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His two examples are Twitter and Reddit whose ad revenue is dying because those two companies have made huge blunders. Elon seems to almost actively be killing
by gleenn 3y ago
His two examples are Twitter and Reddit whose ad revenue is dying because those two companies have made huge blunders. Elon seems to almost actively be killing Twitter (which the poster even states). Reddit screwed Apollo and then many of the most popular subreddits protested and did things like show porn on otherwise usually SFW content to prevent Reddit from showing ads and thus killing their profits. Those are big sites, but those are definitely attributable to other obvious confounding factors. I would definitely argue they should be the first data points thrown out in asking "is the ad biz on the internet dying?". I do think ads have gotten worse but I definitely don't think it's going anywhere for a long long time. Way too many companies have built their whole revenue model around them. And companies may spend less to post ads but they definitely still will because there really aren't that many alternatives.
- woooooo 3y agoI recently googled some random topic (drag race engines I think) and got some fairly-decent article from 5 years ago that satisfied my curiosity. The website was actively user-hostile. Multiple things popping up all over the place, the works. Is there any other destiny for content like that? Long since written, but owned and served. Why not enshittify as much as possible, one performance review cycle at a time?
- soared 3y agoInteresting thought that for content where no competition exists, the owner can maximize profit by drowning it in ads. Doesn’t seem like there is much of an alternative outside of legislation or action from google to enforce stricter ad standards(like how pop ups got killed)
- LakeBoat 3y ago[flagged]
- nonethewiser 3y ago> His two examples are Twitter and Reddit whose ad revenue is dying because those two companies have made huge blunders. Even worse - they never had good ad revenue. If ad revenue model is dying it would suggest companies like facebook and google see ad revenue dying.
- phaedrus 3y agoThe YouTube channel Second Thought recently put out a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gSzzuY1Yw0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gSzzuY1Yw0) whose thesis was that even being cheaper than fossil fuels is not / will not be enough for green energy to win, because under capitalism a cheap thing that also has low profit margin will not attract investment compared to a bit more expensive thing which can be exploited for more profit. I wonder if a similar effect affects sites like Twitter and Reddit: the more efficient they are at connecting users and providing value for user's efforts, the less room there is for profit margin. As a coworker once pointed out to me, the parameter which represents "profit" in an economic system would correspond to "inefficiency" in an engineering context.
- brewdad 3y agoYour coworker is wise. Economic theory holds that in a truly efficient market, profits approach 0.
- convolvatron 3y agodoes that mean that investment is fundamentally beholden to market inefficiency?
- bordercases 3y ago“Market failure”, “Market gap”
- kuchenbecker 3y agoExploitation of a knowledge gap and existing market constraints.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y agoIf all you can think of are services, maybe. But the people that make things don’t agree.
- barrysteve 3y ago
- makeitdouble 3y agoWhat examples of ad based rising companies do you see ? My first thought was Google, and it's started to plateau in the recent years: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOGL/alphabet/revenue#:~:text=Alphabet%20revenue%20for%20the%20twelve,a%2041.15%25%20increase%20from%202020 https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOGL/alphabet/rev.... Meta also took a dive, and while it was from a sharp turn of the business focus, I'd argue it comes from an attempt to avoid staying on a stagnating market.
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoTikTok and IG continue to see good ad rev growth
- w-ll 3y agoI still dont know how IG hasnt stopped the very obvious bot spam. [1] This recent post on @bloombergbusiness for instance, it just takes 1 fold of comments to be all scammers, multiple accounts, same or near same message, pointing to the same account. Sometimes in app its swipe up to go to the next thing, sometimes its swipe left, sometimes i have no clue and trigger an ad event. And then the "game" ads I get, cant seem to tell IG the ad irrelevant enough times. 1. https://www.instagram.com/p/Cuk_35AMXeE/ https://www.instagram.com/p/Cuk_35AMXeE/
- ajmurmann 3y agoIt's interesting that those aren't really available on the open web and require the app.
- code_duck 3y agoInstagram can be accessed with a web browser.
- syntaxing 3y agoI don’t use it but TikTok
- andreygrehov 3y ago> His two examples are Twitter and Reddit whose ad revenue is dying because those two companies have made huge blunders. Elon seems to almost actively be killing Twitter I disagree. Elon doesn't care about ad revenue. He stated multiple times that the goal is to make Twitter a superapp.
- lacrimacida 3y agoHaha, what is a superapp?
- andreygrehov 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-app https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-app
- a1o 3y agoSomething like wechat, like payments, messages, socialmedia, shopping, ...
- bamfly 3y agoAOL but in the 21st century. Possibly minus the ISP part. All the shit you do on the web, but controlled by one company, in their app, so they can rent-seek the hell out of everyone else's business.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- croes 3y agoHe also threatened to "thermonuclear name and shame" advertisers who paused spending. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-name-shame-advertisers-who-pull-budget-2022-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-name-shame-adverti...
- andreygrehov 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- HEmanZ 3y agoHave adds been getting worse? Adds I get in the last 3 years have been way too good for me, so my personal experience has been the opposite (or maybe not? Definitely makes me want to buy more stuff). I guess I’m easily targetable
- warbeforepeace 3y agoThe official reddit app has an add every 4 posts i swear.
- HWR_14 3y agoIt's possible that the density of ads has increased (gotten worse) thus leading to you buying more items. And some bias in your recall makes you think they've gotten more effective at targeting you, instead of the same conversion rate but far more opportunities to convert.
- lettergram 3y agoI keep asking this because I don’t understand - how is Elon “killing” twitter? I’ve frankly not seen any difference, at all. If anything there’s slightly more activity
- paulryanrogers 3y agoDriving away lucrative advertising, replacing with much less sustainable premium subscriptions. Then there's cutting the moderation and safety teams to the bone.
- andreygrehov 3y agoI thought everybody hates advertising, no? Let's do a thought experiment and imagine Elon brought more advertising on Twitter. Everyone would bullshit on him for that. In reality, we have the opposite situation. There is less advertising. On top of that, ad revenue is now being shared with creators. What's bad about it?
- lettergram 3y agoThis is kind of a selling point to me, I can’t use Facebook any more because the obscene number of ads.
- paulryanrogers 3y agoMy day job is helping sell ad-free, subscriptions, so I'm a fan of the idea. That said, Elon is driving away the lucrative advertisers and not dropping ads entirely. Even Blue subscribers still get ads, albeit fewer. At their scale and in their market the premium subscriptions model doesn't appear to work, unless their costs can be reduced much, much further. Sharing revenue with creators is great. Not everything being done is bad. On the whole it just doesn't seem sustainable and sometimes even petty and foolish. Almost appears as if he's trying to bankrupt the company.
- andreygrehov 3y ago
- jhaenchen 3y agoThe real issue IMO is that users do not understand that ads pay for their apps. They don't want to see ads and the ads they do see they want them to be uninformed and general. They want everything free. This just encourages subscriptions. Which we're seeing become more and more common.
- Gigachad 3y agoEveryone understands that ads pay for sites. You can want something for free while still understanding how adverts work.
- timmg 3y agoHonest question: how can you expect stuff for free without ads?
- YetAnotherNick 3y agoUsing VC money? It's not even people's fault as well. For more than a decade, VC has spoiled people to expect internet to just work for free.
- noizejoy 3y ago> For more than a decade, VC has spoiled people to expect internet to just work for free. For more than a decade the fed has spoiled VC to expect that money could just be borrowed for nearly free.
- epidemian 3y agoDepends on the definition of "for free". Depending on where one lives, but many people have access to "free" government services, ranging from roads, education, unemployment security, healthcare, and more. The costs of these services are payed by taxes. Some "free" services are sustained via donations. Wikipedia is a good example of this. Some people might say that those are not examples of "for free", because someone is paying for those things, either via taxes or donations. They do have a cost for society. Yes, but in that case then ad-based services are not free either: the advertisers are putting the money to run those services, and the society is also paying a huge cost in thousand of hours of people's lives wasted down the drain, promotion of harmful products, scams, etc.
- Medh_Suk 3y agoMarketers have ruined internet with deceptive and click baity ads. I dont have a problem with ads, just dont sell my data to everyone who knocks on your companies doors. Happy to support ethical ads. Twitter ads are aweful, showing unknown, click bait ads on its platform.
- LaundroMat 3y ago... deceptive and click baity content too.
- spacemadness 3y agoIt’s interesting we hear a lot about how engineers need to understand ethics, but nobody says a peep about the field of marketing which focuses on psychological manipulation and deception.
- JohnFen 3y agoI think that's because everyone already knows that the marketing field is slimy and don't expect differently from it. There is still hope for devs, though.
- hext 3y agoAdvertising, as a field, has had a horrible reputation since way before anyone on this site was born.
- JohnFen 3y agoYep. It's almost like most people don't appreciate being manipulated.
- drdeca 3y agoI don't even have a problem with what ads I'm shown being based on some information about me. I'd happily provide additional information which I think would, if it were used, result in less ads being wasted on me (showing me ads for horror movies/game is never going to benefit the movie/game company, and I find the ads unpleasant. Not showing me ads for horror content, and showing other ads instead, should be a win-win. But the only topics google lets me restrict ads for are "gambling", "alcohol", "dating", and like one or two others that I don't remember. Maybe "parenting"?)
- YetAnotherNick 3y agoEven the pre Apollo saga, reddit ad revenue was nowhere close to facebook. Same with twitter, before Musk its ad revenue is not good. And both platforms are now trying to emulate facebook with heavy control on the app and the API.
- warbeforepeace 3y agoAfter musk its ad revenue is worse.
- darepublic 3y agoBoth of the blunders you mention are recent no? (Elon / Apollo). And these companies were never making money so blunders can be considered errors forced by the need to monetize quickly.
- armini 3y agoBig platforms are slowly decaying but alternatives are also slowly getting traction with new business models. This is an example that's slowly growing in the lofi-music community https://www.instagram.com/reel/CtR9Lnav1GH/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== https://www.instagram.com/reel/CtR9Lnav1GH/?igshid=MzRlODBiN...
- breakingrules 3y ago[dead]
- commandlinefan 3y ago> Twitter and Reddit ... have made huge blunders In addition to which - they were never that solid in the first place. They (and Facebook) are mostly just "dumb hosting" for other people's content - if the content producers leave, they don't have anything to offer. They don't even really own the content that was produced on their platform and it wouldn't have any value even if they did. There's a weak value proposition there: "we'll let you put your stuff up for people to see and even sort of promote it, but we'll run ads next to it to offset our hosting costs", but neither seemed to realize just how precarious their position is/was.
- JeremyNT 3y agoI think this is really what we're seeing now. One can suggest that recent decisions were "blunders" due to the problems they have encountered, but maybe there just was no path forward for them simply because there's not much value to be extracted from this business. Now we just see the entire house of cards collapsing around them.
- Eisenstein 3y agoThere were many obviously lucrative paths Reddit could have taken. They have incredible amounts of data on users who self-select their own interests. They were making money selling subscriptions even. They could have monetized all sorts of things in non-annoying ways, like secret santa (pay to verify users or have direct anonymous shipping?), subreddit sponsorships (want to own /r/steam, Valve pays for it), etc. Instead they wanted to be Facebook Jr, killed all of their interesting and niche aspects, ignored the things users and mods were asking for, and hamfisted general ads in people's faces while adding expensive, unneeded (unwanted!) features like live chat and video hosting. Reddit is an example of what happens when you put people in charge of a business who are both greedy and stupid.
- jwestbury 3y ago> Reddit is an example of what happens when you put people in charge of a business who are both greedy and stupid. No, it's what happens when your investors are VCs who need to 10x on their wins because most of their investments fail. As a result, stable, long-term profitability isn't the goal; big IPOs are, or at least explosive growth. There's no room for a company which is moderately successful when VCs are involved.
- mikrotikker 3y agoElon is such a good guy. Spending $43B to rid society of the trash fire that is twitter. It's a sacrifice not many could make. I am incredibly thankful to him for that and I hope he succeeds at running it into the ground.
- Accujack 3y agoEven when not making blunders reddit has not yet been profitable.