10 ms·

I don't think people understand the price we pay for these ads. Companies _generally_ are going to operate so they don't lose money. In an industry I am familia

by sanex 1y ago

I don't think people understand the price we pay for these ads. Companies _generally_ are going to operate so they don't lose money. In an industry I am familiar with, I booked someone to clean my home. The total cost was somewhere around $350, about 125 of that went to the actual person cleaning the house. The rest went to a combination of google for the ad and the company I booked through. This industry generally has a 35% marketing expense (sometimes way more) so somewhere around $75 of what I paid to get my house cleaned went to Google. How much better of a job could have been done if the cleaner got a 60% raise? How much better would the local economy be if all of that money stayed local?

vachina 1y ago
True, also considering the hosting costs of that app (probably also on GCP or AWS), and the payment processing fee.
harvey9 1y ago
I ask friends and neighbours for recommendations for this kind of thing. Given you know the industry, what made you search online in this case?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- fijiaarone 1y ago
  I don’t know what an example is.
- ranit 1y ago
  The person you are asking doesn’t say that they looked and found the service through ads. They say that the cleaning companies spent 35% on marketing. And therefore everyone that uses these services pays 35% more as a result. Not only customers that find the service through ads.
  - harvey9 1y ago
    It really does read like they booked through a booking intermediary although the advert part is less clear. In either case, I prefer a personal recommendation if I can get one and we both gain by avoiding the intermediary fee.
    - sanex 1y ago
      Given I'm in the digital marketing industry my case was a little unique. Partly it was for UX research.
- awesome_dude 1y ago
  Sorry, this triggers me a little. Whenever we hire someone, a restaurant to cook our meal, a lawyer to help settle our house purchase, a plumber to fix the leaky pipe, we almost never know what we are buying into. So e ask people that have previously had someone do those jobs for them. And here's the rub, they have no idea whatsoever on the quality of the person being hired, only that they've not NOTICED any poor results. I've highlighted noticed, because, unless the person you ask is qualified to assess the work, they have no idea on is quality. And this affects us all, because we use references to guide us on people to hire for jobs, and we have no idea on the quality of the person providing the reference. Do we ask for a reference on the person giving the reference? Even if we do, do e get a reference on the person giving the reference for the person giving the reference?
  - zenoprax 1y ago
    > they've not NOTICED any poor results This is a good enough bar for me to take a chance on someone. If I'm satisfied with the result... I proceed. My "car guy" has a track record of saving me from over-spending on things that don't matter. I don't have a good enough reason to try someone else. There's a infinite regression in your logic that can only be broken by either: 1. trust in the person, or somewhere along the chain of referrals or; 2. simply possessing the skill and knowledge to assess the work yourself (but lacking the time, energy, or other resources to do it yourself)
    - awesome_dude 1y ago
      > There's a infinite regression in your logic that can only be broken by either: > 2. simply possessing the skill and knowledge to assess the work yourself (but lacking the time, energy, or other resources to do it yourself) Yes, that was the point.
  - bornfreddy 1y ago
    I noticed this with booking.com. When we asked people for recommendations we got way worse sleeping arrangements than when using booking.com. I believe that the first reason, as you outlined, is that we followed many persons' recommendations instead on a single person's, but there is also fear of bad online review that keeps the service providers on their toes. It's a pity though that the 3rd party is needed for this.
- Theodores 1y ago
  You need a functioning community for this, with people knowing and interacting with their neighbours. Sadly, we live in an era of a somewhat atomised society. You can live in a city of ten million people to not know a soul, with workmates that are friendly but not friends, with those workmates commuting in from the opposite side of the city to yourself. For a functioning community you need to have reason to know your neighbours. Maybe you need to borrow things or lend things, go into town together to share a vehicle, or spend time together in the local pub. The list is endless, however, nowadays, when everyone is car dependent, there is no need to ask a neighbour if you can borrow something, you can just hop in your car and get your own. Or you can just get Amazon to drop it off for you. In a functioning neighbourhood, you might ask your direct next door neighbour about something such as needing a cleaner, and they might know that the other neighbours, a few doors down have one. You might merely be acquainted with that neighbour, but you would know them well enough to ask them to make the required introductions. It actually requires a little bit of work to have relationships with neighbours, you also need a functioning street with chance encounters made on a regular basis. Being a pedestrian helps. Another surprising factor is home ownership. If people are merely renting then they are not invested in the community in the same way. In the olden days there were opportunities for teenagers to do work such as newspaper rounds, household cleaning, car washing, babysitting, gardening, dog walking and other jobs. But then we stopped having 'free range kids' due to 'stranger danger'. I am from the former times when I did the whole gamut of pocket money jobs for whomever in my village and my mother would know exactly where I was and if anything ever happened to me. If I was late delivering newspapers then someone would call and my 'last known sighting' could easily be ascertained. I could also always hitchhike into town because one of my newspaper customers would stop for me and give me a lift. My neighbours looked after me, and I did my best for them. I also did not do everything, for babysitting I could 'outsource' to my sister and her friends, for gardening gigs I could 'outsource' to some other kid in the village. What I find interesting is how many of these teenage jobs have become professionalised. For example, washing cars. Nowadays that is 'detailing' and a very different deal with all kinds of potions. Saturday jobs also became professionalised, so you no longer see teenagers serving customers in shops. As for babysitting, you probably need full background checks nowadays. All of my neighbours that I did things for gave me a little bit of mentoring, and Christmas was amazing due to the amount of tips and gifts that I received. Oh, how I miss those days. Apologies for the reminiscing!
m0rde 1y ago
Many people would not have found this cleaner without Googling, reading reviews, etc. While that may not be an ad directly, it's part of the marketing budget. So what needs to change?
- t_mann 1y ago
  We've had markets for all sorts of domestic help for centuries before we had computers. Perhaps more relatable, think about how your parents might have found such help.
  - accrual 1y ago
    Yep. And sometimes a nearby independant contractor who advertises once or twice a week on Facebook or in the local newspaper is going to provide a better service experience than the one blasting TV commercials on the local channels.
    - Swizec 1y ago
      The nearby contractor who gets all their work through referrals is by definition better than the one who needs to blast TV ads. The best people are basically never on the market.
      - bee_rider 1y ago
        Not really by definition necessarily. But yes, it does seem very likely that referrals are the stronger signal. In some sparser places there might also only be a couple contractors working anyway. Might be able to get suggestions just by asking around wherever you get permits.
  - hedora 1y ago
    Craigslist briefly filled this role. Before that, there were classified ads in papers. Those were lightly vetted by the local newspaper. Also, with a warrant, the police could generally track down the person that placed the ad, which broke a lot of bullshit scams. (Like house sitters that don’t exist, but are instead getting lists of people that will be out of town.)
ocdtrekkie 1y ago
This is one of those 100% insane things. We all pay a massive Google tax on every purchase. Marketing has always been a part of business, but since Google has engaged in illegal anticompetitive behavior, the price has also skyrocketed, and we all pay for it.
ruined 1y ago
you can solve this by direct action. when your cleaner arrives, explain you'd like to make a direct arrangement next time, and ask for their phone number. no app can patch this 'analog hole' of the gig industry.
- alyandon 1y ago
  100% spot on. I do this with subcontractors quite frequently for house related stuff and most of them are quite happy to work with me directly.
  - reaperducer 1y ago
    Wanna really make their day? Pay with cash.
    - kenmacd 1y ago
      That's really more of a "Want to pay more than your fair share of taxes? Help them commit tax fraud". Cutting Google out of the mix can be seen as a net positive for the community. The same can't really be said for taxes that go to your local services.
      - jazzyjackson 1y ago
        Bulk of income taxes go to the feds. Plumber will still pay plenty of sales tax. I'd say the value of having a plumber that likes you outweighs what benefits one receives from government programs, making it rational to stiff the man.
      - behringer 1y ago
        It's your moral duty to avoid paying tax, if you're an American.
        hvb2 1y ago
        Uh? What? Care to explain? I know it's considered a sport but a moral duty?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Lu2025 1y ago
I see how Google has a vested interest in hollowing out communities to the point you have nobody to text to refer you to a cleaner. I frequently see such requests in a local Facebook group aptly named "Exit 10 and 11" (of a highway)
Gooblebrai 1y ago
> How much better of a job could have been done if the cleaner got a 60% raise Would you have hired or even found the cleaner without the company’s referral?
- lblume 1y ago
  It appears that the cost of referral is much higher than it used to be. Fifty years ago, you might have looked in a phone book for companies that offer the service you are looking for, or gotten a recommendation from a friend. Everything was local, basically. I am not stating that this was necessarily better or game-theoretically optimal, but when the alternative is paying a large share to a big corporation for suggesting an option not based on merit, but the highest bid in a micro-auction, something tells me things have been going in the wrong direction in this case.
gtowey 1y ago
The capitalist lords demand their tithe. Those superyachts aren't cheap, you know. We are pioneering the new feaudalism.
AnthonyMouse 1y ago
> How much better of a job could have been done if the cleaner got a 60% raise? How much better would the local economy be if all of that money stayed local? Let's be honest here, if you got rid of their advertising expense it's not going to cause the company to offer the contractor more when they're willing to do the job for less. In a competitive market what happens is that the price goes down, so that you pay $227.50 instead of $350, the cleaner still gets $125, and now there is $102.5 in overhead instead of $225. But that's still good. Overhead is inefficient and you could use the extra money to hire other people which increases labor demand which is the thing that does cause people to get paid more. Or maybe some of the gig workers are doing jobs for people who are themselves not rich and paying less helps them out. The real question is, how do you replace the function of the advertising expense? Suppose you even want to set up a non-profit gig marketplace that doesn't take anything, it just hooks people up with customers and people accept payment with cash or Venmo or whatever. That's pretty much just a website. But then how do you get people to find out about it and use it?
- abustamam 1y ago
  I belong to a local Muslim Chamber of Commerce that is basically this. Every business that wants to be a part of the network pays a membership fee (like $300 a year) and gets put into a directory. We have Muslim plumbers, contractors, real estate agents, etc. I think such things can only work at small scales. Once there are too many competing interests it's not as effective.
  - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
    I feel like you're just describing a different form of advertising (pay $300 to be listed in the directory) rather than an alternative to it. In general it seems like the problem is that a marketplace has a network effect. The sellers go where the buyers are and the buyers go where the sellers are. And then the marketplace gets captured by the likes of Google or Facebook who, instead of showing results based on reviews or customer ratings or some other kind of useful curation that allows high quality providers to rise to the top even if they're small, just sell the top slot to whoever bids the most.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
refurb 1y ago
That's not how advertising works. You only do ads because you think the net impact on profit is positive. So in your example of Google getting $75, the alternative isn't skipping Google and keeping the $75, the alternative is the cleaner makes zero because you're not a customer.

by sanex 1y ago

vachina 1y ago

True, also considering the hosting costs of that app (probably also on GCP or AWS), and the payment processing fee.

harvey9 1y ago

I ask friends and neighbours for recommendations for this kind of thing. Given you know the industry, what made you search online in this case?

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
fijiaarone 1y ago
I don’t know what an example is.
ranit 1y ago
The person you are asking doesn’t say that they looked and found the service through ads. They say that the cleaning companies spent 35% on marketing. And therefore everyone that uses these services pays 35% more as a result. Not only customers that find the service through ads.
- harvey9 1y ago
  It really does read like they booked through a booking intermediary although the advert part is less clear. In either case, I prefer a personal recommendation if I can get one and we both gain by avoiding the intermediary fee.
  - sanex 1y ago
    Given I'm in the digital marketing industry my case was a little unique. Partly it was for UX research.
awesome_dude 1y ago
Sorry, this triggers me a little. Whenever we hire someone, a restaurant to cook our meal, a lawyer to help settle our house purchase, a plumber to fix the leaky pipe, we almost never know what we are buying into. So e ask people that have previously had someone do those jobs for them. And here's the rub, they have no idea whatsoever on the quality of the person being hired, only that they've not NOTICED any poor results. I've highlighted noticed, because, unless the person you ask is qualified to assess the work, they have no idea on is quality. And this affects us all, because we use references to guide us on people to hire for jobs, and we have no idea on the quality of the person providing the reference. Do we ask for a reference on the person giving the reference? Even if we do, do e get a reference on the person giving the reference for the person giving the reference?
- zenoprax 1y ago
  > they've not NOTICED any poor results This is a good enough bar for me to take a chance on someone. If I'm satisfied with the result... I proceed. My "car guy" has a track record of saving me from over-spending on things that don't matter. I don't have a good enough reason to try someone else. There's a infinite regression in your logic that can only be broken by either: 1. trust in the person, or somewhere along the chain of referrals or; 2. simply possessing the skill and knowledge to assess the work yourself (but lacking the time, energy, or other resources to do it yourself)
  - awesome_dude 1y ago
    > There's a infinite regression in your logic that can only be broken by either: > 2. simply possessing the skill and knowledge to assess the work yourself (but lacking the time, energy, or other resources to do it yourself) Yes, that was the point.
- bornfreddy 1y ago
  I noticed this with booking.com. When we asked people for recommendations we got way worse sleeping arrangements than when using booking.com. I believe that the first reason, as you outlined, is that we followed many persons' recommendations instead on a single person's, but there is also fear of bad online review that keeps the service providers on their toes. It's a pity though that the 3rd party is needed for this.
Theodores 1y ago
You need a functioning community for this, with people knowing and interacting with their neighbours. Sadly, we live in an era of a somewhat atomised society. You can live in a city of ten million people to not know a soul, with workmates that are friendly but not friends, with those workmates commuting in from the opposite side of the city to yourself. For a functioning community you need to have reason to know your neighbours. Maybe you need to borrow things or lend things, go into town together to share a vehicle, or spend time together in the local pub. The list is endless, however, nowadays, when everyone is car dependent, there is no need to ask a neighbour if you can borrow something, you can just hop in your car and get your own. Or you can just get Amazon to drop it off for you. In a functioning neighbourhood, you might ask your direct next door neighbour about something such as needing a cleaner, and they might know that the other neighbours, a few doors down have one. You might merely be acquainted with that neighbour, but you would know them well enough to ask them to make the required introductions. It actually requires a little bit of work to have relationships with neighbours, you also need a functioning street with chance encounters made on a regular basis. Being a pedestrian helps. Another surprising factor is home ownership. If people are merely renting then they are not invested in the community in the same way. In the olden days there were opportunities for teenagers to do work such as newspaper rounds, household cleaning, car washing, babysitting, gardening, dog walking and other jobs. But then we stopped having 'free range kids' due to 'stranger danger'. I am from the former times when I did the whole gamut of pocket money jobs for whomever in my village and my mother would know exactly where I was and if anything ever happened to me. If I was late delivering newspapers then someone would call and my 'last known sighting' could easily be ascertained. I could also always hitchhike into town because one of my newspaper customers would stop for me and give me a lift. My neighbours looked after me, and I did my best for them. I also did not do everything, for babysitting I could 'outsource' to my sister and her friends, for gardening gigs I could 'outsource' to some other kid in the village. What I find interesting is how many of these teenage jobs have become professionalised. For example, washing cars. Nowadays that is 'detailing' and a very different deal with all kinds of potions. Saturday jobs also became professionalised, so you no longer see teenagers serving customers in shops. As for babysitting, you probably need full background checks nowadays. All of my neighbours that I did things for gave me a little bit of mentoring, and Christmas was amazing due to the amount of tips and gifts that I received. Oh, how I miss those days. Apologies for the reminiscing!

m0rde 1y ago

Many people would not have found this cleaner without Googling, reading reviews, etc. While that may not be an ad directly, it's part of the marketing budget. So what needs to change?

t_mann 1y ago
We've had markets for all sorts of domestic help for centuries before we had computers. Perhaps more relatable, think about how your parents might have found such help.
- accrual 1y ago
  Yep. And sometimes a nearby independant contractor who advertises once or twice a week on Facebook or in the local newspaper is going to provide a better service experience than the one blasting TV commercials on the local channels.
  - Swizec 1y ago
    The nearby contractor who gets all their work through referrals is by definition better than the one who needs to blast TV ads. The best people are basically never on the market.
    - bee_rider 1y ago
      Not really by definition necessarily. But yes, it does seem very likely that referrals are the stronger signal. In some sparser places there might also only be a couple contractors working anyway. Might be able to get suggestions just by asking around wherever you get permits.
- hedora 1y ago
  Craigslist briefly filled this role. Before that, there were classified ads in papers. Those were lightly vetted by the local newspaper. Also, with a warrant, the police could generally track down the person that placed the ad, which broke a lot of bullshit scams. (Like house sitters that don’t exist, but are instead getting lists of people that will be out of town.)

ocdtrekkie 1y ago

This is one of those 100% insane things. We all pay a massive Google tax on every purchase. Marketing has always been a part of business, but since Google has engaged in illegal anticompetitive behavior, the price has also skyrocketed, and we all pay for it.

ruined 1y ago

you can solve this by direct action. when your cleaner arrives, explain you'd like to make a direct arrangement next time, and ask for their phone number. no app can patch this 'analog hole' of the gig industry.

alyandon 1y ago
100% spot on. I do this with subcontractors quite frequently for house related stuff and most of them are quite happy to work with me directly.
- reaperducer 1y ago
  Wanna really make their day? Pay with cash.
  - kenmacd 1y ago
    That's really more of a "Want to pay more than your fair share of taxes? Help them commit tax fraud". Cutting Google out of the mix can be seen as a net positive for the community. The same can't really be said for taxes that go to your local services.
    - jazzyjackson 1y ago
      Bulk of income taxes go to the feds. Plumber will still pay plenty of sales tax. I'd say the value of having a plumber that likes you outweighs what benefits one receives from government programs, making it rational to stiff the man.
    - behringer 1y ago
      It's your moral duty to avoid paying tax, if you're an American.
      - hvb2 1y ago
        Uh? What? Care to explain? I know it's considered a sport but a moral duty?

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Lu2025 1y ago

I see how Google has a vested interest in hollowing out communities to the point you have nobody to text to refer you to a cleaner. I frequently see such requests in a local Facebook group aptly named "Exit 10 and 11" (of a highway)

Gooblebrai 1y ago

> How much better of a job could have been done if the cleaner got a 60% raise Would you have hired or even found the cleaner without the company’s referral?

lblume 1y ago
It appears that the cost of referral is much higher than it used to be. Fifty years ago, you might have looked in a phone book for companies that offer the service you are looking for, or gotten a recommendation from a friend. Everything was local, basically. I am not stating that this was necessarily better or game-theoretically optimal, but when the alternative is paying a large share to a big corporation for suggesting an option not based on merit, but the highest bid in a micro-auction, something tells me things have been going in the wrong direction in this case.

gtowey 1y ago

The capitalist lords demand their tithe. Those superyachts aren't cheap, you know. We are pioneering the new feaudalism.

AnthonyMouse 1y ago

> How much better of a job could have been done if the cleaner got a 60% raise? How much better would the local economy be if all of that money stayed local? Let's be honest here, if you got rid of their advertising expense it's not going to cause the company to offer the contractor more when they're willing to do the job for less. In a competitive market what happens is that the price goes down, so that you pay $227.50 instead of $350, the cleaner still gets $125, and now there is $102.5 in overhead instead of $225. But that's still good. Overhead is inefficient and you could use the extra money to hire other people which increases labor demand which is the thing that does cause people to get paid more. Or maybe some of the gig workers are doing jobs for people who are themselves not rich and paying less helps them out. The real question is, how do you replace the function of the advertising expense? Suppose you even want to set up a non-profit gig marketplace that doesn't take anything, it just hooks people up with customers and people accept payment with cash or Venmo or whatever. That's pretty much just a website. But then how do you get people to find out about it and use it?

abustamam 1y ago
I belong to a local Muslim Chamber of Commerce that is basically this. Every business that wants to be a part of the network pays a membership fee (like $300 a year) and gets put into a directory. We have Muslim plumbers, contractors, real estate agents, etc. I think such things can only work at small scales. Once there are too many competing interests it's not as effective.
- AnthonyMouse 1y ago
  I feel like you're just describing a different form of advertising (pay $300 to be listed in the directory) rather than an alternative to it. In general it seems like the problem is that a marketplace has a network effect. The sellers go where the buyers are and the buyers go where the sellers are. And then the marketplace gets captured by the likes of Google or Facebook who, instead of showing results based on reviews or customer ratings or some other kind of useful curation that allows high quality providers to rise to the top even if they're small, just sell the top slot to whoever bids the most.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

refurb 1y ago

That's not how advertising works. You only do ads because you think the net impact on profit is positive. So in your example of Google getting $75, the alternative isn't skipping Google and keeping the $75, the alternative is the cleaner makes zero because you're not a customer.