8 ms·

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 reli

• 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.
        • crazygringo 9mo ago
          Again, this "death of search" I hear so much about, but doesn't exist in the numbers. If search results are such a waste of time, why do people keep using Google? In ever-increasing numbers? What's the explanation there?
          • imron 9mo ago
            Dead internet theory explains this perfectly well. Google search results are a wasteland of ads and content farms, with vanishingly small value for humans
            • crazygringo 9mo ago
              Again, then why are people using Google more than ever? I don't really see how "dead internet theory" explains that. If it were as bad as you claim, surely usage would be plummeting? But it's just the opposite.
              • imron 9mo ago
                Are you sure it’s _people_ driving this increase? Dead internet theory means real users are declining while bot users are skyrocketing. For example google search is such a terrible experience these days that I’ll often ask an LLM instead. That LLM may do multiple google and other searches on my behalf, combine, collate and present me with just the information I am looking for, bypassing the search experience entirely. This is a fundamentally different use case from human traffic.
                • weatherlite 9mo ago
                  > Are you sure it’s _people_ driving this increase? Most likely - yes. If Google has been dead for years people wouldn't pour hundreds of billions of dollars into ads there. The Search revenue keeps increasing, even since ChatGPT showed up. It might stagnate soon or even decrease a bit - but "death" ? The numbers don't back this up. One blog saying he stops paying for Google ads conflicts with the reality of around 200 billion yearly revenue from Search.
      • hgomersall 9mo ago
        The policy described in my link is literally about making each user search more to get the results they want in order to drive more ad revenue. That would create more searches and a less good user experience.
      • duped 9mo ago
        That is good evidence that Google is dying because it takes more than one search query to find what you want.
    • kakapo5672 9mo ago
      You should let Google know, given their business is really humming nowadays. Along with their stock price.
  • esseph 9mo ago
    Gemini is the new search.
    • reddalo 9mo ago
      But Gemini doesn't bring much visitors to your website. Also, optimizing for AI is even more "black magic" than normal SEO.
      • nicce 9mo ago
        Instead sites adds Gemini integrations, which are targeted based on prompts. When you pay enough, Gemini recommends your shop and AI buys the stuff for the target audience.
      • brainwad 9mo ago
        Google considers the consumer's side, not just the publishers. Users often don't want to visit someone's website (and then dodge ads and cookie/newsletter/notification popups). If the query can be answered without veer visiting a website, so much the better.
    • frmersdog 9mo ago
      AI is not and cannot be search. Search is dead and has been for a few years now. Search has seemingly been subsumed into the LLM monster, considering how "fuzzy" queries have become (probably because they're not hitting the search algorithm without being massaged by "something else"). Significant portions of the web have been purged from Google's index, which means that neither Gemini nor Search can present those pages to users. It's over. Sorry.
      • esseph 9mo ago
        When people say "search is dead", I feel like you and I live on different planets. If I have an idea of what I want, Google search works great. On the rare occasion I don't know the specific thing I'm looking for, Gemini points the way. It had never ever been easier for me to find what I'm looking for on the internet, since 1993-1994. I do wonder how much browser, location, and language plays into this.
  • imron 9mo ago
    Google search died years ago already.
• ravenstine 9mo ago
  It's been some years since I've had to put ads on the web, but I found Reddit ads insanely effective. Really, Google ads have been dead for a long time. I found them hardly effective at all since maybe 2011.
  • manmal 9mo ago
    A surgeon in our family got basically all his (private) clients from Google. Spend was multiple k per month. If you consider that one surgery brings in 7k in revenue, then those numbers actually make sense. He's retired now but did this up to 2y ago.
    • tsunamifury 9mo ago
      This is a Kshaped example that’s solid. Some SMBs can afford per keyword large spend in focused high reward arenas. The rest can’t do anything.
  • theshackleford 9mo ago
    > Really, Google ads have been dead for a long time. For you perhaps. I work with a huge amount of businesses whose profits are still driven almost entirely by them, who have seen not even a blip and make money hand over fist.
    • benjaminwootton 9mo ago
      I wish I knew the difference. I’ve ran or been close to tens of businesses over the last 20 years and we’ve always paid the Google tax, but I’m not sure it’s ever had a positive ROI.
• tomjuggler 9mo ago
  I forgot YouTube has ads, thanks. I do occasionally post (free) on Reddit, it's not that big here though
  • senthil_rajasek 9mo ago
    By "here" I think you mean SA. Reddit is big in the U.S.
    • lovich 9mo ago
      Reddits been building up its user base in India the past few years.[1] I’m permabanned on Reddit so I only consume via the default not logged in feed and I run into some comments in what I assume is Hindi(might be marathi or one of the multiple other languages on the continent) or posts from subreddits explicitly about some aspect of india [1] https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/catalyst/inside-reddits-rising-popularity-in-india/article69039237.ece https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/catalyst/inside-reddits...
      • grugagag 9mo ago
        How are permabanned? Can you just change the handle or create a new account?
        • lovich 9mo ago
          I had a few alt accounts, they were all banned and I wasn’t able to make a new account with existing emails. I assume, with no evidence, that they just used the same data tracking for ads, to enforce the ban. I think Meta turned on the real banning tech during a panic in Covid iirc
          • grugagag 9mo ago
            I noticed I was shadow banned on youtube (for comments). I have no idea what was the reason because I rarely comment and am very civil when I do. It doesn’t bother me much though, I was just curious how it happened.
• Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
  Hm good point but if one were to try to reach visibility via let's say contacting the creators themselves or making reddit showcases themselves? I am not sure what might work better, sponsorships or Ads. Of course some are definitely icky sponsorships but if one were to align with small youtubers who develop their own things and you enjoy their content and there might be an overlap etc. I personally have an ad blocker so I don't really know what might work for. I guess organic marketing? But how does one achieve it? Any good books / ideas on more sustainable forms of marketing aside from paying the large corporations a sort of land tax basically?
• mingus88 9mo ago
  Google ads is dead precisely because their search product is dead. Ever since Google bought double click, their ads business has been their search business. They are the same product.
  • JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
    > their search product is dead Do we have any evidence search volume is down? Don't get me wrong, I'm an avid Kagi user. But I'm sceptical anyone outside tech is using anything other than Google.
    • timnetworks 9mo ago
      I watch people search for PlatformName Login every single day because they don't know how URLs work. Google isn't search. It's a crutch for people with too much time and money. p.s. not google labs, not tpu's, but specifically search.
      • JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
        > Google isn't search. It's a crutch for people with too much time and money …wouldn’t this make it an advertiser’s dream?
  • TacticalCoder 9mo ago
    Google search ain't dead at all: it became so good something silly like 99% of all the queries have to be answered by the Google AI before the very first "result". And for those who want more, there's the "continue this discussion with Gemini". Now this may not be great for Google Ads (dunno about that) but Google search now works better than it ever did.
    • skeptic_ai 9mo ago
      Try to double check the AI inline response. Got it wrong way too many times to trust it now.
    • 9mo ago
• Aurornis 9mo ago
  > Also, In my own experience for my business ( also entertainment) I have found reddit ads to be useful. Reddit is very hit or miss depending on your target audience. Depending on your Reddit target audience, a lot of people could have adblock installed. They might be loyal to communities that have approved vendor lists where everyone parrots the same vendor recommendations back and forth in every thread, so not being part of that game means you're left out. In some niches, the subreddit moderators have a financial relationship with vendors and they'll put their weight into swaying every conversation away from competitors. For other niches, none of this applies and Reddit can be a good ad destination. It really depends
  • uyzstvqs 9mo ago
    Let's be honest, most "Reddit marketing" isn't about on-site ads, it's about posting UGC that promotes your product in some way.
  • vineyardmike 9mo ago
    100%. My business is in the smart home space. I peruse various smart home subreddit communities, and they all have a few brands that are aggressively celebrated on Reddit. Market research, financial disclosures, and other public data largely indicates that these brands are not all that popular, especially in the biggest-spend markets. We don’t find Reddit ads valuable.
  • silexia 9mo ago
    I run a large marketing agency and Reddit is terrible for advertising across most verticals.
• hermitcrab 9mo ago
  Based on personal experience, I would be wary on spending much on Reddit ads without carefully measuring the results. Some real world data: https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/08/11/what-i-learned-spending-851-on-reddit-ads/ https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/08/11/what-i-learned-spe...
• jonas21 9mo ago
  I’d suggest that the title should be, “Competition for Google AdWords is so strong that unsophisticated advertisers can no longer get a good return. Where do I promote my business now?”
  • tonyedgecombe 9mo ago
    I have a feeling that it is mostly unsophisticated advertisers bidding up the price of AdWords.
    • tsunamifury 9mo ago
      As someone who leads large parts of ad tech for TikTok and worked at Google for 10 years, it’s the K shaped economy that is pressing SMBs out. Pure and simple Everyone can make up some complex theories but I see it in the numbers every day. Spend distribution is now k shaped and SMBs simply can’t compete at top end performance levels.
      • bix6 9mo ago
        Can you share any numbers ie roughly how different the spend is? SMB spends $1k on ads but grandes spend $1M or something? Idk how it works.
        • tsunamifury 9mo ago
          SMBs broadly spend 200-400 dollars a month on ads and see marginal to negative returns against 10 million in spend for large clients. Even 1000-5000 see marginal returns at best unless the target small demo high return (local premium services). They lack the budgets for learning and optimization let alone optimal price per placement. This combined with SMBs targeting everyday joes with increasing less demand availability for anything it leaves them crushed on both sides.
          • bix6 9mo ago
            Wow so 10,000-100,000x spend difference. That is a wide K. Do you think there’s any hope for SMB? Eg I’ve seen some companies tout AI advertising optimization for SMB but when I looked into one for investment the numbers weren’t very compelling.
• ChuckMcM 9mo ago
  Without search ad revenue Google is dead.
• tcfhgj 9mo ago
  for my life, I haven't found ads useful at all, so I block them
• jwrallie 9mo ago
  Any suggestions for local business? Things that operate only within a specified area. Google worked well for those.
• stackedinserter 9mo ago
  How did you run campaigns on reddit? Reddit ads had the worst performance among all platforms I tried, literally zero conversion.
• Art9681 9mo ago
  Thank you. This is a perfect example of clickbait. I trusted the HN crowd, clicked the link, and immediately realized the trap. I'm upset at how effective it is. And also commend the author for publishing an article specifically engineered to waste the viewers time.
  • cornholio 9mo ago
    In truth, I have never seen a company doing such an insane 180 against it's traditional suppliers as Google is doing against the websites populating its search pages which now Google milks as mere training data. Google Search is dead, from the perspective of the websites, and there is less and less incentive to spend effort and money to appear on the first pages. Google better have a good strategy because this is bound to have 2nd order effects down the road, like, why would I pay money for advertising on a dead internet search engine? If AI is killing organic results, then AI better make money itself, because dead websites don't buy ads.
• safety1st 9mo ago
  I think he's aimed in the right direction with the observation about short videos. I tried to load his website. It took a full minute to come up. Maybe that's the HN hug of death or something, but this is surely issue #1 to resolve. Beyond that I would ask whether targeting the "young'uns" directly is the correct strategy. His business is party entertainment, kids' birthday parties could be the biggest slice of that, but the kid isn't the purchasing decisionmaker, and there are all these other opportunities (like corporate events) too. And then I would consider whether paying for ads in shorts is the right or only way to approach the world of video. The thing about video is it's huge, lucrative, and eating up more of people's time every year. People are moving from the text Internet, to watching videos. I would think given the nature of the business this guy has raw footage which can be turned into entertaining videos, or can produce it pretty quickly. I'm increasingly surprised by how much some people can earn on Youtube, by creating videos that also function as marketing collateral for their business. He will ultimately need to geotarget to get customers, so yeah that's probably paid ads, but a good YouTube channel would build authority, making sales easier to close, and might also make him more money than you'd expect via ad revenue.
  • rendaw 9mo ago
    It loaded in far less than a second for me, almost immediate.
    • safety1st 9mo ago
      Hmm, the URL appears to have changed since I commented. It was originally a .co.za. Now it's fast. Perhaps there was a CDN issue (I am in a country that is definitely not material to his business)
      • tomjuggler 9mo ago
        I updated CloudFlare settings, yes. Seems to have worked?
        • safety1st 9mo ago
• miguelbemartin 9mo ago
  I see paid ads as a short-term goal; the business seems to be local, so people should find this when looking for this specific service in their city.
• bgro 9mo ago
  Remember when people wrote things online because they had something useful to say and share and that was enough? Now it’s slop factory of people having a writing quota to get enough ads because they don’t want to work. Particularly true for tech writers who praise things like leetcode then can’t get a real job. Now it’s supercharged by ai and they’re upset how accessible their slop job is. I just find that funny I suppose.