20 ms·

Google is dead. Where do we go now?

• tomjuggler 9mo ago
  A blog post lamenting the demise of Google Adwords.
  • agentifysh 9mo ago
    good riddance seriously i used to pay like $1~2 a click back in 2010s and remember feeling like a total scam. no way of knowing if those clicks were bots and any campaigns would always have inflation somehow even long tail words that shouldn't. AI should equal the playing field and promote businesses based on merit and capacity not how much they can spend.
    • eterm 9mo ago
      For now. I give it maybe 12-18 months before AI results are polluted by advertising.
      • djmips 9mo ago
        exactly, enjoy the Golden age people, like the Internet had once...
      • nospice 9mo ago
        I don't even think this golden age actually exists today. Aask Google AI mode for the best product in some category - say, the best kitchen range - and it cites... a bunch of spammy "review" websites and a YouTube video. If you're shopping around, an LLM you control can work for stuff like summarizing customer reviews or compiling a list of products with specific features (if you don't mind them being randomly wrong). But for general shopping advice / "plan my vacation" kind of queries, it's already firmly in the land of SEO-garbage-in-SEO-garbage-out.
      • nacozarina 9mo ago
        they won't be in a separate panel you can ignore, either the product promotion text will be integrated into the responses 'your prompt is insightful and refreshing. reminds me of the refreshing taste of organic coconut-cinnamon water. here's a QR code coupon for $1 off a 48-ct pack you can use at your local HoleFoods.'
        • ndriscoll 9mo ago
          More like "Fantastic! It's great that you care about what you should feed your children. A bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch is a great way to start your kids' day with the energy they need, and it's something they're sure to love! It's also fortified with vitamins to give them the nutrition they need! If you don't have any, I can start a DoorDash order right now." Or "It's great that you want to find a way to earn some extra money for holiday presents for your family when you don't have anything left over after paying your bills. You're so thoughtful. You're an avid sports fan, so you've got the knowledge to have an edge in sports betting. DraftKings has a $10 credit when you bet your first $15 on tomorrow's game. You're automatically a winner!" One mustn't forget that propagandists are frequently just straight malicious.
          • lelanthran 9mo ago
            They want to get there (embedded ads that look like content), but right now it's not so easy - how can they confirm to the advertiser that the ad was seen? What are they gonna do? Put in a 700-character long link in the conversation? I'm pretty certain that the ChatAI providers want to show ads, but until they can bill for it, they aren't going to. At some point the billing will work, and then they will.
            • ndriscoll 9mo ago
              My point is more that thinking advertisement is simply "here's a coupon buy this thing" is naive. The more pernicious flavor is "this thing that everyone knows hurts you (but makes us money) isn't that bad. In fact it's good! You should do it!" That flavor is pervasive to such a degree that people don't even register it. The AI people call this "alignment" or "safety".
      • hylaride 9mo ago
        > I give it maybe 12-18 months before AI results are polluted by advertising. Have you been on amazon lately? We're already there. :-/
    • Banditoz 9mo ago
      I will say I have no experience in the ad space, but surely the SEO/ad companies will figure out how to game LLMs to make their sites more likely to be picked up by it, no? Or OpenAI would just directly sell ads themselves.
      • trey-jones 9mo ago
        Yes - we're in what I like to call the Socialist Phase of AI (user acquisition). We were once in this phase with Google. Eventually we'll move into the as-yet-unnamed-by-me phase that Google (and search in General, also the internet) have been in for quite some time, where they try and squeeze out all the money that they put in during the Socialist Phase.
        • cheschire 9mo ago
          Capitalist?
          • trey-jones 9mo ago
            I prefer not, because technically this socialist phase is part of capitalism currently.
        • simpsond 9mo ago
          Value creation phase vs extraction phase.
        • jaggederest 9mo ago
          The classic pairing is explore/exploit - where you allocate resources towards serendipity in the former, and lock down into only doing the profitable thing in the second.
        • delfinom 9mo ago
          I like to call this the candyvan phase.
    • mtoner23 9mo ago
      I would be that Openai and Google will find a way to boost the embedded ad in the llm result to you based on an auction on how valuable you and your query are
    • andrewmcwatters 9mo ago
      [dead]
    • mrweasel 9mo ago
      > AI should equal the playing field and promote businesses based on merit and capacity not how much they can spend. Wasn't that pretty much also the promise of Google as a search engine originally? For the longest time Google actively fought SEO, while running a minimal set of ads, then they bought DoubleClick and everything went to to shit. AI should equal the playing field, but it won't. The current generation have our bias built in and it's not in a good place financially. It's only a matter of time because it becomes infested with ads. You think OpenAI aren't going to promote shitty products or companies, because the algorithm says they shouldn't? No, they might charge that customer more, but they aren't saying no. This is a multi facet problem. There's a generation of advertisers who believe that advertising is clicking around in the AdWords interface, maybe sprinkle in a little ad spend on Meta and boom, you're done. The reality is that they can't advertising anything, they don't have the skills required to sell a product. If they can't rely on Google, where can they go? Social media, AI? Nope, because many of us have been burnt by the major online platforms and won't trust any of them. I'm never signing up for another social media platform, hell, I'm reluctant to sign up for ANYTHING. The current generation of marketing has sacrificed the future for a quick profit now. Many aren't on social media, we use adblockers, we pay for services to ensure no ads, we don't watch TV, newspapers are dead, we don't go out much, so where are you going to advertise exactly? Even if you find a venue, many see so few ads that your attempt at marketing is going to feel like an assault, because you're so desperate that you don't dare tone it down enough. Advertisement needs to reinvent itself, and it needs to stop funding the entire online services industry, because it can't, not without cannibalizing its own future.
  • mapontosevenths 9mo ago
    AI is built with content from the open web, but it has also killed the open web. The death of Adwords is only one symptom of that. I don't know what comes next, I just know it will be worse.
    • shadowgovt 9mo ago
      It wasn't really AI. Fundamentally, building a website the "traditional" way (hosting agreement, apache install, your favorite way to convert data formats that don't hate you into HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) was always a learned and quite technical skill; most people weren't doing it for fun, they were doing it because it was the only way to be on the web. What killed the open web was Facebook, Twitter, and their ilk replacing that whole mess with social media profiles, networking connections, and templated, pre-fabricated organization home pages. When social networks became dominant enough that businesses could use it to get their info out there without having to author a webpage, the balance tipped (at least for business-motivated web content).
    • nottorp 9mo ago
      No, google search has stopped being useful years before "AI".
      • mapontosevenths 9mo ago
        It was still useful to advertisers and publishers.
      • LunaSea 9mo ago
        Is that why it kept it's market share and usage numbers?
        • pixl97 9mo ago
          Business momentum goes a long way, especially with Google being near monopoly status in their advertising. If you're flying at 50,000 feet and the engines fall off the plane it may be a long time before you the customer feel the impact. We can only guess Google is in a panic trying to figure out how they'll make their numbers next quarter and looking for something else to enshittify to increase profits in the meantime.
  • sixtyj 9mo ago
    - Build FAQ section (LLM can help write a lot of it, if you let it load the content of your site) - Write news on your site (LLM can help you to find ideas what to write about) There are other networks as well: X, Meta, YouTube, LinkedIn, Amazon ads. It depends what’s your target group. But all networks have targeting tools so you can test them with minimum budget just to see what works and what doesn’t. For sure, you have some personalized landing pages with CTA (Posthog script included so you can see what works).
• AuthAuth 9mo ago
  Please go anywhere but the platforms I use. Go fill Tiktok up with ads. Any of the "mainstream" platforms inbuilt ad posts are a good bet. Or a marketing agency that will disguse it as organic content.
  • tomjuggler 9mo ago
    Lol wish I could afford to "fill up Tiktok with ads"! Seriously though, I always felt like Google AdWords (we only used the search network) are the most honest way. Someone searches for what you offer and they see your ad. With these other platforms it's more about relying on the algorithm.
    • HawtAds 9mo ago
      Google ads are the cheapest yes, but depending on your audience they may not be looking on Google now. For ChatGPT (and similar) you need to have a strong FAQ page and lots of content marketing to increase the likelihood of being the suggested answer when a user asks ChatGPT a relevant question (it's a highly probabilistic system, look up AEO/GEO). CloudFlare for example offers an option to block AI scraping bots by default. If you are in the services business, this is the opposite of what you want because having AI crawlers scrape your site would drive traffic down the road when users ask a related question. I would also suggest having accounts with major chatbot companies and enabling the "allow training on my conversations" option and then talk to it about your services. Ultimately you just want to get your brand into the training data corpus, and the rest is just basic machine learning statistics.
      • dataviz1000 9mo ago
        Facebook ads were the cheapest for me ten years ago. We were marketing a product that many people were happy to know existed. The dashboard gave us tools to really delve into demographics. Of all the ridiculous personal data Facebook collected, the best demographic filter was allowing me to narrow in on pages someone liked or interacted with. We were selling things related to cruising sailboats, and we could target an audience within 30 miles of Fort Lauderdale who also liked Sailing Magazine. Moreover, we could use a pixel so that only people who had also visited our website saw the ads. Facebook had a policy of rewarding high-quality ad content. If people clicked the ad, or better yet left positive comments and discussion or shared, the price drastically decreased to fractions of a cent per impression and click-through. We were able to get ads shared a lot with people tagging other people about the product suggesting they might be interested in it. That was the holy grail for copy that we always strived for. Of course, they got rid of all that. But at the time, it was a great way to target an audience based on third-party pages they liked, giving them ad content about products they were generally interested in—and products they were happy to know they could purchase because they had value. Ads configuration is like gambling in Las Vegas, in that the easier the game, the worse the odds—like slot machines—and the more the player has to interact, like Blackjack, the better the payout. When done well with good configuration, we were getting 1000s of click-throughs for dollars. It was amazing. The point is that Facebook rewarded ads that people positively interacted with, as it meant the quality of the news feed wasn't hurt by the ad. There was a time when ads benefitted everyone, the buyer, the seller, and Facebook.
• 1970-01-01 9mo ago
  GOOG +65% YTD. Opposite of dead.
  • mikert89 9mo ago
    unfortunately, google is better than ever
  • allknowingfrog 9mo ago
    The article is specifically about the decline of Adwords, not the company as a whole.
  • shadowgovt 9mo ago
    Both of these things can be true: - Google, the company, is doing pretty well in the stock market. - Google, the advertising company, isn't generating good ROI for its advertising customers. From Google's point of view, they've been very gunshy about having ads be their only revenue stream for years; I wouldn't be surprised that the consequence is the value there is drying up.
    • 1970-01-01 9mo ago
      Let's answer the question. Hard trending data on ads says everything is normal. https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-revenue-of-google/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-reven...
      • InsideOutSanta 9mo ago
        Advertising revenue being up is also consistent with the linked article, since the writer had to increase ad spend to get any results before giving up entirely.
        • emodendroket 9mo ago
          It's also not broken out -- for instance, if people move to advertising on YouTube instead of AdWords that's still revenue for Google.
• mikelitoris 9mo ago
  Kagi
  • mapontosevenths 9mo ago
    Kagi depends on their being an open web to crawl. The incentive to publish on the open web is gone though.
    • carlosjobim 9mo ago
      Search engines can usually search the closed web as well. Also, incentives are super high for businesses to create quality content for the open web to drive business. For example a car tire manufacturer could publish reliable restaurant reviews in order to encourage driving.
      • deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
  • piskov 9mo ago
    Kagi will be dead if google and alike are dead. Buying access to web search indices is not the same as having one. (I love them but this is the hard truth)
    • tensor 9mo ago
      Kagi is building their own index. There are also other open indexes. Over time these can replace the big corporate indexes. The hard truth is that the big players in search are dead. They are now the yahoo of search, with landing pages full of ads and results that are primarily ads.
      • piskov 9mo ago
        See their revenue (number of paid users is not a secret): something around $7M annually? It was half of that not so long ago (glad, that the userbase is growing). With their current pricing they are out of their league of having any full-blown index, crawlers, people, what have you. I would say year ago I was amazed how they are alive at all (unless I am missing something in their funding).
• thornjm 9mo ago
  Anecdotally, this article seems to match with what I am witnessing regarding browsing habits. I am planning a big trip with others and everything is being found via social media apps; destination ideas, experiences, cafes, accommodation, etc.
• hyperhello 9mo ago
  Look, the 90's Internet isn't cool anymore. Sorry. Things are cool for a while and then they're not. Franchises die. It's still cool to say "The originals were really cool", and always will be, but now we're talking about now. Star Wars is uncool. There are people who sort of automatically praise it and subtly put down those who don't like they're aligned with a magnetic field, sure, but they're in their own world. Indiana Jones and Ghostbusters are uncool now. Star Trek is almost there. AI is not cool and never will be. Tiktok is cool, but soon everything that is uncool will descend upon it. Sorry. Bananas blacken and apples get spots. Time moves on. Downvoting isn't cool. Reply instead.
  • lokar 9mo ago
    Did you read the page? The context is very clear: a small business that had for years gotten a lot of its leads/customers from Adwords is seeing that Adwords ("Google" in context) is not working. They are then asking (other small businesses in the same situation, "where do we go now?"). There nothing about nostalgia, no real concern for Google as a company, or how the web used to work, etc. Just a small business trying to stay afloat.
    • hyperhello 9mo ago
      Yes, Google is no longer producing good results for them. That is what I'm addressing.
  • antonvs 9mo ago
    "Cool" is precisely the problem. Cool is completely irrelevant to whether something is useful or valuable.
    • hyperhello 9mo ago
      God no! Useful and valuable is incredibly cool! How could you write this?
  • wiseowise 9mo ago
    You're joking, but they're really trying hard to make cool things uncool.
• rolph 9mo ago
  -to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.
• dana321 9mo ago
  Haha no wonder, check out the website its dodgy as f. https://bigtop.co.za/ https://bigtop.co.za/
  • andy99 9mo ago
    This is actually the most legit thing I can think of that could be behind an ad. It looks like an actual small business that is using ads as a replacement for the yellow pages, presumably when people are searching for party entertainment. I had assumed that basically all online ads were just straight up scams. That said, I don’t ever want to see ads for it either. If I lived in Durban and wanted a juggling act, I’d like to be able to find it, as I’m sure all their clients would. I wonder if the market is just very competitive, or if they don’t show up on regulular searches for some reason.
  • tkin1980 9mo ago
    Well, it's harshly put... bu not entirely untrue. The website would probably need to be refreshed.
  • fourneau 9mo ago
    Serious question: why do you find it dodgy?
  • wiseowise 9mo ago
    Not enough layers of SPA and Tailwind for your taste?
  • xandrius 9mo ago
    Funny how a simpler and self-made website is seen as "dodgy af" but geocity 90s mash of stuff is "nostalgic". It's not the neatest but it feels real, like these guys are into entertainment for parties, not web design.
    • relaxing 9mo ago
      I’m not handing over money to 90s geocities.
  • 9mo ago
• reconnecting 9mo ago
  Perhaps, click fraud? Is there any new powerful platform/aggregator in your market?
  • austinpena 9mo ago
    unlikely but they should check their invalid click rate to be sure
    • reconnecting 9mo ago
      Invalid click rate is not always a reliable metric. I've been dealing a lot with click fraud on Google Ads, and it's usually hard to detect it without special tools.
      • austinpena 9mo ago
        What’s your experience? Off the shelf click fraud software (for search) has never been ROI-positive for me when I run in A/B tests. Fou analytics is a fun tool though for social/native etc
        • reconnecting 9mo ago
          Click farms that we had been dealing with for our clients did not render images on webpages during visits, therefore we put tirreno on the backend of the platform, plus added a 1px image that sends the same request to tirreno to spot the difference. Page loading + no image loading = blacklist API.
  • tomjuggler 9mo ago
    I don't know what click fraud is but it's a very small entertainment agency market in Durban, South Africa's 3rd largest city. We only advertised locally (specified in AdWords)
    • reconnecting 9mo ago
      Click fraud is malicious activity where someone runs bots that click on ads for specific category keywords. For example, if this is a villa rental website, someone like competitors or a large platform, might use ad agencies that perform click fraud against the villa rental website to exhaust their budget and therefore get more traffic themselves. In the case of an entertainment agency, it might be other competitors interested in your traffic. The first step you might take is to check that you are not advertising with AdWords partner networks, as they might be the reason for the clicks on your ads. Second, you can check your server logs and verify clicks from Google Ads, especially the geolocation of those clicks. If they are not from your region and the visitors perform no action after viewing the first page, this is most probably click fraud. I use our own open-source security platform (I'm a co-founder) for this purpose (1), as it's server-side and works even if bots aren't running JS. However, your website analytics might also be useful if they can collect events without JS. 1. https://github.com/tirrenotechnologies/tirreno https://github.com/tirrenotechnologies/tirreno
• ndarray 9mo ago
  Is this being on top of HN part of the writer's new non-google marketing strategy?
  • tomjuggler 9mo ago
    Please not that again, my server was down for 2 days last time! (I did join CloudFlare CDN after that)
    • tomjuggler 9mo ago
      Cloudflare seems to be sorting it out (mostly).
      • BirAdam 9mo ago
        CF is exposes my own hypocrisy more than any other company. I am always the first person to say that humans shouldn’t be centralizing so much into so few hands, but then… I use CloudFlare, I recommend it to others, and the company has a fairly decent track record.
    • NooneAtAll3 9mo ago
      > CloudFlare CDN lol
  • phoronixrly 9mo ago
    Thankfully there are a bunch of comments here summarising the post.
  • wiesbadener 9mo ago
    Not sure how much HN is read in SA though. Could even be a small GEO/SEO bonus if search engines/LLMs pick up the thread + his webpage.
• pigpop 9mo ago
  Your business seems well suited to advertising through short form content so I wish you lots of success with transitioning away from Adwords.
  • tomjuggler 9mo ago
    Thanks, yeah I see lots of video editing in my future
    • cjbgkagh 9mo ago
      Perhaps catering towards TikTok experiences, help them make the videos that they then share with their friends. ‘Pic or it didn’t happen’ has now been replaced by ‘TikTok or it didn’t happen.’ Is it possible to enjoy something without there being video evidence of it? According to my gf and her female friends the answer appears to be no.
      • tomjuggler 9mo ago
        Tell me about it - my mother was a librarian, I prefer text content, but have to face facts now I guess
• manoDev 9mo ago
  The web is dead, we replaced with portable cable TV where you scroll up to change channel.
  • bdangubic 9mo ago
    whats a cable tv?
    • bigbuppo 9mo ago
      It's how we got our internet before the internet.
    • hagbard_c 9mo ago
      [flagged]
    • mcphage 9mo ago
      It's like TikTok but you hit buttons instead of swiping.
      • bdangubic 9mo ago
        that sounds like a lot of work
        • pndy 9mo ago
          Nearly same thing but instead of smacking the screen you'd actually press the physical button on remote control and run in circles with channel's list to find anything remotely interesting.
        • mcphage 9mo ago
          The trick is you hold the controller in your limp hands, with your fingertip resting on one of the channel buttons. Usually the plus. So when you want to swipe you just extend your index finger just a fraction of an inch. And the screen changes. They dialed in the interface over years, and have gotten it to a process with almost no work involved.
• taikahessu 9mo ago
  Reminds me of a quote I once read of "marketing being a game of diminishing returns". When you find a working marketing solution, it's just a matter of time when it dries out, because of competitors and overall saturation.
  • tomjuggler 9mo ago
    I can't rule out competition here, definitely part of it - cost per click has gone up a lot over the years
  • giorgioz 9mo ago
    Yes but it's possible that the marketing channel is very profitable before drying out. Also the less a channel is known the more it will take to reach saturation. So there might be channels that are very profitable and well hidden, the problem is that by definition it might be too hard/expensive to find them.
• eagsalazar2 9mo ago
  Is this really about Tiktok or about AI and how people are consuming the web? Used to be all web, then web+Tiktok,etc, now only AI+Tiktok, etc? I think I go to normal websites way less than I used to. Maybe everyone is doing that?
• senthil_rajasek 9mo ago
  I think the author intended the title to be, "Google Ads is dead, Where do I promote my business now?" When I hear "Google" I assume search, oof (sigh of relief). They mention running ads on tiktok or instagram but no mention of youtube ads... Also, In my own experience for my business ( also entertainment) I have found reddit ads to be useful. So my next steps would be, Reddit Ads Youtube Ads Instagram Ads Increase AI Visiblity [Edit: Added Instagram Ads, from a different comment]
  • bdangubic 9mo ago
    > When I hear "Google" I assume search, oof (sigh of relief). If Google Ads is dead/dying the search is soon to follow...
    • hgomersall 9mo ago
      Search died ages ago [1]. Ads dying is a direct consequence of that. [1] https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
      • crazygringo 9mo ago
        > Search died ages ago You might want to let Google know that, because the number of searches on Google appears to continue to be growing massively: https://searchengineland.com/google-5-trillion-searches-per-year-452928 https://searchengineland.com/google-5-trillion-searches-per-... Those numbers look like the exact opposite of dead or dying to me. As does Google's growing stock price over the same time period.
        • imron 9mo ago
          ‘Numbers go up’ is the exact type of thinking that caused the death of search. From a user perspective, google search results are awful and almost always a complete waste of time.
• xthe 9mo ago
  Google isn’t dead, but it’s no longer the single answer. Even Mark Zuckerberg recently acknowledged how fast Google is improving, which explains why Meta is pushing AI harder. Still, competing shouldn’t mean replacing what already works.
  • JKCalhoun 9mo ago
    > Even Mark Zuckerberg recently acknowledged how fast Google is improving AI. I thought he was referring to how fast Google is improving their AI. Search though?
  • margorczynski 9mo ago
    But what's the endgame? What if Google has the "best" AI offering if most of their revenue that comes from ads is gone?
    • emodendroket 9mo ago
      They'll presumably monetize their AI (more) on both ends: getting you to pay for more access and getting advertisers to pay to be mentioned more often in the outputs. I mean that isn't really a bad position for them if you "using the Internet" degrades into you just sitting there typing queries in their Web app and never going anywhere else.
• alexpotato 9mo ago
  It wouldn't surprise me if physical advertising, as mentioned in the post, makes a comeback. Especially coupled with magazines etc apparently making a comeback too. Also, a lot of ads now have QR codes so you can tell which physical ads are driving versus traffic versus those that aren't. e.g. the "half of my advertising is a waste but I don't know which half" is not true anymore if you are using specific QR codes per location/advertisement.
  • hyperman1 9mo ago
    I assume physical still works. LIDL closed their shop in our neighborhood, so we stopped going unless their paper ads were interesting. Then they decided with a lot of fanfare to go all-in on digital, and as they decided we should want their ads we should install their app. Well, naughty us, we didn't. We simply stopped shopping there completely. A few months later, the paper ads are back (with a lot less fanfare), and no other shop followed their lead, so I assume LIDL was hurting hard.
• newman8r 9mo ago
  They recently changed the max results per page from 100 to 10 and they're suing serpapi. They've basically killed their google newspaper archive. Not happy with google. And it's become clear to me how little of the open web, and top 100k sites they've fully indexed, I used to have a lot more faith in them.
• SunshineTheCat 9mo ago
  I recently took someone to go and watch a hockey game. Been a little while but I personally played as a goalie myself. The person kept making the comment that she couldn't see/find the puck and it made it frustrating to watch. As a goalie, not being able to see the puck is pretty normal (especially with big bodies trying to screen you). What I told her was that what matters a lot more than where the puck is, is where it's going to be in about two seconds. But the next best thing is to know where the puck is now. If you can't see the puck then look at the players and as a last resort, look at the ref. 99% of the time they will be looking at the puck. Look where they're looking and soon enough it will appear. I think this applies very much to this whole Google question. The puck is gone (or on the way to the other side of the rink) and everyone is confused where it is or where it's going. Look where everyone is looking and you'll find your answer there. It may not be in the same form as Google adwords, but the game is the same. Leveraging attention. The tactics were different during the phonebook days (it was having your business start with the letter "A") as opposed to Google and will be different for the next thing as well. From what I can tell, everyone seems to be looking at chatbots and vertical, shortform video. Not sure how that plays out in terms of advertising, but in terms of the answer to this article's question, that seems like a good place to start.
  • philco 9mo ago
    Skate to where the puck is going
    • kevin_thibedeau 9mo ago
      Better to stop playing the game. --WOPR
      • AndrewKemendo 9mo ago
        “The game” is an emergent property of the human species at scale Human society cannot exist at this scale without this nested social complexity structure given the biological constraints So something has to give
• observationist 9mo ago
  Oh no, adtech is dying. I guess we'll all have to compete through quality of products and services and not gaming a rigged system designed to reward anything that maximizes the profit of the global surveillance adtech machine. This gives me warm fuzzy feelings. It's nowhere near good, but this is better than it was.
  • btbuildem 9mo ago
    I wish that were true, but I don't think it's dying, I think it's metastasizing. Ads will ingress deeper into what were trusted layers -- embedded in text and video in a seemingly organic way. GenAI tools make this possible -- to splice a 20 second mention of something into a stream, or rewrite a paragraph injecting a subtle product placement. We will develop new mental antibodies for this, we always do. Silver lining of sorts -- while short-form video content is making people illiterate, perhaps literacy will become a calm refuge once again.
    • observationist 9mo ago
      The biggest problem is platform scale, imo - platforms grow so big as to make the network effects confer an invulnerability to regulation or moderation, and then get exploited to squash competition, either through legal action, acquisition, suppression, or sometimes simple inertia. Ubiquitous reach and total control over the platform made it irresistible to bad faith operators, politicians, activists, and rent-seekers. AI has a good shot at completely fragmenting those technologies at a fundamental level. We should be resisting any ad injection into ChatGPT, Claude, etc maintaining a firewall between what's acceptable in a paid product and what's not, and as long as open source Chinese models roughly keep parity, the big US labs can't pivot hard into exploiting users for ad revenues. Private hosting and bots are almost as good as ChatGPT with UI and UX, within a few percentage points as good in capabilities, and the pressure to go elsewhere is minimal. If they drive off a whole lot of independence minded users, they risk creating a community of people who'll create a very slick, workable alternative, while paying only a tenth or less what the frontier labs charge. As long as that dynamic cripples the efforts of big labs to enshittify, there's a good shot that the entire ecosystem fundamentally evolves to something better. I hope, anyway - it could just explode into a grotesque mess of user exploitation and yet more of the same. I think at some point you'll be able to have good-enough AI on your phone to carry everywhere you go, and it'll do all the ad filtering and opsec and digital hygiene for you - everyone will have a high quality competent tech nerd in their pocket looking out for their best interests, and it won't just be a niche rebel nerd thing anymore.
• fidotron 9mo ago
  I love knocking on Google, and have been doing so for longer than it was cool, but this sounds more like the business is no longer attractive than Google having become suddenly wildly ineffective. My anecdotal evidence is the smarter normies are increasingly allergic to screens. They only use them to watch stuff they hear about by some other means, but parents, for example, look for any excuse to keep their kids off the Internet, and largely they're better for it.
  • tsunamifury 9mo ago
    It’s googles fault no one wants my product! It certainly can’t be the basics of demand! - most SMBs I ever work with.
    • pixl97 9mo ago
      > the basics of demand If you've been around longer than internet advertising you realize the basics of demand have changed pretty considerably. Let's go back to 1980 and say that you have widget X that person A would absolutely buy if they saw/heard it advertised. They live in Podunk Minnesota that had coverage by 3 radio stations, 3 TV stations, and 2 newspapers. But you have no idea what media they actually consumed to target the right one. Right now you're at the point you would have to contact at least 8 different media companies for ad spend if you wanted coverage. Most likely you'd cut it down to one of each, and maybe a billboard. This said, the cost for just this little area is going to be wildly expensive! Ads were huge money, and this is just for one little town. These costs were slightly lower for large corporate buyers, but not that much because as you go back farther and farther you were typically dealing with more companies before consolidation. Being an SMB was great in this market in a local area because you weren't competing with the world. Fast forward to now and you compete with the entire world at any given moment. In the West we've forgotten about competition and allowed a huge portion of our economic product to consolidate to a small number of companies. This is very apparent in advertising as the old media entities are dead or far more expensive than you'll ever recoup with the competition out there. Instead you're looking at Google/Reddit/Facebook style ads, but with that kind of ad you again, complete with the entire world. If your ad actually does good and drive business, then Google metrics will feedback to players watching the market and they will advertise products in the same space driving up competition and the base costs for ads. The supply from your competitors is practically unlimited which will drive your profits to almost zero unless you happen to have something very special. Welcome to the K shaped economy, where the big get bigger and the small die.
• jrjeksjd8d 9mo ago
  One anecdote, but I have a brick and mortar business and Adwords leads have fallen off a cliff year over year. Since AI stuff started getting pushed harder we've gotten fewer impressions and fewer conversions. Some of it is economic headwinds but also Google is just a black box we throw money into and pray it will send us business.
  • tomjuggler 9mo ago
    Trying something different myself. Enough is enough, I have said goodbye to AdWords for good now I think
• tensor 9mo ago
  I think it's time for a new way of discovering products. My ideal would be some sort of site that I can go to, to find services and products in my local area. There could also be national and international sections, with user ranked news of new interesting products in given categories. For example, with video games I can go to sites like www.rockpapershotgun.com or others, or forums related to games, to see what the new products coming out. That's perfect in my world. No ads in my search, no ads in my email, no ads in youtube or whatever. But when I'm interested in seeing what's new, I can, on my terms, go and check out the new products.
• austinpena 9mo ago
  A few things to determine if what you're experiencing is actually Google "being dead" 1. Check your search volume. Use Google Trends or the method I will share below. 2. Check how you spent in December vs how you spent during a previously great time. Understand if it's a volume issue or a conversion issue 3. See if anyone new entered your auction. If they did, find out what they're saying -- 1a) Search Volume Checking search volume: In the era of broad match, this is one of the most underrated approaches to diagnosing issues. Take a look at your `search exact match impression share` relative to your impressions on a few of your top keywords. Then measure out if search volume for your business is actually decreasing. Then, use the following rubric to diagnose futher: 1. Not decreasing. Move on to the next item 2. 5-10% decrease and competitive auction. If you have a decrease AND a competitive auction, a 20% drop in efficiency could be explained. 3. 5-10% decrease and a not-so-competitive auction. If this is the case, the drop in volume may not be what's causing your issues. -- 1b) Click volume Check your exact match impression > click rate. Similar to the last approach, this helps diagnose if there are SERP feature changes which could decrease the amount of clicks you're receiving despite demand remaining flat. If this is the case, take a look at the SERP and find the new winners. -- 2) Segment comparison Compare December YOY and see what changed. Are you serving to a different age range? Different search term mix? Increased spend to search partners? Are the headline combinations which are serving different? -- 3) Auction changes Have you checked your auction insights? Are new competitors being more or less aggressive? If so, what are their headlines? Are they offering an easier booking experience than you are? And... if Google is actually dead, you might try: 1. Meta ads. Turn off audience network, make sure you've got the conversions API set up, and see what happens. Expect leads to be lower intent. Make your creative dead simple. "If you're looking for kid party entertainment in Northdene..." Start with $20/day optimizing for leads. 2. Improve your form. I see typeform-style-forms do better than the long one you have. 3. (Maybe) If you don't already track `closed (won)` conversions into your google ads account, that could help. I find when I start tracking which searches turn into deals, I can restructure my account to de-prioritize the junk leads. 4. (Maybe) Add a soft form to each of your service pages. Basically an embedded form which starts by asking people softball questions like "How Old Are The Kids At Your Party." Once people start a form they're much more likely to complete it, even if the questions are very basic. 5. (Maybe) Add a way to give a phone call. Phone call leads convert 30-50% better in my experience. But, this isn't an option for every
• mattmaroon 9mo ago
  I work in private events and the answer is definitely Facebook. Facebook ads have been better for quite some time. Targeting is a harder but also the CPCs are a lot lower so you can spray and pray a bit more.
  • tomjuggler 9mo ago
    Thanks, we tried them before but many years have passed and things have changed. Our new Instagram campaign just bore fruit in the first hour (4 WhatsApp enquiries with $1.50 spent!), will be looking at FB also
    • wiesbadener 9mo ago
      I was intrigued to see this trending, because it seems to contradict what Google has been saying on earnings calls. It also made me wonder if this reflects conditions for individuals / SMEs rather than large corporate accounts. And I didn’t expect the story to come out of Durban - I would’ve guessed the US. I haven't been to Durban lately, but my understanding is that the broader SA economy has been under pressure (high unemployment, etc.), and that can hit smaller/local businesses first. So it could simply be a rough patch for your market right now. That said, if you’re seeing campaigns picking up on other platforms, you might be onto something, at least for your niche. Looking at your website/content: you’re selling an experience, and this seems like a product that really benefits from strong visual marketing. Make it easy for someone new to "get it" in the first 10 seconds. Three ideas: 1) Ride local trends: build demos around what’s currently hot in SA/Durban and showcase that with the Magicpods in short, punchy videos. 2) Consider adjacent use cases: beyond magic shows, this could be compelling for advertising, especially at conventions (e.g., ICC). That might be a natural expansion path if event bookings are slowing. 3) Try Airbnb Experiences, or local platforms, like daddysdeals.co.za :-)
• crystal_revenge 9mo ago
  > I am AI assisted, very fast! I sometimes think people really don't understand the value-add of AI (and I say this as someone on the less hyperbolic end of the "AI-hype" spectrum). If your service to me can be accomplished by AI "very fast"... I don't need you anymore. AI provides a generic problem solving interface where non-experts can leverage the power of the AI to solve a task they previously couldn't have so long as they can describe it well. I've had multiple cases at work or other places where I've been presented with something as the stakeholder and been told "I used AI to make this!" Great! Next time I'll use AI to make it and save myself the overhead/cost of having work with someone else. I don't see a lot of value in explaining a problem to you so that you can then re-explain it to an LLM. When people show me they've used AI to complete a task I used to have to do I'm delighted, and, more often then not, proven my value when they come back weeks later asking for help untangling the mess they've made. But, I'm equally delighted in the cases where they are successful using AI to replace things I used to be tasked with. Despite the AI hype, I find myself busier than ever.
• dnw 9mo ago
  The author should try Google Local Services Ads instead of Google Ads. I think Google cannibalizes Google Ads with LSA.
  • tomjuggler 9mo ago
    Thank you I will look it up, never heard of those
• butler14 9mo ago
  Google and Google Ads are not one and the same. The jump from the op's "i screwed up my google ads campaigns" to "Research shows that many young people are getting their information from short video platforms like TikTok".... i mean, c'mon
  • JKCalhoun 9mo ago
    If Google Ads was cut off from Google, would they still be profitable?
• handfuloflight 9mo ago
  Your campaign on Google is dead.
• travisgriggs 9mo ago
  > I am AI assisted, very fast! This feels like one of the most surreal things I have read in a while, believing that the blog is authentically written by a real person. I can't put my finger on why. I do feel like it's maybe time to rewatch BSG.
  • tomjuggler 9mo ago
    lol I meant coding, can't stand AI slop web content myself. I wrote all the words - what's BSG?
    • travisgriggs 9mo ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica_(2004_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica_(2004_TV_...
      • pixl97 9mo ago
        We fought the toasters, and the toasters won.
      • tomjuggler 9mo ago
        Oh right Battlestar Galactica! I watched that like 3 times already, best sci-fi ever
• verdverm 9mo ago
  my vote is for ATProto let's take back the interwebs and have a single account where all apps store their data about you, which you can move around and also swap out clients for any data without companies blocking you
• kachurovskiy 9mo ago
  Try contacting YouTube creators in your area. Much more cost efficient than any other kinds of ads especially if you pick channels with your target audience IF you can actually get creators to promote you (most won't reply).
• mmmBacon 9mo ago
  I think Google’s search and ad business are at risk. Search has become such a mess that it’s become harder and harder to use to find quality results. It reminds me of Yahoo before Google in a way. I’m using ChatCPT or equivalent for 60% of my searches. The remaining 40% is just muscle memory. Of that 40% about half the time I regret using Google search due to the difficulty of finding the relevant result. I can see search users moving to ChatGPT or such and Googles Ad business suffering as a result and a general downward spiral of Google search.
  • akoboldfrying 9mo ago
    You don't think putting ads in Gemini output has crossed Google's mind? I've never understood the "AI is eating search! Google is dead!" theory. The specific mechanism (whether that be keyword search, LLM conversation or something else) by which users describe their needs to a company doesn't matter, all that matters is that (a) the company makes that mechanism available for free, (b) it does a good job of satisfying the user's need and (c) ads can be smuggled into it.
    • lelanthran 9mo ago
      > You don't think putting ads in Gemini output has crossed Google's mind? What do you think the mandatory youtube link in every conversation is, if not a link to an ad? They have successfully monetised chatbot AI, while no one else has.
    • mmmBacon 9mo ago
      Why do you assume I don’t think that? Of course it will happen at some stage. But my comment wasn’t addressing the future, but now. Effectively ChatGPT is buying market share by not having ads; that’s clear. What’s not clear is whether there’s a more innovative model than inserting low-quality, mostly irrelevant ads into the body of the chat they way Google and YouTube do it today. In a Chat agent, advertising also will be an issue for credibility of results. So I think the ad model as we know it will need to change.
  • theli0nheart 9mo ago
• cronelius 9mo ago
  psa, "is comprised of" is almost never correct. "comprises" means "is composed of". so when people say X is comprised of Y they really mean "X comprises Y" or "X is composed of Y"
• rickcarlino 9mo ago
  The way people get information online is changing rapidly. I run a local makerspace. It is not quite the same thing as a local entertainment business, but there are certainly some similarities. We are local, and we are very event-based. For the last 10 years, the way we would get new members was to host Meetups. Meetups are slowly bringing in fewer members. When I ask tour guests how they found out about us, they recently started saying that they found us on ChatGPT. They did not know what a makerspace was but they explained their problem and ChatGPT presented our space as a local solution. This has been good for us because we offer something useful to the community but struggle to explain it. In the old days of search, this was a problem because many people were not using the correct phrase to describe what we are. That doesn’t matter anymore. How does a local business optimize for this though? I am not sure.
  • layer8 9mo ago
    The question is how LLMs will get that kind of information in the future, if not from the web. By scraping TikTok and Discords?
    • rickcarlino 9mo ago
      I anticipate a cottage industry of “AI optimization” types similar to the current SEO crowd. I have not seen too much of it yet, though.
    • arccy 9mo ago
      instead of hosting a website you host... SERVICE.md, BUSINESS.md, .... or maybe a MCP server describing what you provide /s
    • pixl97 9mo ago
      >By scraping TikTok and Discords? One of two ways. Yes, by scraping, even it it requires users to 'sell' their own browsing data to the AI companies because places like Discord lock them out. Or, the other way is for particular event organizers to pay directly for their services to be advertised/incorporated into the LLM itself. Those that don't pay get more and more of their data erased from the LLM maybe?
• fairity 9mo ago
  Surprised to see this upvoted because the takeaway is completely incorrect, and based on the anecdotal evidence of one advertiser. As someone who spends seven figures every month on Google ads, what’s much more likely to be happening here is that the individual advertiser is either getting outcompeted or they’re executing ads poorly. Google ads revenue in the US continues to grow every quarter. And, since advertisers will generally invest in ads until the last dollar is break even, it’s likely that the total value advertisers unlock through Google ads is growing as well. Whether that’s true or not, the notion that value generated for advertisers is “dead” is absurd.
  • JKCalhoun 9mo ago
    > and based on the anecdotal evidence of one advertiser The author admits as much.
    • crazygringo 9mo ago
      The question is, why has this post been massively upvoted? It contains zero useful information. Just somebody struggling with AdWords and they don't know why. Not helpful. I have to assume the vast majority of upvotes are based on the title alone, assuming it's about Search? A large proportion of top level comments are about Search too. Depressing.
      • nrhrjrjrjtntbt 9mo ago
        The "Google is dead" title in the AI age, probably.
      • Scarblac 9mo ago
        Things are upvoted because people feel like discussing the subject. The actual article is usually just a conversation starter, if it's read at all.
      • consumer451 9mo ago
        I am fairly confident that the answer is that most people vote based on the title/headline without ever clicking through. I am likely guilty of this as well sometimes. It takes discipline to avoid this behaviour. > We find that most users do not read the article that they vote on, and that, in total, 73% of posts were rated (i.e., upvoted or downvoted) without first viewing the content. [0] In this case, my guess is that people are noticing less and less utility from Google search, and that was why they voted like they did. This same phenomenon is what gives newspaper editors far more power than the journalists, as it is the editors who not only decide the stories to be covered, but even more importantly, they decide the headline. Most people just scan the headlines while subconsciously looking for confirmation of their own biases. [0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.05267 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.05267
• delichon 9mo ago
  Push advertising sucks, but we can make pull much better by giving the user more control. Imagine a protocol to publish commercial offers for any given fragment of content addressable by URI. It would describe the details of some product or service and a set of proposed terms. We could surf the web looking for relevant content and publishing related offers. Various repositories would subscribe or not. A browser (extension or native) would optionally pull offers from selected repositories and have UI for the user to solicit/pull offers for any given piece of content styled to signal their existence, and to filter and sort them. To make it sustainable there needs to be revenue sharing with the content source(s). Are there existing projects like this? The same protocol could be used for independent commentary and other annotation.
  • __MatrixMan__ 9mo ago
    The Brave/BAT experiment was similar to what you're describing. I think it failed to live up to its dreams of revolutionizing advertising because for the most part there are two kinds of people. - I try not to think about ads - I think about ads because I aggressively block them I'm sure somebody out there represents a middle ground, but I think it's a pretty small demographic.
  • socalgal2 9mo ago
    The problem is curation. People will mis-categorize in every way possible just to try to get eyeballs. I see this all over the web.
  • pixl97 9mo ago
    >user more control As others said, most users don't care or don't want to see them. This leaves the people that care being the ones who are providing the ads, and they will game the system with bots and other methods of bad acting that will make the system useless.
  • yowayb 9mo ago
    I hate ads until I need them, then I complain that the algorithms still suck. My wife recently reminded me I have to give Shopee time to surface good options when I don't have the exact words. I expect this to improve as their models improve.
• tedk-42 9mo ago
  As it should be with all things. I pivoted away from google search (duckduckgo instead primarily) but even then, the majority of "information" I'm looking for goes instead to chatgpt.
• wouldbecouldbe 9mo ago
  An instant drop in 50% means something else is off. The shift to llm's has been happening already for the last years. Its more likely their your ranking dropped. Or a competitor got ahead of you. Google is still main source of leads for service businesses. If you are old & previously ranked well the LLM's will also mention you similar to how Google did.
• weinzierl 9mo ago
  I don't know if Google is dead, but what I know is this: For the first time since 1995 my default method to research information on the web does not involve any traditional search engine anymore.
• kuon 9mo ago
  I consider ads to be a cancer I hope it will die in every possible way.
  • efilife 9mo ago
    Same. This blog post is actually good news
    • gavmor 9mo ago
      OK, but the poster is a party clown. How is he supposed to get business? He can't just show up to kids' birthdays when he hears them down the street.
• muppetman 9mo ago
  Might this not also be the fact that given the cost of living the world over, being able to afford a fancy party with entertainment like the poster provides is a luxury few can afford now? We used to eat out a lot more (Saturday lunch at a cafe I mean) and also used to get HelloFresh and other such services, but as the cost of them has gone up way faster than our salaries, we've had to reign them all back. I agree with the "Google is dying" sentiment for sure, but I also wonder how much is just being unable to afford nice things anymore.
• jackofspades 9mo ago
  If you believe markets to be a future discounting mechanism, then they're sure as hell saying Google "figured something out" in the last year, even vs OpenAI [1] [1] https://x.com/firstadopter/status/1993464859376468102/photo/1 https://x.com/firstadopter/status/1993464859376468102/photo/...
• SirMaster 9mo ago
  Apparently you should be getting ready to buy ad campaigns from LLM companies because they are going to inject ads into the responses soon. Young people are using LLMs like crazy in my experience.
• nonameiguess 9mo ago
  I'm glad as hell not to run a business and never plan to, but it's interesting to think as a consumer where I would try to get information like this. Guy's running a service that provides in-person entertainment for events and parties, seemingly things like clowns and magicians, maybe small-time bands or what-not. Seemingly you don't want to target children directly. If they ask their parents for specific entertainment at a party, they're going to ask for entertainers they know, not companies acting as brokers and middlemen. They might want a particular clown (but probably not) but will never want a particular local vendor of clowns. You need to target the parents for that. If it were me doing the buying, I'd probably prioritize word of mouth recommendations if anyone had such, and otherwise for a large enough event like a wedding or graduation party, I'd look to professional planners. Assuming that's any kind of widespread pattern, you'd want to target strong relationships with planners rather than trying to advertise directly to consumers. Did people really ever search Google to find party entertainment, and then ignore the search results and use the ads instead? Let alone Tik Tok videos? I guess I'm out of touch enough that the answer can be yes and I'm just that clueless about how small businesses work, but all the comments talking about LLM chatbot services are tripping me out. Y'all would ask ChatGPT who to hire for your kid's party?
  • tomjuggler 9mo ago
    Google Adwords just shows your ad at the top of search results. Someone searches for a clown and I'm on top - worth paying for! (when it worked)
• deadbabe 9mo ago
  Here's the business model in a nutshell: If you want AI to recommend your business for some purpose, you must pay to have it included in the training corpus. And you will pay fees every time those vectors get used for outputs. And if you don't pay, you don't get mentioned.
• elorant 9mo ago
  Contextual ads is the answer. You sell shoes, go and advertise on fashion related sites. I don't want to see a shoe ad while I'm browsing a gaming site just because I did some relative search a week ago. It's so fucking annoying and I never understood why Google never bothered to try some alternative too. I don't mean completely replace behavioral targeting but at the very least try some contextual one too.
• amelius 9mo ago
  If google is dead, I sure hope they won't sell my gmail and google drive data to the highest bidder.
  • rc_mob 9mo ago
    this post is title-gore. Gmail and drive aint going anywhere.
  • kccqzy 9mo ago
    Google never sells your data to anyone. Why would they sell the primary data that they themselves use to determine how to show you ads? Doing so means a deep-pocketed new advertising platform can just buy data from Google and get started with competing against Google on their primary revenue source. It’s like having a goose that lays golden eggs and selling the goose. It’s corporate suicide. I’m surprised anyone on HN even believes Google will sell your data. It takes five seconds of thinking to dispel that notion.
    • tonyedgecombe 9mo ago
      Google shares your data with ad-tech companies via its real time bidding. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/google-says-it-doesnt-sell-your-data-heres-how-company-shares-monetizes-and https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/google-says-it-doesnt-...
    • nephihaha 9mo ago
      Google gets given significant tax breaks in many countries. Maybe it is selling it to agencies who could not obtain that info legally
  • LightBug1 9mo ago
    Already did.
• layer8 9mo ago
  The mainstream leaving Google search and the general web would be a chance for both getting better again. A new equilibrium will establish itself one way or the other.
  • paganholiday 9mo ago
    It's a chance.. But which for-profit environments are not going to do whatever is necessary to try to win that role and how will the worst of them not have the most profitable model?
• tomjuggler 9mo ago
  Great, now my server is crashing again. I thought Cloudflare was supposed to take care of this stuff
  • austinpena 9mo ago
    are you caching the HTML response or just the assets?
    • tomjuggler 9mo ago
      I can't remember I think it's just the assets though - seems to be surviving so far. How do you get it to cache everything, is that a paid thing?
      • austinpena 9mo ago
        Page rules should do it
        • tomjuggler 9mo ago
          Page rules did it!! thank you
• riazrizvi 9mo ago
  Googles Search Ad revenue is dead, but the business is diversified and positioned for change. As of 2024: Search Ads and Partner Revenue = 230bn Youtube = 36bn Cloud = 40bn Say they drop 100bn on search revenue. How well are they positioned to convert their user platform and search crawling infrastructure onto Gemini, and introduce an advertising platform into LLMs to replace what they had? I imagine they are as well positioned as OpenAI. I would lose a lot of sleep if I paid out for puts on them.
• phillipseamore 9mo ago
  That site loosing revenue mentioned in the post (https://bigtop.co.za/ https://bigtop.co.za/) doesn't even load for me.
  • efilife 9mo ago
    If it's loose then you might want to screw it on. Sorry, couldn't resist! The correct word here is lose, when something is loose it means that it's not fastened or constrained, like a loose knot
• neomantra 9mo ago
  I know very little about online marketing, but my Googler marketing friend told me that just 6 months ago everybody would Google search three word terms: “best Chinatown dumpling” But now people Google search: “my boyfriend is coming to town for the holidays and we are going to Chinatown and I want to have delicious dumplings with him because it was what we had on our first date, where should we go?” So he now works to sell AdWords properly in that environment. I am wondering how or if OP took that into account with their new spend. What are other people doing? I’ve also heard (probably via post+comments here on HN) that the new SEO is making tons of AI slop info pages on the site, not for humans but for AI crawlers to slurp, and then refer from prompts.
• czottmann 9mo ago
  Hugged to death right now, therefore: https://web.archive.org/web/20251229204141/https://www.circusscientist.com/2025/12/29/google-is-dead-where-do-we-go-now/ https://web.archive.org/web/20251229204141/https://www.circu...
  • catlikesshrimp 9mo ago
    His actual entertaiment bussiness is down, https://bigtop.co.za/ https://bigtop.co.za/ They are a circus for hire (events) https://web.archive.org/web/20250424004511/https://bigtop.co.za/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250424004511/https://bigtop.co... Located in Durban, South Africa. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durban https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durban He got too much exposure by stating Adworks no longer works?
• DinakarS 9mo ago
  the site is loading forever now. hn crashed it hehe
• why-o-why 9mo ago
  Reminds me of the whale oil business being replaced by petroleum. Except the ad-based economy was effectively a google monopsony. I'm surprised the OP managed to make ad revenue for a decade, but to me at always seemed about casino-ish and snake-oily. A decade is impressive but I think we all knew where this was going. I think the question is: will another monopsony for ads arise or will it be content based only? It seems YouTUbe is poised to be the next google since more people watch YouTube than cable, so the audience is captive since there's no alternative (yes I realize Google owns YouTube). But that's still a parasitic economy sucking from google. "Where to go now?" depends on if another ad server can gain dominance, otherwise the answer is "nowhere".
• Liron 9mo ago
  Wait I know Google search to content sites is largely dead, but I thought Google ads still worked fine.
• blauditore 9mo ago
  Now I wonder how long until AI chat tool are riddled with ads, and with shitty content because of people trying to game them just like they've been gaming search engines.
• ramon156 9mo ago
  Can we also talk about how dogshit YouTube Search has been the last 2 years? Some videos have turned to shorts, but they're not searchable through their search API, making the feature pretty useless.
• semiinfinitely 9mo ago
  maybe the issue is that you site bigtop.co.za literally does not load
• mgaunard 9mo ago
  The old decentralized Internet is dying out and being replaced by a few apps under the total control of a few companies. I'm not sure much can be done about this. At least the physical world is still the same.
  • pixl97 9mo ago
    > At least the physical world is still the same You mean the physical world where businesses are signing up with companies to put AI enabled cameras all over their properties and sell your data? Why not some nice dynamic pricing on their digital price bars next (oops, we are already there).
    • mgaunard 9mo ago
      I only go to small local specialty shops within walking distance of my house, none of which has such sophisticated equipment. Where I live, the trend has been to make spaces more walkable and with more nature and green spaces.
• cat_plus_plus 9mo ago
  You become a trusted source of data for AI chatbots (hopefully in somewhat ethical way for end users). Look into generative language optimization.
• mmaunder 9mo ago
  Just trying to find out what this guy actually does is hard. It’s a page of links linking to another page of links, repeat. Where is the thing? The content? The product? It just feels a bit disconnected from patterns users expect and delivery mechanisms users are comfortable with in 2025. It’s almost a 1995 style pastiche of intent with no payoff.
  • eddythompson80 9mo ago
    ?? There is one link that takes you to his business. It’s kids parties (birthdays, etc) entertainment (Or corporate events). Think performers doing magic acts, juggling, comedy, balloons, etc. it really wasn’t that difficult to find out.
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  • tomjuggler 9mo ago
    You must be referring to my personal Blog and Tutorial Site. It's messy, and serves no purpose other than to talk about whatever I am interested in at the time. Sometimes other people are also interested. And it's 14 years old now, so yeah. If you need a payoff, click the Patreon link banner on top and go support development of my Open Source LED Poi!
• mgaunard 9mo ago
  Is there such a thing as a good ad? I've always blocked them on all platforms. Looking at instagram where I don't block anything, most of what it suggests to me are soft porn or soft scams (generic chinese dropships marketed as a unique innovation).
  • pixl97 9mo ago
    I mean, you mean "I've always tried to block 'obvious' ads in the places I expect obvious ads to be". The thing is the world of ads is far larger and more complicated than that. Just think of product placement in movies? That is an ad, have you stopped watching most movies? What about content that is a thinly veiled ad? What about a set of bots that follows everything you post on line, and when it's little AI core figures out you are looking for something makes a suggestion under a post where you're asking questions?
  • runamuck 9mo ago
    I get really good recommendations from Insta. Leather jackets, motorcycle gear, Swiss microbrand watches.
• akoboldfrying 9mo ago
  Another explanation is that when the cost of living is high, people reduce their spending on entertainment. If that's the case, no amount of advertising will materially shift your bottom line.
• kunley 9mo ago
  Where do you go know - maybe realize that ads make everyone around miserable and with this bitter understanding go through painful but necessary process of finding other means of earning money. PS. Seriously.
• bix6 9mo ago
  How long have you lived in Durban? Nice surfing pics.
  • tomjuggler 9mo ago
    20 Years now. I'm from Cape Town, but the weather here is better. And no need for a wetsuit!
    • bix6 9mo ago
      Dreamy, I hope to make it out there one day. Heard good things about Mozambique as well.
• hollowturtle 9mo ago
  Genuine question: how is Google not losing a tons of money yet?
• alexpadula 9mo ago
  “Research shows” Lool!! Ask anyone in their teens or 20s even 30s. They’ll all answer what you did in the article. Short attention spans are ruling and so are those social media applications you mentioned.
• cube00 9mo ago
  Google Ads started charging me $5 per click on low traffic search keywords this week, meanwhile YouTube ads are still 20 cents a click (presumably to keep up with Meta) They're having a laugh if they think we'll keep paying that for no actual leads.
• emodendroket 9mo ago
  I think this article title misled me a bit... Google seems to be fine but it's no longer driving traffic through Ad Words. I think that in particular is really getting messed up by AI since people often don't go to any Web site once an AI agent answers their question.
• saltysalt 9mo ago
  There is always chaos when a central authority fails, and the "main home page for the Internet" model has definitely failed. AI killed it. How long before we see sponsored ads placed alongside prompt answers?
• jondiggsit 9mo ago
  Isn’t it just AIs that have an agenda? That lie to you? That use a directive to persuade you to do / purchase something under the guise of authority? ChatGPT, etc. right now is the early web where everything was free and everyone wondered how it would make money. Soak it up because it won’t last long.
• deleted 9mo ago
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• LePetitPrince 9mo ago
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• macinjosh 9mo ago
  Judging by the post this guy advertises his kids entertainment business to young people. With recent crackdowns on age verification etc. it could be his ads are no longer reaching the audience they used to.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• verelo 9mo ago
  It’ not Google that’s dead. It’s the economy in North American markets. I am finding conversion way down, clicks and impressions I’m still getting. People are just being way more fussy before handing over cash. Everyone i talk to is quoting the same time line, this started in September and it hasn’t returned to normal. Winter is coming.
  • starik36 9mo ago
    The blog in question is in South Africa.
  • drstewart 9mo ago
    Everyone I talk to says the opposite. Spring has sprung.
• sans_souse 9mo ago
  Sorry in advance if this comes off as hostile, that's not my intent. I am genuinely wondering: You're in the business of advertising? And you're upset that Google isn't your golden goose anymore?
• paxys 9mo ago
  Maybe someone should tell Google.
• m3kw9 9mo ago
  Because everyone asking AI to do websearch for them
• brandon272 9mo ago
  Watching other people use Google, the predominant method of searching for information involves a query followed by getting their answer from the AI summary that appears above any search results. I'm not sure what impact this would be having on Adwords, but another commenter mentions that Google isn't hurting in the ad revenue department.
  • throwaway5465 9mo ago
    While TFA is anecdote, the author mentions maintaining their spend, being gifted adword budget, and getting lower returns so increasing spend. This suggests adword revenue is up, conversion to adword 'dollar' balances is inflating those balances, so both return per dollar in is down and even more down is return per adword balance dollar. It's a leading indicator that quarterly-return focused Google must be scrambling to fix right now - they inflated themselves out of Q4 2025 but 2026 is a question mark, or to parle some Boxton Matrix, is the cash cow dying and if so is the extension strategy ad injection in AI responses, product placement in your AI videos, background changes in your family snaps, etc.
• 6thbit 9mo ago
  Such thick tension in the air waiting for the first courageous company to place ads on their LLM chats and tools. They can spare their ad income falling for a while, but making the first move is always risky. Should they let openAI go first and fail? Where do you go now? You go make sure LLMs know about your site, you welcome the herds of bot crawlers and pray someone breaks the standstill before your business falters.
• devhouse 9mo ago
  The real story isn't that Google Ads stopped working, it's that attention moved somewhere ads can't follow. You can't buy placement in a Discord server or an iMessage group chat. If this is the new normal, the entire ad-supported internet is running on borrowed time.
• thesquib 9mo ago
  Anecdotally it seems like a lot of people go to whatever LLM they have access to and ask it what to do. Surely the next frontier of advertising products is directly injecting recommendations into the response from the LLM. Or at least make the answer incorporate products and services somehow, similar to how influencers do paid content in a seamless way alongside their main content.
• axelthegerman 9mo ago
  It never really worked. Most businesses just paid for customers that were going to or already found them anyways. Not saying ads don't work at all, they definitely increase awareness.
  • CosmicShadow 9mo ago
    Yet if I turn off my ads my sales drop to nearly nothing, but when I turn them on again I get a steady flow of new customers as well as some repeaters who either forgot about us or needed a reminder to buy again, sometimes literally years later. It all depends on how big you are, what you sell, and how people can or will find you. I sell something that some people REALLY want, but they will never think to Google if it exists, they just think it's not available anymore/end of story, and I rank #1 unpaid, it's frustrating. Now I only have one ad platform I can get to work at this point and I've wasted so much money on others, trying again every few months, but they all seem to suck or I don't have the patience and pockets to try and figure them out compared to how I've figured out the one that works enough to make a living off of.
• austinbaggio 9mo ago
  I can't find it, but there's a good graph that shows Google search decline in share to GPT, but it excludes Gemini. With Gemini, it stays relatively on par. That's pretty much the answer with where one goes. LLMs are higher intent than search could ever be, and they are closer to you selling to yourself than a store selling to you since they have all of your user context
• charlie0 9mo ago
  It's only going to get worse from here. Everything is trending towards zero for any kind of online service as it gets easier to make software with LLMs. There just simply won't any moat left.
• sam0x17 9mo ago
  I would say Kagi but they need to start doing their own indexing for that to be a real future
• hirpslop 9mo ago
  Logged on to say Kagi[1] [1]not an employee, sponsor, or autonomous agent of the above company
  • freediver 9mo ago
    The article is about using Google for advertising, and that would be a far stretch for Kagi. Thank you for your support anyway ;)
• giancarlostoro 9mo ago
  Well, there used to be altavista but it seems Yahoo bought them out. So I guess Yahoo?
• BLACKCRAB 9mo ago
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• deleted 9mo ago
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• surfacenexus 9mo ago
  “Google is dead” feels overstated. What is actually breaking is the click based retrieval and attribution model once answers start getting synthesized upstream. When discovery is mediated by LLMs, ranking a page is no longer sufficient because the system is not choosing a single best document. It is assembling an answer from spans that fit its internal representation of the problem, which quietly invalidates many of the assumptions SEO and ads were built on. You can see this shift in the kinds of services being offered now. Instead of focusing on links, keywords, or bid optimization, teams are spending time on structured content that breaks cleanly into answerable fragments, on entity relationships and schema that make concepts legible to models, and on persona driven content that anticipates how questions will be interpreted rather than how pages will rank. Measurement is shifting as well. Instead of impressions and clicks, people are running prompt level tests, checking whether their content shows up across different models, and tracking inclusion and citation patterns rather than traffic. In many cases, strong traditional pages disappear entirely from answers while smaller, better structured sources surface. From the outside this looks like traffic declining. Internally it feels more like a loss of observability, where you cannot tell whether you were excluded, partially used, or summarized away into latent knowledge. Google will likely face the same issue as AI Mode expands. Generating answers is not the hard part. Defining what visibility means when the retrieval layer is no longer exposed is.
• left-struck 9mo ago
  I knew about duckduckgo for years and it was always too much friction to switch. I tried like 4 times but always went back to google when I had to research something quickly. Eventually the friction of using google became high enough though that the friction of switching was not that much higher. I’ve been using ddg and occasionally duck ai for over a year now.
• arrty88 9mo ago
  you can buy ads on instagram, fb, tiktok, reddit, youtube, amazon, apple iOS apps, the M$ windows start menu (apparently), and soon OpenAI (gemini gotta be following right)!
• benjaminwootton 9mo ago
  The AdWords platform is extremely complicated nowadays, and try as I might I can’t get any impressions from it. I then went through a period with an AdWords specialist from their team who also couldn’t get any impressions. It’s like they don’t want or need my money.
• cvballoon 9mo ago
  This post and these comments give me low confidence in our HN community. No one here seems to understand ad platforms. Google is far from dead. It still has the majority of the world’s online ad revenue, with Microsoft coming in second, then Meta at a far third. People assume that TikTok and Insta _must_ have the most since they assume that’s what all of their friends use, but even though they’re growing, they’re still not there yet. Video ads on YouTube and others have a lot of play also, and everyone thinks of the TV commercials played during the Super Bowl. But Google is still f-ing everywhere. It’s fine to call them dying, but are they really when they are best positioned for ads in AI? OpenAI or Anthropic don’t have the data about users that Google has. There’s a reason that Buffett invested in Alphabet recently.
• shevy-java 9mo ago
  I am glad to not be the only one to come to a similar conclusion. But we need to go one step further: I believe that Google has become harmful to the world in its present form. I'll skip listing all reasons, as there are many other websites that detailed this already, as well as (ironically) youtube videos. The problem goes much deeper than "merely" Google's monopoly in regards to all that ad-money. This is indeed probably the biggest reason why Google sucks so much nowadays, but the problem really is much bigger than that; it also taps into politics, what with the orange King meta-protecting these mega-corporations and the tech-bros ruthlessly abusing the rest of the world. We need real change, substantial change. Fixing Google is one important step but not the only one - but let's focus on Google mostly here, to simplify things a little. The big underlying problem is that Google has no real incentive to change the way how it operates. Its search engine, which they crippled, is not really that important to Google anymore compared to the ad-revenue and other business ventures here. AI is the current insanity rage and Google went for it too. When you cripple the search engine, you can sell more bullshit to people, fake-generate and hallucinate a world wide web that is controlled by these walled garden corporations (Facebook is probably the best example of a walled garden, but there are many similar; twitter run by a crazy oligarch too, "bla bla bla log in to read news bla bla bla" - never going to do that, so they cut off my access to an open world wide web here). I do not think Google can be fixed with the current setup though. It will just continue to steal money by taking our data and interconnecting this with other greedy private interests, now represented by lobbyists running the USA (and also other places, of course; just the USA being bigger than the other places, economically). Google has to be split up and removed. There is no other way to fix it anymore. They want down a path from which they can not change anymore, because any change means less revenue, and no corporation wants to do so on its own. > Research shows that many young people are getting their information from short video platforms like TikTok and Instagram. We are trying ads on there. Well - circusscientist adds to this problem. They depend on ads, so they contribute to the overall problem. The issue is not just Google here; it is also commercial interests who think they have a right to pester-harass people via irrelevant crap (aka ads). Google killed ublock origin. Google controls the web virtually via chrome. We have a conflict of interests here. Google has no reason to change this, and many companies think they need to use ads. This is a problem. I believe in an ad-free world. I don't want to see any ads. Many years of commercial interests confused people into thinking ads are the way to go. I disagree. I think ads are evil and must die. And companies that have no alternative business model, who rely on ads, also have to go. Google is just sitting on top of it all, acting as a greedy parasite. > We have an email newsletter They still think anyone cares about email spam. I never subscribe to any "newsletter". A better model is to read up on things WHEN YOU VISIT THE WEBSITE. This works on many private websites too such as github. I can read when I want to, not when some bot spams me down with this irrelevant stuff (and admittedly I would not read ads anyway, but my point is about DELIVERY versus VISITING something here). > We also plan to do some actual physical advertising So he chose confrontation. > I am AI assisted, very fast! Why would I want to give my money to anyone using ads or wanting to lower the overall quality via AI? That makes no sense. Some people are beyond hope.
• conductr 9mo ago
  > Right now, though – I’m broke. Anyone need a website or IOT project built? I am AI assisted, very fast! Oh wow, this author is tone deaf to the entire situation that is occurring in the world right now. I just had a conversation with my 70 year old Aunt (no tech skills) about AI and its impact on the labor market and I used the example of how for the first time ever I actually believe she could build her own iPhone app by just talking to her computer. This is an hypothetical app that would have cost her $10k-100k or more in the very recent past. I really think the market for the very services this author is selling is evaporating or at least on hold while everyone is at least trying to diy it with AI.
  • TurnItOffAndOn0 9mo ago
    that's true.Lots of people try to build app to solve their problem. ai make it easier. But I'm not sure if people want to make apps just like make a short
• sreekanth850 9mo ago
  you wrongly assumed about tiktok or shortform content. In last 6 months I only visited google for 2 things. Searching and looking at reviews of restaurants or shops. And of course navigation in maps. Other than that I never use google now a days. I'm sure there are a lot like me.
• drding 9mo ago
  The traffic goes to mobile and AI. Google is much stronger than ever before, in mobile and AI, not just web.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• throw-12-16 9mo ago
  Google is a waste of brainpower. I wish it would actually die so that all those talented engineers could move on to solving non-ad problems.
• jjaksic 9mo ago
  Seriously, one random website getting less traffic means "Google is dead"? I imagine if you hit your toe, you call it "end of the world"? This sort of posts should be illegal. Flagged.
• rankiwiki 9mo ago
  You’re definitely not alone in this, I’ve seen similar drops from Google Ads recently. It feels less like bad optimization and more like the ground shifting under everyone.
• bariswheel 9mo ago
  Gross clickbait title, do better with your article titles.
• aurelien 9mo ago
  Google is dead the day they remove their moto: Google is not evil And by the way announced the world they are the source of evil!!
• jalapenos 9mo ago
  Can someone explain why GOOG is still sky high despite this?
• wtcactus 9mo ago
  Instagram (one of the potential targets of the author to replace Google Ads) became unusable for me with this last update, where they make you wait for ads to finish. Not that I ever used it much (in fact, after all these years, I still didn't wrap my mind around anything but simple posts), but now, I basically only go there to do a post about a group I have (and that I had to remove from Meetup because Meetup is equal shares of terribly bad and terribly expensive) and answer some messages. There's a generation (in fact several) of people that still want to meet in person, and the platforms that allowed us to create and join groups for it (Meetup was great for that during a golden period of 3-4 years) are all turning into garbage.
• mediumsmart 9mo ago
  is this about the second single from Good Riddance?
• zen4ttitude 9mo ago
  Most people now conduct searches through AI chat. We never trusted Google with our search terms, IP address linked to WiFi and cell towers surveys with Google trucks for cross referencing on Google map, browser fingerprinting, time of day pattern detection, mouse reaction time measurement for age estimation, cross referencing with economic profiling of neighbourhoods, income bracket estimation algorithms, interest profiling based on search terms, browsing breadcrumbs, social network tracking, etc. Now imagine the new powers of AI chat adding reasoning patterns, deep thinking and complete trust to the equation. Let us organise a disconnect day where you turn off your phone and Internet router and ISP box just to confuse the algorithms! Where do we go from here? We stay home and invite disconnected friends for a rare moment of statistically insignificant privacy.
• miguelbemartin 9mo ago
  Google is not dead in this case; what is dead is Ads on top of Google. I think the best way to fix this is to ensure that your website is optimized for searches in Google and in the new AI world.
  • miguelbemartin 9mo ago
    Every website should be optimized for searches in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude,...
• jasonvorhe 9mo ago
  I'm amazed people on HN still use Google tbh. What for? Do you expect them to get better or treat your eyeballs and attention with more dignity anytime soon? There's Kagi, Brave Search, even DDG would be better.
• netdevphoenix 9mo ago
  The very concept of people going to a private digital plaza was very problematic in the first place and arguably still is. Humanity's drive towards convenience is the source of marvels but also many ills imo. Google's decline is a chance for change. Change towards something better. Not that I am optimistic that we will get there imo but the opportunity window is opening now. Don't look for a new digital overlord. Embrace the new age
• piokoch 9mo ago
  Well, the cycle is over. I remember the rise and the fall of AltaVista search engine. I remember the rise of Google that was able to circumvent all the "old days" SEO efforts by spamming keywords in the HTML headers. Then everyone was trying to guess how to game Google page rank algo. Finally people learned how to cheat Google, searches on many topics are returning endless pages of spam, marketing content that is supposed to earn AdSenens money (Google's "disruption" of online ads, better than all those cringe banners, that, eventually, destroyed Google search). Right now Bing is working better for me (Bing! WTF?), for some stuff I use Yandex (shrug), but most of the stuff goes through AI, if you ask them to provide source of the information and you check it, this seems to be working fine... For the time being, until people learn how to feed AI bots with the manipulated content they want. This will be probably more complicated, but it will happen (gaming page rank was also harder than adding "right" words to HTML keywords), unless AI providers will be careful with what they give as a food for their hungry Nvidia GPUs. But this will be more expensive than blindly scanning the internet. That's why I see here a proper place where governments should step in, finance curation of the content for AI, as this will benefit society in a big way. I see here an opportunity for smaller players, like Mistral, who can get some gov/EU funding and provide more quality than others who will devour whatever they find.
• cgfjtynzdrfht 9mo ago
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• fumar 9mo ago
  We don’t know any details on OP’s ad campaign. Did they happen to make any errors? Is holiday the most competitive time? Bids?
• Zavora 9mo ago
  Chegg’s decline is a concrete example of how AI search is changing the web There’s been a lot of debate about whether Google’s AI Overviews and tools like ChatGPT are actually harming publishers. One publicly traded company’s timeline is worth looking at: Chegg. What happened (with sources): 2021: Chegg launched Uversity, a platform for educators to share academic content. (Wikipedia) 2023: ChatGPT emerged as a serious competitor in homework help. Chegg responded by launching CheggMate, its own AI product built on OpenAI’s models. (Wikipedia) Late 2024: Chegg reported accelerating subscriber declines, widely attributed to users shifting to free AI tools instead of paid study platforms. (WSJ, company filings) Feb 2025: Chegg sued Google, alleging that AI Overviews reduced traffic to Chegg by answering questions directly in search results, harming acquisition and revenue. (Search Engine Land, Reuters) May 2025: Chegg laid off ~22% of its workforce (≈248 employees), citing competitive pressure from AI and changes in search behavior. (Reuters) Oct 2025: Chegg announced another round of layoffs (~45%, ≈388 employees), explicitly referencing “the new realities of AI” and reduced traffic from Google to content publishers. (Reuters / SF Chronicle) What the data suggests (more broadly): Independent studies show that when Google AI Overviews appear, users are significantly less likely to click through to external sites. “Zero-click” searches (where users get answers directly on the results page) have increased, especially for informational and educational queries. The impact isn’t uniform — some publishers report minimal effects — but content that answers how-to, homework, or factual queries appears most exposed. Why this matters: Chegg isn’t a small blog or SEO-driven site. It’s a public company with audited financials, legal disclosures, and incentives not to exaggerate under scrutiny. Its filings and lawsuit don’t claim AI is “bad” — they claim that traffic flows are structurally changing. This doesn’t prove AI search is “killing the web,” but it does show: AI answers are substituting clicks, not just competing for them. Entire business models built on informational content are under pressure. “Build better content” may not be sufficient when answers are synthesized upstream. Curious how others here see it: Is this a temporary transition problem? Or are we watching the unbundling of the open web’s traffic economy in real time?
  • vgeek 9mo ago
    The educational and informational queries were always the least valuable from a monetization standpoint. Chegg Answers could rank for these low competition (also low commercial intent) terms-- think queries like phrases from textbooks students would be querying. There is virtually 0 way (for people besides Chegg) to monetize these types of queries. Now Google can answer these queries directly, albeit with the assumption it costs them slightly more to serve these AI responses than a search query. AI overviews are breaking the implicit "contract" for informational sites-- "we will create content to rank on Google with the expectation of monetization via display ads, mailing list growth and/or sales commissions of some sort." If these sites now lose 90% of their traffic, they simply go extinct. We have already seen the destruction of the old web era sites and the walled gardens being built. How many new sites, at the same frequency as 15 years ago, 1) get built and 2) get visibility without relying on one of the fickle walled gardens for an audience? Google will probably figure out a way to monetize these informational queries by building better profiles of users. Or most likely, they start slipping in commercially biased responses-- either natively or disclosed, but probably based on all user conversations instead of the current one.
• suhaspatil101 9mo ago
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• MrSkelter 9mo ago
  Googles ad business is riddled with fraud in all levels. Google profits directly from the fraud. It has no incentive to reduce it and is embarrassed by its extent. Google is essentially overseeing a huge criminal enterprise which funds its other activities. It’s been well documented for over a decade and no one seems to care. The traffic is faked, the publishers are faked, the clicks are faked and the ad rates are manipulated. It’s an incredibly lucrative way to steal money with extremely low risk and trivial penalties. The victims are the advertisers. Google has no interest in rocking the boat while they get paid. The effective ads via Google platforms are like the percentage of real drugs in what’s bought off the street. Coincidental and ever being shaved.
  • hackmack10 9mo ago
    Can confirm this with YouTube advertising. When enabled for growth, it's nothing but bot farms. When I reached out to Google about it, they acknowledged the unusual traffic but did nothing about it. They are running a huge fraudulent business.
• jbrooks84 9mo ago
  Get a real job
  • tomjuggler 9mo ago
    Not much chance of that at this point - I'm almost 50 years old and managed to make a living purely from performing so far (with a small exception of the pandemic, where I did coding mainly)
• zkmon 9mo ago
  It is fantastic to see how a research paper by Google fueled the force that might kill Google. Attention is all that is sold by google. It is an attention broker. Now that very attention is thinly distributed, Attention as the most precious food for businesses, is under fierce struggle. Google has ruled the city center area will all the attention sinks, the billboards. But AI is the new mafia on the scene that kidnapped all attention and hoarded it inside the AI data centers.
• qubex 9mo ago
  As a game theorist and a cynic, my go-to response when I hear of non-zero-sum games is “yipee, both sides can lose!”
• ThinkBeat 9mo ago
  This is impolite but it might be that the services you offer are in decreasing demand in general. Your return customers know what a great show you do and it becomes tradition and they obviously love it. But the difficulty finding new clients (something we all face) may be partially due the world moving on.
• bobse 9mo ago
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• delis-thumbs-7e 9mo ago
  I thought SoMe replaced google for this sort of stuff like 6 years ago? GoogleAds are prob fine if you have a big retail business or something, but for anything creative some has been the marketing route I have seen everyone doing for years. And looking at their site… Hacky creative coding. Mate, AI replaced you like 2 years ago.
• geekamongus 9mo ago
  I'm not a marketer (anymore), but as an end user, I feel that Google has shot themselves in the foot with the horrendous search experience they provide these days. This notion and topic of discussion is becoming more commonplace online. "Google results are just AI and sponsored content anymore." We've all seen it.
• jmrm 9mo ago
  The response is ChatGPT. They're going to add ads to their responses (if they didn't added it already), and people use it as search engine.
  • ojosilva 9mo ago
    Google is in that game too with "AI Mode", stealing traffic from ChatGPT. But as OP and other threads here highlighted, the other ~half of the gold sits in more fenced communities like WhatsApp, IG, Telegram, and other messaging and non-digital communities that are getting their "news" and "information" from viral shorts from IG, TikTok and YT Shorts.
• ryhile 9mo ago
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• arkt8 9mo ago
  No matter which new technology arises on the horizon... what is tainted is not internet, not AI. Is the entire purpose on follow dollars. I hated when needed to see Google reports for ads. And be in a rush for SEO. This was a game of rats, no real knowledge, just attempts to satisfy an Algorithm that changed on weekly base. I quit Facebook / Instagram / Google ads 6 years ago. Why? Because my advertisement was feeding the system on who show concurrent advertisement, collecting habits of MY customers. So the system is broken. Stop pursuing the american dream and the wild capitalism. This new generation is building immunity to many of these things, at least until their engineers find a way to take control of these minds. About where to go... I think we need to be satisfied with less, in the sense we need to buy a new car every year, nor new clothes just for fashion, neither gadgets just by compulsive appeal. Buy the best you can, use it the most before discard it. Exchange fast food for what your granparents used to be fed. Know that you can be happy by yourself, not by what they said you need in the last 100 years. Life is that, the way is that. But many fall in the western system propaganda.
• ChicagoDave 9mo ago
  It’s not the advertising or eyeballs. GenAI allows everyone to build their own stuff and find their customers without ads. The ad business is doomed. And if you think Gen-Z or Gen-Alpha are a capturable audience, I gotta bridge to sell you. You have one slim hope. Engage with smart young people that are savvy at today’s comms and can create and edit their own content.
• chaostheory 9mo ago
  Ironically, Google’s Ads division and CEO have blame for this. The Ads division forced the search division to weaken the quality of search results and Google’s CEO sided with them.
• geldedus 9mo ago
  Google has drowned in irrelevance for me. I barely use it (i use DuckDuckGo), and it has massively de-indexed my websites for no apparent reason. I don't even bother to look at Google Search Console
• lrvick 9mo ago
  It is not just Google Ads that are dead. Advertising in general, is dead. No one wants this shit and no matter where you go, people will find a way to block your ads or leave the platforms they cannot easily block ads in. As soon as you advertisers moved to the internet, you gave users the power to delete you, so thanks for that.
• tomjuggler 9mo ago
  For posterity, if anyone can ever find this comment amongst all the others: We went with Instagram ads, where we have the most followers. The result: 4 paid bookings in 48 hours - all confirmed leads from the new Instagram ad campaign. Blog post updated.