5 ms·

Damn right but I don't understand why. That is, why is ads business generating so much profits that it allows to build such ridiculously powerfull devices ? Is

by wiz21c 3y ago

Damn right but I don't understand why. That is, why is ads business generating so much profits that it allows to build such ridiculously powerfull devices ? Is it because it's genuinely full of money or is it because Google is so central that it makes tons of money out of lots an dlots and lots of small adverts ?

h4kor 3y ago
My working theory is, that advertising is the overhead cost of doing capitalism. There is a certain percentage of resources which have to be spent on advertising to keep the system functioning. Google is good at grabbing a large portion of a huge pile of money.
- mordae 3y ago
  Not really. It's sufficient to show cool products in "TV" shows (robotic vacuum cleaner in a procedural crime drama might even be a plot device, absorbing murderer's hair to be found by detectives, gasp!). Coupled with a magazine or a show presenting new product categories for those interested, customers will eventually visit a physical or online shop and check out the goods. And then word of mouth will do the rest. Aggressive advertising will mostly just help you get ahead of your competitors and perhaps speed up the adoption rate at the cost of increased volatility of the market and to the detriment of people's mental health. We would be better off regulating aggressive ads away.
  - chromoblob 3y ago
    I propose a law: nobody can advertise a product without mentioning all the brands which offer same or similar product on the market (and the mention must be neutral or positive). Or: all advertisers of all brands with a same or similar product must collaborate. Only voluntary input counts as collaboration; if a brand simply doesn't care about presentation of itself in the advertisement, they have trivially collaborated. Easiest way to implement this is giving every owner of all relevant brands a right to veto every entire final advertisement product (this right could also be surrendered, for all or some possible vetoed advertisements, in exchange for something in a contract). Ignoring flaws of this proposition itself, what could be society's reasons for rejecting it? Does society perhaps want havers of more money to gain further advantage over havers of less money?
    - pixl97 3y ago
      >nobody can advertise a product without mentioning all the brands which offer same or similar product on the marke Maybe 50 years ago that would have worked. Today, not so much. Go to Amazon and look, well, just about anything. What is BEHENO, what is DINGEE, what is Etoolia, what is Romedia, what are the over 300 different 6/7 letter companies that show up when I search up some random product. Unfortunately your consideration causes its own parasite effect of countless companies forming up to feed of the big advertisers budget.
      - chromoblob 3y ago
        Since the product is standard, why is it actually bad? If there are too many brands to be included in a single advert, just choose randomly (the lower the price, the higher the probability for a single brand; I don't know the function).
        pixl97 3y ago
        Because, in the US, this will quickly fall foul of free speech laws. Over 'public' airwaves maybe you could go some distance with this, but advertising on private property, as long as it is not fraudulent will present a constitutional challenge to what your saying. And, you're also crating a regulatory nightmare. Say I put up an add for XXYZXX company, and it includes ZZXYZZ and YYXZYY information (I mean totally random picks), and I just happen to have a stake in those companies too. Now you're going to have to track hundreds of thousands of these entities to ensure no fraud is occurring, and in most cases the fines for this kind of behavior are well under the cost of doing business. Everything you've said so far just creates bigger messes and solves nothing.
        chromoblob 3y ago
        It solves a hypothetical skew towards brands offered by already richer businesses. About regulation, how hard is it to just audit the random picking procedure? I now understand that my second variant, with vetoing of final advertisement, is very flawed (one can cheaply obstruct anyone's advertisement by making a company that vetoes any version of it). How about dividing an advertisement into pieces of information solely about each distinct brand, and let every brand owner compose the piece for its brand? Then all pieces are added into final concrete form in a collaboration - I think it would succeed in most cases, and if brand owners can't collaborate, then an independent company will work on it. Then we need to look how exactly freedom of speech is defined. If it means ability to express views without attaching any additional information, then such freedom is incompatible with my proposal. But if freedom of speech allows attaching additional information as long as base message is preserved, I see no problems. Note that the proposal essentially just forces you to advertise other brands as they wish, along with any advertisement that you do, which (brands) it doesn't mention.
  - WJW 3y ago
    > Aggressive advertising will mostly just help you get ahead of your competitors That's a hell of a load-bearing "just" you managed to insert there. Getting ahead of your competitors in market share can be the difference between having a company succeed or fail.
    - chromoblob 3y ago
      So if nobody is "getting ahead of competitors", does it mean that "capitalism is not functioning"? (which was the point of the comment to which the reply was)
  - SturgeonsLaw 3y ago
    Product placement is still advertising, likewise advertising plays a role in getting people to go to that online or brick and mortar shop instead of some other one.
collaborative 3y ago
It's a monopoly on eye balls. People don't casually walk in front of domain names, they must find them on Google As a result, spending ad money on Google is ridiculously expensive, but companies accept this because there is no alternative hoping to "build long lasting relations" with the people who make them pay upwards of 1 dollar per click
- cj 3y ago
  > people who make them pay upwards of 1 dollar per click FWIW, the cheapest (quality) clicks I've seen, at least in the B2B space, is closer to $3/click, and it can quickly balloon to upwards of $10/click especially on company brand names where competitors are bidding on another company's brand name. Knowing this, I cringe every time I'm screensharing with someone and they search "[B2B Company] login" to login to a tool they use every day. Each login = $2-$10 It's not uncommon for companies to spend $100k+/year JUST bidding on their own company name.
  - collaborative 3y ago
    It honestly escapes me how these companies can be sustainable. The whole market is sooo inefficient. Companies also pay crazy money to appear in privileged positions in supermarkets shelves, and they will often pay crazy money for simply being in the supermarket at all I just don't get where all the marketing money is coming from. Bootstrapping is clearly not an option these days
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      Computers DOUBLED the productivity of the USA since the second world war. All that money went to a few people and groups, and none of it went to average people. For decades, companies have just been sloshing the same giant pile of cash around and around the Ads ecosystem. That bag of chips did not cost $4 to make, not even a little close.
- zelphirkalt 3y ago
  At the same time it is also a huge bubble, that Google is just hoping will never burst. People and businesses way overestimate the impact their ads are having and way underestimate the impact, that treating customers well can have.
collaborative 3y ago
@h4kor one of my crazy ideas is to cap money companies are allowed to spend on Marketing once they reach a certain size. It would encourage a better form of decentralized capitalism and prevent monopolies
- jack_riminton 3y ago
  Exactly, it’s the mechanism for exchanging information in a capitalist economy. Conversely, in Communist systems they could never get this right. Factories were just told to produce 5 or 10% more than last year, didn’t matter if the product quality was worse or if people didn’t want it.
  - ffgjgf1 3y ago
    There was some competition amongst consumer goods producers and TV and other ads in the UUSR. High scarcity of good quality stuff meant they didn’t need to advertise but there was also an oversupply of junk nobody needed. Those companies has to move their inventories somehow since it was much harder for them to go bankrupt.
  - sharemywin 3y ago
    unfortunately pure capitalism has no mechanisms for externalities and information hiding.
- fauigerzigerk 3y ago
  This could easily turn out to be counterproductive. It would provide an additional incentive to hide marketing in all kinds of other business activities rather than openly advertise what's on offer. Marketing is already difficult to tell apart from other company communications, product documentation, etc. What about a company blog showing how to use their products? Is that marketing or product documentation?
  - collaborative 3y ago
    The point is that "openly" advertising would be capped. That would reduce the price of doing so, making it more affordable to smaller players and removing the insane profits ad monopolists enjoy today. Plus, "openly" advertising is one of the most effective ways of advertising. Lastly, by diverting marketing budgets to non-traditional routes (charity donations, etc), the economy would benefit as money would be spread more evenly across
imtringued 3y ago
Because there is no incentive for customers to tell businesses what they want, businesses tell their customers what they should want.

by wiz21c 3y ago

h4kor 3y ago

My working theory is, that advertising is the overhead cost of doing capitalism. There is a certain percentage of resources which have to be spent on advertising to keep the system functioning. Google is good at grabbing a large portion of a huge pile of money.

mordae 3y ago
Not really. It's sufficient to show cool products in "TV" shows (robotic vacuum cleaner in a procedural crime drama might even be a plot device, absorbing murderer's hair to be found by detectives, gasp!). Coupled with a magazine or a show presenting new product categories for those interested, customers will eventually visit a physical or online shop and check out the goods. And then word of mouth will do the rest. Aggressive advertising will mostly just help you get ahead of your competitors and perhaps speed up the adoption rate at the cost of increased volatility of the market and to the detriment of people's mental health. We would be better off regulating aggressive ads away.
- chromoblob 3y ago
  I propose a law: nobody can advertise a product without mentioning all the brands which offer same or similar product on the market (and the mention must be neutral or positive). Or: all advertisers of all brands with a same or similar product must collaborate. Only voluntary input counts as collaboration; if a brand simply doesn't care about presentation of itself in the advertisement, they have trivially collaborated. Easiest way to implement this is giving every owner of all relevant brands a right to veto every entire final advertisement product (this right could also be surrendered, for all or some possible vetoed advertisements, in exchange for something in a contract). Ignoring flaws of this proposition itself, what could be society's reasons for rejecting it? Does society perhaps want havers of more money to gain further advantage over havers of less money?
  - pixl97 3y ago
    >nobody can advertise a product without mentioning all the brands which offer same or similar product on the marke Maybe 50 years ago that would have worked. Today, not so much. Go to Amazon and look, well, just about anything. What is BEHENO, what is DINGEE, what is Etoolia, what is Romedia, what are the over 300 different 6/7 letter companies that show up when I search up some random product. Unfortunately your consideration causes its own parasite effect of countless companies forming up to feed of the big advertisers budget.
    - chromoblob 3y ago
      Since the product is standard, why is it actually bad? If there are too many brands to be included in a single advert, just choose randomly (the lower the price, the higher the probability for a single brand; I don't know the function).
      - pixl97 3y ago
        Because, in the US, this will quickly fall foul of free speech laws. Over 'public' airwaves maybe you could go some distance with this, but advertising on private property, as long as it is not fraudulent will present a constitutional challenge to what your saying. And, you're also crating a regulatory nightmare. Say I put up an add for XXYZXX company, and it includes ZZXYZZ and YYXZYY information (I mean totally random picks), and I just happen to have a stake in those companies too. Now you're going to have to track hundreds of thousands of these entities to ensure no fraud is occurring, and in most cases the fines for this kind of behavior are well under the cost of doing business. Everything you've said so far just creates bigger messes and solves nothing.
        chromoblob 3y ago
        It solves a hypothetical skew towards brands offered by already richer businesses. About regulation, how hard is it to just audit the random picking procedure? I now understand that my second variant, with vetoing of final advertisement, is very flawed (one can cheaply obstruct anyone's advertisement by making a company that vetoes any version of it). How about dividing an advertisement into pieces of information solely about each distinct brand, and let every brand owner compose the piece for its brand? Then all pieces are added into final concrete form in a collaboration - I think it would succeed in most cases, and if brand owners can't collaborate, then an independent company will work on it. Then we need to look how exactly freedom of speech is defined. If it means ability to express views without attaching any additional information, then such freedom is incompatible with my proposal. But if freedom of speech allows attaching additional information as long as base message is preserved, I see no problems. Note that the proposal essentially just forces you to advertise other brands as they wish, along with any advertisement that you do, which (brands) it doesn't mention.
- WJW 3y ago
  > Aggressive advertising will mostly just help you get ahead of your competitors That's a hell of a load-bearing "just" you managed to insert there. Getting ahead of your competitors in market share can be the difference between having a company succeed or fail.
  - chromoblob 3y ago
    So if nobody is "getting ahead of competitors", does it mean that "capitalism is not functioning"? (which was the point of the comment to which the reply was)
- SturgeonsLaw 3y ago
  Product placement is still advertising, likewise advertising plays a role in getting people to go to that online or brick and mortar shop instead of some other one.

collaborative 3y ago

It's a monopoly on eye balls. People don't casually walk in front of domain names, they must find them on Google As a result, spending ad money on Google is ridiculously expensive, but companies accept this because there is no alternative hoping to "build long lasting relations" with the people who make them pay upwards of 1 dollar per click

cj 3y ago
> people who make them pay upwards of 1 dollar per click FWIW, the cheapest (quality) clicks I've seen, at least in the B2B space, is closer to $3/click, and it can quickly balloon to upwards of $10/click especially on company brand names where competitors are bidding on another company's brand name. Knowing this, I cringe every time I'm screensharing with someone and they search "[B2B Company] login" to login to a tool they use every day. Each login = $2-$10 It's not uncommon for companies to spend $100k+/year JUST bidding on their own company name.
- collaborative 3y ago
  It honestly escapes me how these companies can be sustainable. The whole market is sooo inefficient. Companies also pay crazy money to appear in privileged positions in supermarkets shelves, and they will often pay crazy money for simply being in the supermarket at all I just don't get where all the marketing money is coming from. Bootstrapping is clearly not an option these days
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    Computers DOUBLED the productivity of the USA since the second world war. All that money went to a few people and groups, and none of it went to average people. For decades, companies have just been sloshing the same giant pile of cash around and around the Ads ecosystem. That bag of chips did not cost $4 to make, not even a little close.
zelphirkalt 3y ago
At the same time it is also a huge bubble, that Google is just hoping will never burst. People and businesses way overestimate the impact their ads are having and way underestimate the impact, that treating customers well can have.

collaborative 3y ago

@h4kor one of my crazy ideas is to cap money companies are allowed to spend on Marketing once they reach a certain size. It would encourage a better form of decentralized capitalism and prevent monopolies

jack_riminton 3y ago
Exactly, it’s the mechanism for exchanging information in a capitalist economy. Conversely, in Communist systems they could never get this right. Factories were just told to produce 5 or 10% more than last year, didn’t matter if the product quality was worse or if people didn’t want it.
- ffgjgf1 3y ago
  There was some competition amongst consumer goods producers and TV and other ads in the UUSR. High scarcity of good quality stuff meant they didn’t need to advertise but there was also an oversupply of junk nobody needed. Those companies has to move their inventories somehow since it was much harder for them to go bankrupt.
- sharemywin 3y ago
  unfortunately pure capitalism has no mechanisms for externalities and information hiding.
fauigerzigerk 3y ago
This could easily turn out to be counterproductive. It would provide an additional incentive to hide marketing in all kinds of other business activities rather than openly advertise what's on offer. Marketing is already difficult to tell apart from other company communications, product documentation, etc. What about a company blog showing how to use their products? Is that marketing or product documentation?
- collaborative 3y ago
  The point is that "openly" advertising would be capped. That would reduce the price of doing so, making it more affordable to smaller players and removing the insane profits ad monopolists enjoy today. Plus, "openly" advertising is one of the most effective ways of advertising. Lastly, by diverting marketing budgets to non-traditional routes (charity donations, etc), the economy would benefit as money would be spread more evenly across

imtringued 3y ago

Because there is no incentive for customers to tell businesses what they want, businesses tell their customers what they should want.