking of an ad) is now almost non-existent. As an advertiser your livelihood is dependant on an algorithm, not skill, not intuition, not experience, not even track record. Facebook, Google and the rest of the industry were so driven by profit at all cost, and at the expense of long term thinking, they shot themselves in the foot. Advertisers are searching for alternatives, but they are all the same. I think online advertising, as a whole, is probably f***ed…

civilized 4y ago
> My thesis, in beef This is a delightful turn of phrase. I wonder if it was deliberate or an autocorrect happy accident.
- samwillis 4y ago
  I really hate iPhone autocorrect…
- hestefisk 4y ago
  It’s a very beefy thesis … Or a beef with someone?
  - civilized 4y ago
    The latter. Since he's complaining about the ad industry from what sounds like a personal perspective.
- verisimi 4y ago
  In brief, I think
  - samwillis 4y ago
    Correct.
- tjpnz 4y ago
  Do they carry a vegetarian option?
xwdv 4y ago
Is it really much different from offline advertising in days of old? That was more or less also a black box.
- jeremyjh 4y ago
  Yes, you would know what content your ad was displayed between and could draw inferences and do research on that specific audience.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
Have you read "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism"? I would say that your observations - tho they frustrate you - are very much inline with what the book proposes. In short, and paraphrased a bit to speak to your context, you're no longer buying impressions / clicks in the traditional transactional sense. Instead you're buying the influence on behavior within the broader context of what these networks know about the individuals within a market, but also what other influence these networks have accrued on the individuals. It's a blackbox be because it's no longer a simple transaction, but also because the AI (?) is in a broader sense exerting proactive influences. Nudges on behavior that add up and ideally can not only be predicted but also created. The book is long and deep, but it will also change how you view the world and Big Tech. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capitalism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capi...
- jeremyjh 4y ago
  But how does an ad buyer know their ads are even displayed to a relevant audience?
  - chiefalchemist 4y ago
    You don't, but that's what's being sold. Not the old transaction, but instead the boarder awareness from the network of the market to create and deliver an audience. Put another way, the book would argue that with the traditional way "relevance" was a reactive guess. Going forward the ability to create the desired behaviour is less of a guess and more predictable.
martincmartin 4y ago
> As an advertiser your livelihood is dependant on an algorithm, not skill, not intuition, not experience, not even track record. In other words, companies now have to compete by making useful products at a good price, rather than gaming SEO.
- deltree7 4y ago
  Naive understanding of the world / information. Say, In a world of 1,000,000,000+ great products, reaching consumers through word-of-mouth is hard. I bet there are products that solves a lot of your current problems at a decent price. But you don't know about it and none of your friends or network have the same problem for you to give you the solution. The only way to solve this problem is for the product/service provider to know about you and the fact that you have a problem. Advertising is actually an optimal / scalable way for companies to reach you. In a Billion+ product world, you need at least 10 Million Trust worthy reviewers to give you an unbiased review of everything. But, how do you trust the reviewers?
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    Even though this idea of visibility is often touted, the vast majority of advertising is in practice all about obfuscating the actual uses (and especially limitations) of a product. Furthermore, rather than trying to find the few people whom a product matches, it is often about pushing the product on people who never needed it in the first place - such as the diamond industry marketing inventing the practice of giving diamond rings for engagements, or the toy industry creating ads to specifically teach children to nag their parents. Or the vast amounta of pills promising penis enlargement. Sure, these things may not happen so much in B2B specialty advertising, but in B2C they are the norm, and exceptions are few and far between.
    - deltree7 4y ago
      You can reform the Ad industry in several ways (enhancing "truth in advertisment") i) You can only use factual information. ii) You can't use visual props unrelated to the product (sexy women, beaches, fancy cars, spas) But to burn advertisements due to shortcomings is like hating/shutting down internet because of 4chan or QAnon
simfree 4y ago
I have given up on Google AdWords due to the exact issue you describe. Trying to restrict my advertising budget to just one city and do a hard geographic restriction to just US IP addresses did not work. I filed 5 tickets over two weeks with Google trying to get this resolved, only to have over half my budget spent in another continent making impressions with people that will literally never buy the local specific product advertised.
- AJ007 4y ago
  I think there is probably a record breaking class action lawsuit here with the right lawyers. Damages could be 50-100% of Google's yearly gross revenue, especially when you include countries outside on the US who really don't like Google. Google intentionally modified both geo-targeting and mobile app targeting, removing the options advertisers set. For example, you opted out of mobile app targeted. Then they removed the option and you had to set it in the domain blacklist. Then they removed that. This wasn't a one off, hid, modified, and moved these options repeatedly. Advertisers didn't know that when you geo-targeted a location, by default it was set to users searching that location. You didn't want people in India who were interested in NYC? Too bad. Remember the whole Adwords prescription drug settlement. This is an organization run by people who would be serving hard time if they didn't have a legion of lawyers and bottomless pockets.
  - sailfast 4y ago
    Perhaps, but I’m sure there’s a forced arbitration clause buried in a EULA somewhere…
    - lillecarl 4y ago
      The government in Sweden could call a too crappy EULA non-enforceable. It's like the anticompetitive clauses that I happily sign over here because they don't hold in court, which employers are well aware of.
- Covzire 4y ago
  That's ridiculous, isn't selecting a target market Marketing/Econ 101? What possible reason would they have for not giving some kind of locality options?
adbro123 4y ago
> what actual search terms people are using, proper visible conversion tracking of an ad I sympathize with this position. I operate a one stop shop for digital advertising for huge brands. First I agree that the regulations (the government ones and Apple's) have benefitted no one. This is in a sense totally factual, and I challenge the blowhards here to like, name one substantive harm someone has experienced from ad ID tracking on an iPhone. While I believe government regulations should be proactive, rather than reactive, I believe the sum total history of ad tracking has pretty much confirmed that there aren't any substantive harms to correlated ad IDs. From the perspective of advertisers: An enlightening explanation of the Google value ad I read came from another guy explaining how he advertised dev tools on Google. He created a YouTube ad so that Johnny Programmer, watching YouTube videos on a weekend, would see a demo of his devops tool because Johnny searched "how to connect git to kubernetes" or whatever in the previous 10 days. And those ads converted really well. Even though the YouTube video had no contextual relationship with the ad the user saw. So it sounds like you are complaining about the flaws in Google's tracking UI. Well, I guess e-mail them some more.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  > This is in a sense totally factual, and I challenge the blowhards here to like, name one substantive harm someone has experienced from ad ID tracking on an iPhone. You then give a perfect example right in the next paragraph: > so that Johnny Programmer, watching YouTube videos on a weekend, would see a demo of his devops tool because Johnny searched "how to connect git to kubernetes" or whatever in the previous 10 days. So now Johnny Programmer's work life is hounding him on weekends. Even worse, he is being influenced to buy a paid product to do something that could probably be easily achieved with open source tools as well.
  - aidos 4y ago
    To be fair, you should use different profiles for your work and personal digital lives. And if someone is likely to use an open source solution, they’re also unlikely to be influenced to switch to a paid product based on an ad instead.
EGreg 4y ago
Yep, it is, and there are far better models out there. Here is just one of MANY possibilities: https://qbix.com/ecosystem#Decentralizing-the-Marketplace https://qbix.com/ecosystem#Decentralizing-the-Marketplace
- bosky101 4y ago
  Also check out https://perpetual.technology https://perpetual.technology that pays you in crypto, to run open source decentralized software on your website/app or server. disclosure: i'm a co-founder
tinus_hn 4y ago
Ultimately as ad blocking rises im pretty sure ad hosting and tracking as it is now will go the same way popups went and ads will end up within the content itself or included in the pages directly so they can’t be blocked.
- candiodari 4y ago
  I look forward to them first AI ad blockers then.
- Gtex555 4y ago
  ad blocking is not as popular as you think , I think 70-80% of people don't even use it especially on mobile.
hnick 4y ago
Yeah I found it quite hard as a novice to actually tell if my Facebook pixel stuff was all working and firing exactly as intended. The lack of data means it's hard to map a 1:1 relationship for a certain visitor (me). "Luckily", our site was not successful so we could find some matches in the recent queries list... on a busier site it would have been hard to pin down. It still felt like a total money pit into which you toss offerings to a dark god which may or may not grant blessings.
- whatever1 4y ago
  But that is adverting in general. We have billboards, tv ads, paper ads, product placements. You have no clue how many people will buy because of these ads. But you burn your cash anyway.
  - hnick 4y ago
    The difference there - you can at least verify your ad is being shown, even if it is not a guarantee of effectiveness, and use other estimates to see how many people see it such as foot traffic or TV viewership. I have no real way of knowing how many people see my online advertising, I just get a number and a bill, and I have to trust them. The pixel does help for visits but not views and other metrics.
  - polygamous_bat 4y ago
    > “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.” — John Wanamaker (1838-1922)
  - datavirtue 4y ago
    I used to have a retail store on a busy state hiway in a congested area. We put out a used ragged-arse flashing arrow sign that just had keywords on it or maybe a few sentences for products we sold. That worthless piece of junk printed money. Road signs, sidewalk signs, and billboards are worth every penny. They work.
ravenstine 4y ago
The Google laughs maniacally in response and says: "No, no... we're not competing with ad firms. We're about bringing products to users before there's even a need to advertise them."
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
"Facebook, Google and the rest of the industry were so driven by profit at all cost, and at the expense of long term thinking, they shot themselves in the foot." If one subscribes to the idea that reducing spending can help curb inflation, then consider that the "business model" of online advertising-supported "tech" companies seem to require that consumers keep spending, in spite of inflation.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  To make money by helping people spend less, you need to be a "discounter" or some kind. E.g. here is fruit that is 20% less than your supermarket. But even such services and businesses need to advertise. Even the government needs to pay to advertise, even if it is advertising giving money to help people in tough economic times. I think companies that are so large, and do one thing (advertise!) cannot be immune from business cycles. But is it a bad thing if these companies don't grow every single damn year.
jzb 4y ago
So, ironically, advertisers are right back where they started. The relentless desire to track leads gutted publishing because the ad dollars got sucked up by Google and Facebook. Publishers that survived did so by chasing “clickbait” and SEO that everybody bitches about. In the end the golems they helped create is taking away the control and tracking they wanted in the first place - and undermining their relationships with their audience, too. Maybe we’ll move back to a better model that helps support decent content.
- ehnto 4y ago
  Big businesses and advertising agencies already see this, they have been tracking it. But I wouldn't want to be a small ecommerce brand who built their business on the back of online marketing that worked. Coupled with Amazon stealing absolutely everyone's lunch, they have had the rug pulled out from under them by big tech companies. You can say it's their fault for building on top of someone elses land, and you would be mostly right. But online commerce has become a mess, and it is just hard to make it work without being on these platforms. They have hoovered up all the customers, and dominate all the avenues for advertising online.
AndrewKemendo 4y ago
That's great to hear In my view advertising can't end fast enough, but my worry is that our economy is so tied to advertising as a model that it would cause a deep depression - as spending would shift and slow down to a halt. Psychopaths with money that want to trick people into doing what they want will always seek out the most targeted way to manipulate people. If there's a system that allows advertising psychopaths more granularity in their attempts to burrow into your brain they will be all over it, until all the competitive advantage is burned out and then they will hop to whatever gives them even better advantage My evil genius idea in 2016 was to eventually just inspect every piece of trash that people throw away (legally possible) to build the most personalized and predictive profile of a consumer possible without strapping a camera to them, which is the ultimate goal.
- int_19h 4y ago
  > our economy is so tied to advertising as a model that it would cause a deep depression - as spending would shift and slow down to a halt. Would it, though? I can't think of the last thing I bought because I've seen it in an ad. There certainly were some, but I'd be surprised if it all added up to even 1% of what I spent on products and services.
ehnto 4y ago
In the more grass roots advertising industry we are seeing agencies move away from what can be called "performance marketing" in general, which entails the high volume low effort advertising channels such as google and facebook ads. Alternatives are more traditional, real world brand building and engaging with communities in a real sense, running events and getting involved in the spaces their customers are active. It shouldn't surprise anyone here that online advertising is wildly saturated and that users are unable to engage with thousands of brand voices a day.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
spaceman_2020 4y ago
This Google black box is not just on the advertising side, it's also on the customer service side. Really impossible to get hold of a real person, even after giving them thousands of dollars.
ako 4y ago
> "As an ... your livelihood is dependant on an algorithm, not skill, not intuition, not experience, not even track record." Does this say anything about AI in general?
- samwillis 4y ago
  Interesting point! And I supposed with things like stable diffusion there is a level of skill, intuition and experience in how to steer it to what you want. A skilled stable diffusion user is still an “artist”. My issue with the AI behind ad networks is that it a hostile AI, it is trained with an agenda that does not align to that of the user (the advertiser). The AI is trained to maximise the profits for the platform (Google or Facebook) at the expense of the advertisers own business and the viewers of the ads. It’s an exploitative relationship (to both advertisers and viewers), compleat with all the usual gas lighting and manipulation. In my view there needs to be a separation of ad placement vendor and advertising exchange. The exchanges need to be regulated in the same was a securities exchange is.
bogomipz 4y ago
>"I’ve spent most of the last 10 years earning my living from an e-commerce business I own. The online advertising industry is unrecognisable from when we started." Could you elaborate on some of the things that have changed to make it unrecognizable? Wasn't it still targeted ads 10 years ago by the same players mentioned in the article i.e FB and Google?
robryan 4y ago
I have spent a long time in ecommerce and follow the results of a bunch of public ecommerce companies. It seems to be that Google basically collects the whole profit margin. Companies will do this to keep growth as high as possible to justify their high market caps and hope that they can eventually scale back on advertising and keep their customer base.
- samwillis 4y ago
  100% this! You are even required now (as an advertiser) to send so many metrics to Google for the algorithms to work they know everything about your business. The entire system is now engineered to extract the maximum possible value from the advertiser. People complain about the tracking of visitors, but the tracking of advertisers own business is equally as abusive.
FounderBurr 4y ago
Advertising in general is just businesses grifting each other with false promises.
sammalloy 4y ago
> It’s now just one big black box, you put money in one side and get traffic out the other. The control and useful tracking (what actual search terms people are using, proper visible conversion tracking of an ad) is now almost non-existent. As an advertiser your livelihood is dependant on an algorithm, not skill, not intuition, not experience, not even track record. Look, I’m about as anti-consumer at you can get, but whoever is in charge of advertising over at Instagram has me literally scared for my life. I want almost every product they try to sell me, and I’ve never been this targeted by any ad in my entire life. I even recently made a new purchase of shoes outside of Insta because of the influence their ads had on me. It’s pretty fucking incredible.
- bamboozled 4y ago
  What are you talking about sorry? I have absolutely no similar experience to this?
davewritescode 4y ago
I 100% agree with this sentiment. I think we're going to be transitioning back to more personalized marketing with CRM and email and SMS as channels. It seems to be happening already as there's lots of startups in this space. Search advertising is in real trouble, it's one of the reasons I sold my Alphabet shares a year ago. I see long term headwinds in this space. I don't doubt Google can engineer their way out of this, I'm just not willing the market has priced that risk in.
pabs3 4y ago
From a consumer perspective, the sole valuable thing about ads seems to be discovery. If we could have discovery without ads, that can only be a good thing. What is the future of discovery in such a world?
ls15 4y ago
> Facebook, Google and the rest of the industry were so driven by profit at all cost, and at the expense of long term thinking, they shot themselves in the foot. As far as I know, the technical term for that is greed.

civilized 4y ago

> My thesis, in beef This is a delightful turn of phrase. I wonder if it was deliberate or an autocorrect happy accident.

samwillis 4y ago
I really hate iPhone autocorrect…
hestefisk 4y ago
It’s a very beefy thesis … Or a beef with someone?
- civilized 4y ago
  The latter. Since he's complaining about the ad industry from what sounds like a personal perspective.
verisimi 4y ago
In brief, I think
- samwillis 4y ago
  Correct.
tjpnz 4y ago
Do they carry a vegetarian option?

xwdv 4y ago

Is it really much different from offline advertising in days of old? That was more or less also a black box.

jeremyjh 4y ago
Yes, you would know what content your ad was displayed between and could draw inferences and do research on that specific audience.

chiefalchemist 4y ago

Have you read "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism"? I would say that your observations - tho they frustrate you - are very much inline with what the book proposes. In short, and paraphrased a bit to speak to your context, you're no longer buying impressions / clicks in the traditional transactional sense. Instead you're buying the influence on behavior within the broader context of what these networks know about the individuals within a market, but also what other influence these networks have accrued on the individuals. It's a blackbox be because it's no longer a simple transaction, but also because the AI (?) is in a broader sense exerting proactive influences. Nudges on behavior that add up and ideally can not only be predicted but also created. The book is long and deep, but it will also change how you view the world and Big Tech. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capitalism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capi...

jeremyjh 4y ago
But how does an ad buyer know their ads are even displayed to a relevant audience?
- chiefalchemist 4y ago
  You don't, but that's what's being sold. Not the old transaction, but instead the boarder awareness from the network of the market to create and deliver an audience. Put another way, the book would argue that with the traditional way "relevance" was a reactive guess. Going forward the ability to create the desired behaviour is less of a guess and more predictable.

martincmartin 4y ago

> As an advertiser your livelihood is dependant on an algorithm, not skill, not intuition, not experience, not even track record. In other words, companies now have to compete by making useful products at a good price, rather than gaming SEO.

deltree7 4y ago
Naive understanding of the world / information. Say, In a world of 1,000,000,000+ great products, reaching consumers through word-of-mouth is hard. I bet there are products that solves a lot of your current problems at a decent price. But you don't know about it and none of your friends or network have the same problem for you to give you the solution. The only way to solve this problem is for the product/service provider to know about you and the fact that you have a problem. Advertising is actually an optimal / scalable way for companies to reach you. In a Billion+ product world, you need at least 10 Million Trust worthy reviewers to give you an unbiased review of everything. But, how do you trust the reviewers?
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  Even though this idea of visibility is often touted, the vast majority of advertising is in practice all about obfuscating the actual uses (and especially limitations) of a product. Furthermore, rather than trying to find the few people whom a product matches, it is often about pushing the product on people who never needed it in the first place - such as the diamond industry marketing inventing the practice of giving diamond rings for engagements, or the toy industry creating ads to specifically teach children to nag their parents. Or the vast amounta of pills promising penis enlargement. Sure, these things may not happen so much in B2B specialty advertising, but in B2C they are the norm, and exceptions are few and far between.
  - deltree7 4y ago
    You can reform the Ad industry in several ways (enhancing "truth in advertisment") i) You can only use factual information. ii) You can't use visual props unrelated to the product (sexy women, beaches, fancy cars, spas) But to burn advertisements due to shortcomings is like hating/shutting down internet because of 4chan or QAnon

simfree 4y ago

I have given up on Google AdWords due to the exact issue you describe. Trying to restrict my advertising budget to just one city and do a hard geographic restriction to just US IP addresses did not work. I filed 5 tickets over two weeks with Google trying to get this resolved, only to have over half my budget spent in another continent making impressions with people that will literally never buy the local specific product advertised.

AJ007 4y ago
I think there is probably a record breaking class action lawsuit here with the right lawyers. Damages could be 50-100% of Google's yearly gross revenue, especially when you include countries outside on the US who really don't like Google. Google intentionally modified both geo-targeting and mobile app targeting, removing the options advertisers set. For example, you opted out of mobile app targeted. Then they removed the option and you had to set it in the domain blacklist. Then they removed that. This wasn't a one off, hid, modified, and moved these options repeatedly. Advertisers didn't know that when you geo-targeted a location, by default it was set to users searching that location. You didn't want people in India who were interested in NYC? Too bad. Remember the whole Adwords prescription drug settlement. This is an organization run by people who would be serving hard time if they didn't have a legion of lawyers and bottomless pockets.
- sailfast 4y ago
  Perhaps, but I’m sure there’s a forced arbitration clause buried in a EULA somewhere…
  - lillecarl 4y ago
    The government in Sweden could call a too crappy EULA non-enforceable. It's like the anticompetitive clauses that I happily sign over here because they don't hold in court, which employers are well aware of.
Covzire 4y ago
That's ridiculous, isn't selecting a target market Marketing/Econ 101? What possible reason would they have for not giving some kind of locality options?

adbro123 4y ago

> what actual search terms people are using, proper visible conversion tracking of an ad I sympathize with this position. I operate a one stop shop for digital advertising for huge brands. First I agree that the regulations (the government ones and Apple's) have benefitted no one. This is in a sense totally factual, and I challenge the blowhards here to like, name one substantive harm someone has experienced from ad ID tracking on an iPhone. While I believe government regulations should be proactive, rather than reactive, I believe the sum total history of ad tracking has pretty much confirmed that there aren't any substantive harms to correlated ad IDs. From the perspective of advertisers: An enlightening explanation of the Google value ad I read came from another guy explaining how he advertised dev tools on Google. He created a YouTube ad so that Johnny Programmer, watching YouTube videos on a weekend, would see a demo of his devops tool because Johnny searched "how to connect git to kubernetes" or whatever in the previous 10 days. And those ads converted really well. Even though the YouTube video had no contextual relationship with the ad the user saw. So it sounds like you are complaining about the flaws in Google's tracking UI. Well, I guess e-mail them some more.

tsimionescu 4y ago
> This is in a sense totally factual, and I challenge the blowhards here to like, name one substantive harm someone has experienced from ad ID tracking on an iPhone. You then give a perfect example right in the next paragraph: > so that Johnny Programmer, watching YouTube videos on a weekend, would see a demo of his devops tool because Johnny searched "how to connect git to kubernetes" or whatever in the previous 10 days. So now Johnny Programmer's work life is hounding him on weekends. Even worse, he is being influenced to buy a paid product to do something that could probably be easily achieved with open source tools as well.
- aidos 4y ago
  To be fair, you should use different profiles for your work and personal digital lives. And if someone is likely to use an open source solution, they’re also unlikely to be influenced to switch to a paid product based on an ad instead.

EGreg 4y ago

Yep, it is, and there are far better models out there. Here is just one of MANY possibilities: https://qbix.com/ecosystem#Decentralizing-the-Marketplace https://qbix.com/ecosystem#Decentralizing-the-Marketplace

bosky101 4y ago
Also check out https://perpetual.technology https://perpetual.technology that pays you in crypto, to run open source decentralized software on your website/app or server. disclosure: i'm a co-founder

tinus_hn 4y ago

Ultimately as ad blocking rises im pretty sure ad hosting and tracking as it is now will go the same way popups went and ads will end up within the content itself or included in the pages directly so they can’t be blocked.

candiodari 4y ago
I look forward to them first AI ad blockers then.
Gtex555 4y ago
ad blocking is not as popular as you think , I think 70-80% of people don't even use it especially on mobile.

hnick 4y ago

Yeah I found it quite hard as a novice to actually tell if my Facebook pixel stuff was all working and firing exactly as intended. The lack of data means it's hard to map a 1:1 relationship for a certain visitor (me). "Luckily", our site was not successful so we could find some matches in the recent queries list... on a busier site it would have been hard to pin down. It still felt like a total money pit into which you toss offerings to a dark god which may or may not grant blessings.

whatever1 4y ago
But that is adverting in general. We have billboards, tv ads, paper ads, product placements. You have no clue how many people will buy because of these ads. But you burn your cash anyway.
- hnick 4y ago
  The difference there - you can at least verify your ad is being shown, even if it is not a guarantee of effectiveness, and use other estimates to see how many people see it such as foot traffic or TV viewership. I have no real way of knowing how many people see my online advertising, I just get a number and a bill, and I have to trust them. The pixel does help for visits but not views and other metrics.
- polygamous_bat 4y ago
  > “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.” — John Wanamaker (1838-1922)
- datavirtue 4y ago
  I used to have a retail store on a busy state hiway in a congested area. We put out a used ragged-arse flashing arrow sign that just had keywords on it or maybe a few sentences for products we sold. That worthless piece of junk printed money. Road signs, sidewalk signs, and billboards are worth every penny. They work.

ravenstine 4y ago

The Google laughs maniacally in response and says: "No, no... we're not competing with ad firms. We're about bringing products to users before there's even a need to advertise them."

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

"Facebook, Google and the rest of the industry were so driven by profit at all cost, and at the expense of long term thinking, they shot themselves in the foot." If one subscribes to the idea that reducing spending can help curb inflation, then consider that the "business model" of online advertising-supported "tech" companies seem to require that consumers keep spending, in spite of inflation.

quickthrower2 4y ago
To make money by helping people spend less, you need to be a "discounter" or some kind. E.g. here is fruit that is 20% less than your supermarket. But even such services and businesses need to advertise. Even the government needs to pay to advertise, even if it is advertising giving money to help people in tough economic times. I think companies that are so large, and do one thing (advertise!) cannot be immune from business cycles. But is it a bad thing if these companies don't grow every single damn year.

jzb 4y ago

So, ironically, advertisers are right back where they started. The relentless desire to track leads gutted publishing because the ad dollars got sucked up by Google and Facebook. Publishers that survived did so by chasing “clickbait” and SEO that everybody bitches about. In the end the golems they helped create is taking away the control and tracking they wanted in the first place - and undermining their relationships with their audience, too. Maybe we’ll move back to a better model that helps support decent content.

ehnto 4y ago
Big businesses and advertising agencies already see this, they have been tracking it. But I wouldn't want to be a small ecommerce brand who built their business on the back of online marketing that worked. Coupled with Amazon stealing absolutely everyone's lunch, they have had the rug pulled out from under them by big tech companies. You can say it's their fault for building on top of someone elses land, and you would be mostly right. But online commerce has become a mess, and it is just hard to make it work without being on these platforms. They have hoovered up all the customers, and dominate all the avenues for advertising online.

AndrewKemendo 4y ago

That's great to hear In my view advertising can't end fast enough, but my worry is that our economy is so tied to advertising as a model that it would cause a deep depression - as spending would shift and slow down to a halt. Psychopaths with money that want to trick people into doing what they want will always seek out the most targeted way to manipulate people. If there's a system that allows advertising psychopaths more granularity in their attempts to burrow into your brain they will be all over it, until all the competitive advantage is burned out and then they will hop to whatever gives them even better advantage My evil genius idea in 2016 was to eventually just inspect every piece of trash that people throw away (legally possible) to build the most personalized and predictive profile of a consumer possible without strapping a camera to them, which is the ultimate goal.

int_19h 4y ago
> our economy is so tied to advertising as a model that it would cause a deep depression - as spending would shift and slow down to a halt. Would it, though? I can't think of the last thing I bought because I've seen it in an ad. There certainly were some, but I'd be surprised if it all added up to even 1% of what I spent on products and services.

ehnto 4y ago

In the more grass roots advertising industry we are seeing agencies move away from what can be called "performance marketing" in general, which entails the high volume low effort advertising channels such as google and facebook ads. Alternatives are more traditional, real world brand building and engaging with communities in a real sense, running events and getting involved in the spaces their customers are active. It shouldn't surprise anyone here that online advertising is wildly saturated and that users are unable to engage with thousands of brand voices a day.

deleted 4y ago

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spaceman_2020 4y ago

This Google black box is not just on the advertising side, it's also on the customer service side. Really impossible to get hold of a real person, even after giving them thousands of dollars.

ako 4y ago

> "As an ... your livelihood is dependant on an algorithm, not skill, not intuition, not experience, not even track record." Does this say anything about AI in general?

samwillis 4y ago
Interesting point! And I supposed with things like stable diffusion there is a level of skill, intuition and experience in how to steer it to what you want. A skilled stable diffusion user is still an “artist”. My issue with the AI behind ad networks is that it a hostile AI, it is trained with an agenda that does not align to that of the user (the advertiser). The AI is trained to maximise the profits for the platform (Google or Facebook) at the expense of the advertisers own business and the viewers of the ads. It’s an exploitative relationship (to both advertisers and viewers), compleat with all the usual gas lighting and manipulation. In my view there needs to be a separation of ad placement vendor and advertising exchange. The exchanges need to be regulated in the same was a securities exchange is.

bogomipz 4y ago

>"I’ve spent most of the last 10 years earning my living from an e-commerce business I own. The online advertising industry is unrecognisable from when we started." Could you elaborate on some of the things that have changed to make it unrecognizable? Wasn't it still targeted ads 10 years ago by the same players mentioned in the article i.e FB and Google?

robryan 4y ago

I have spent a long time in ecommerce and follow the results of a bunch of public ecommerce companies. It seems to be that Google basically collects the whole profit margin. Companies will do this to keep growth as high as possible to justify their high market caps and hope that they can eventually scale back on advertising and keep their customer base.

samwillis 4y ago
100% this! You are even required now (as an advertiser) to send so many metrics to Google for the algorithms to work they know everything about your business. The entire system is now engineered to extract the maximum possible value from the advertiser. People complain about the tracking of visitors, but the tracking of advertisers own business is equally as abusive.

FounderBurr 4y ago

Advertising in general is just businesses grifting each other with false promises.

sammalloy 4y ago

> It’s now just one big black box, you put money in one side and get traffic out the other. The control and useful tracking (what actual search terms people are using, proper visible conversion tracking of an ad) is now almost non-existent. As an advertiser your livelihood is dependant on an algorithm, not skill, not intuition, not experience, not even track record. Look, I’m about as anti-consumer at you can get, but whoever is in charge of advertising over at Instagram has me literally scared for my life. I want almost every product they try to sell me, and I’ve never been this targeted by any ad in my entire life. I even recently made a new purchase of shoes outside of Insta because of the influence their ads had on me. It’s pretty fucking incredible.

bamboozled 4y ago
What are you talking about sorry? I have absolutely no similar experience to this?

davewritescode 4y ago

I 100% agree with this sentiment. I think we're going to be transitioning back to more personalized marketing with CRM and email and SMS as channels. It seems to be happening already as there's lots of startups in this space. Search advertising is in real trouble, it's one of the reasons I sold my Alphabet shares a year ago. I see long term headwinds in this space. I don't doubt Google can engineer their way out of this, I'm just not willing the market has priced that risk in.

pabs3 4y ago

From a consumer perspective, the sole valuable thing about ads seems to be discovery. If we could have discovery without ads, that can only be a good thing. What is the future of discovery in such a world?

ls15 4y ago

> Facebook, Google and the rest of the industry were so driven by profit at all cost, and at the expense of long term thinking, they shot themselves in the foot. As far as I know, the technical term for that is greed.