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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

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 10mo ago
Skate to where the puck is going
- kevin_thibedeau 10mo ago
  Better to stop playing the game. --WOPR
  - AndrewKemendo 10mo 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
    - willturman 10mo ago
      Revenue generation via advertising is an emergent property of humanity?
      - pixl97 10mo ago
        100%, but it's not a direct 1:1 relationship. First you need agriculture so people tend to settle in one place. After ag comes more specialization, farmers need houses, graineries, and as society grows social specialists in which we'd call government. These things in an area typically cause the area to grow because of their stability. As they grow you get more than one person/business doing the same line of work and you get more people than fit in ones monkeysphere. At that size you may not know a person that knows what you need to know and start looking further. This is why as cities grow advertising itself becomes an emergent property. Just go to a Roman city and look for dick pavers for example. Then someone will think "Hey, I can give some poor kids a board with a message on it and have them cry out to go to the place that people pay me to advertise" and suddenly you have an emergent property of humanity.
        willturman 10mo ago
        I (mis)attributed an element of pre-destination to the word emergent that apparently doesn't map to the word properly used. That said, there's a petroglyph (circa 1150-1600 CE) of a macaw (among other sign-like petroglyphs)[1] on the walls above the pueblo ruins in Frijoles Canyon in Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico that came to mind when reading your explanation. The pueblo ruins themselves are immediately above an agriculturally developed riverbed floodplain with structures previously used for food storage. It doesn't seem too far fetched to analogize a macaw above a pueblo in a canyon to, say, a flamingo on a neon sign (Circa 20th century)[2] above a bar along a highway, or an ad on a phone in 2025. Perhaps advertising is emergent (and, dare I say, with an element of pre-destination). [1] https://www.nps.gov/places/petroglyphs-pueblo-loop-trail-stop-21.htm https://www.nps.gov/places/petroglyphs-pueblo-loop-trail-sto... [2] https://www.flickr.com/photos/25229906@N00/4056975591/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/25229906@N00/4056975591/
        10mo ago
  - tomjuggler 10mo ago
    Whoever said that lived with their parents and didn't pay rent
tomjuggler 10mo ago
It's short form video for sure. My wife just got 4 WhatsApp messages from our new Instagram campaign in 1 hour. Spent $1.50 so far. So Zuckerberg is the ref now?
AznHisoka 10mo ago
AI SEO is where the attention is going, with ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/Google AI Overviews replacing the need for people to visit websites
- echelon 10mo ago
  It's unnatural to search an LLM for a product. It's why Alexa never became a shopping portal. Best way to get the word out about a product now is through an influencer in the space. -- Edit: Show of hands for anyone using ChatGPT to shop. Be honest. People don't even use Google to shop. They try to find something either (1) by brand name, eg. "iphone" or (2) generically by category, eg. "best cold weather tent". In the former case, Google used their enormous, antitrust flaunting power and 90% browser marketshare to turn the URL bar into a competitive trademark bidding dragnet. Apple pays out the nose for the iPhone spot. For every click. And every other major corporation selling to business or consumer does the same. This is the source of Google's enormous wealth. Google is a middle man. You cannot conceivably get to a brand or product without paying the Google tax. In the latter case, when people try to look up blogs and reviews and Reddit posts to compare products, Google gets in the way and inserts themselves into the flow. If LLMs make this experience even shittier, there won't be upstream content to source as no reward will reach the people providing the value. It will naturally atrophy over time. As a new sales channel, young people are buying content off of TikTok and Instagram directly now. When they see influencers using products they like, it leads to massive sales volume. New unicorn consumer businesses are being minted regularly from this.
  - ben_w 10mo ago
    Alexa never became a good shopping portal because voice interfaces regularly mishear you, so there was always a lot of doubt about what it might be ordering, and also has anyone except the obscenely rich ever gone "yes, the first result, that's always fine, no I will not bother looking at any of the prices on any of the results"? Hence the joke about the reason why Amazon bought Whole Foods being that Bezos said one day "Alexa, buy me something from Whole Foods" and Alexa mishearing it as "Buy Whole Foods". LLMs are not limited to voice interfaces. You absolutely can use ChatGPT as a search engine if you want to: it does give you results you can compare, telling you about pros and cons of various options, and you can discuss with it what your end-goals are and have it turn a vague idea into a shopping list (that may or may not be complete for your project). I don't have any reason to think these are the best, ChatGPT is not a storefront and OpenAI does not have a long history as a search engine, but it absolutely can be used this way.
bluedino 10mo ago
> The person kept making the comment that she couldn't see/find the puck and it made it frustrating to watch. Lifelong hockey fan, I never understood this complaint. I believe it was FOX that did the 'highlight the puck' thing for a few years in the 1990's. You can't see the ball in American football, either. But you don't need to. The guy that's running and everyone is trying to tackle? He has the ball. Just like the guy skating across the ice with his stick on the ground? He's got the puck. When you CAN see the puck/ball, either someone lost control of it, or they're shooting/throwing/passing it.
- pedalpete 10mo ago
  I'd go a step further and say the ball/puck is not the interesting thing to watch. Imagine if you couldn't see the players, and just saw the puck. Would that be interesting at all? Think about tennis. There is the trope of people's eyes going back and forth following the ball, but I don't think they are following the ball directly. They are going back and forth looking at the person who is going to hit the ball.
  - tshaddox 10mo ago
    I think you might be conflating knowing where the puck is with being able to fix your eyes on the puck at all times. The complaint is usually about the former. People are complaining that they don't know where the puck is.
    - basch 10mo ago
      you dont know what you dont know. walking into hockey for the first time, you may think you should be looking for the puck. but really, what you want to look for is how the players are moving. it's sort of a "which one is different from all the others." one person will clearly be moving in a completely unique way, as the others chase them or vie to get open or get in somebodys way. to acomplish this identification, youre looking at their legs, shoulders, hands, feet, and heads.
  - autoexec 10mo ago
imiric 10mo ago
"AI" is the next advertising frontier, no question. People are throwing themselves to feed you personal data. You no longer have to come up with sneaky ways to collect it, or build out their profile from inferred metadata. Less work for you, more accurate profiling, and less risk getting fined by pesky regulation. Ad campaigns can be much more personal and targeted. You can push them at just the right moment to optimize the chances of conversion. They can be much more persuasive, since chatbots and assistants are deeply trusted. You can dial the sensitivity knob to make them very subtle, or completely blatant, depending on your urgency and client. If I as someone outside of this hostile industry can think up these scenarios, the world is not ready for what advertising geniuses are cooking up as we speak.
- mcphage 10mo ago
  > the world is not ready for what advertising geniuses are cooking up as we speak. Advertising directed towards AI models, at the very least. If you can get into ChatGPT's weights that McDonalds is the cheapest and tastiest hamburger, how many millions of people would ChatGPT tell that to?
  - criddell 10mo ago
    If ChatGPT told you to go to McDonald’s, would you?
    - smileson2 10mo ago
      yeah, it's always a good time for a egg mcmuffin
    - mcphage 10mo ago
      Personally, if ChatGPT told me the sky was blue, I’d go out and check. But if you’re someone who takes advice from ChatGPT, maybe? It’s not like I don’t ever go to McDonalds.
beloch 10mo ago
Bang on. It's advertising, so literally looking at where people are getting their info from is the way to go. Google searches don't produce good results these days. The enshittification has become too extreme. Google openly admits as much (and further intensifies the enshittification) by placing a huge AI summary above those results. The answer is self evident. If, before, you were relying on clicks resulting from google searches, today you need to be what an AI recommends when somebody uses an AI like they used to use google. (Users will eventually become more sophisticated though!) Lots of people are using AI like a search engine and getting better results than google gives simply because massive resources are currently being put into training AI, while mere neglect is insufficient to explain how fast Google search results are getting worse. Is this how AI companies plan to cash in? Accept money from advertisers to promote their products in interactions with their LLM's? Were I an advertiser, I'd be trying to get Anthropic to take my money instead of giving it to Google. AI might be what finally makes it impossible to tell content and ads apart. That's great for advertisers... I guess. Not so great for the rest of us.
- PaulDavisThe1st 10mo ago
  > Google searches don't produce good results these days. The enshittification has become too extreme. Google openly admits as much (and further intensifies the enshittification) by placing a huge AI summary above those results. I haven't asked Google a question it has failed to provide a more than adequate answer to in ... months? years? And on all my devices, I run google search with &udm=14, so I am not talking about AI summaries. I also have search personalization disabled. I see a lot of people complaining about this on HN. It simply doesn't match my experience at all, in any way.
  - JKCalhoun 10mo ago
    I don't want a list of links that I have to then click through in a kind of Russian roulette—hoping I don't get some kind of SEO crap.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 10mo ago
nostrademons 10mo ago
In my anecdotal experience, it's moved to private, trust-based channels: iMessage, WhatsApp, email, face-to-face interactions. Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring the public and the private has finally ended: people don't want to be online, don't trust social media, don't really trust any media, and are living simple local lives with a small circle of friends that they get together with regularly in person. But then, my anecdotal experience may not be representative of most of the world. Most of my friends have money, houses, kids, friends - all of which are, by the numbers, rarities these days. It's an interesting thought experiment to explore what it means if that actually is the new normal, and people are not consuming media or much of anything, or even if the people who are still addicted to social media are now tapped out and don't have any more disposable income left to spend. Probably economic depression. If everybody bought only what they needed and ignored all the advertisements, our present level of economic activity would plunge.
- mikepurvis 10mo ago
  Absolutely this. I recently got a nice photo taken with my kids and for the first time I... didn't post it on Facebook. I sent it to my family group chat. Yesterday I posted on Facebook for the first time in months and it was about the power being out for an hour in the ice storm. I haven't posted travel photos to FB in years. I'm mostly still on FB at all for the acquaintance-level connections to things like neighbourhood, church, and hobby communities. All the people I actually care about are in private group chats. I was reflecting recently that Google Plus actually had the right idea back in 2011 with "circles", but at the time we all said it was too hard figuring out which circles we wanted to share a particular message or thought with. Hmm, maybe they were ahead of the game all along?
  - hinkley 10mo ago
    One of the things I hope will come from the Trough of Disillusionment in cloud computing will be families running redundant file servers hosting the family photos instead of doing everything on IG. Your three tech savvy family members should all have redundant copies of the photos of memaw’s wedding and Uncle Jim when he was 2 and looked exactly like your cousin’s second kid. I don’t need to see those. Your stalker ex boyfriend definitely doesn’t need to see those. It’s none of our goddamned business. Someone, I think WD? Already made a play at this but I think it fell on deaf ears and will have to be tried again after the hype cycle calms tf down.
baxtr 10mo ago
This is a great analogy and approach! One rough heuristic I use is people-watching on the subway. Just a quick glance from a distance at their phones. What are they actually looking at? (Yeah I know it's a bit nosy...) I see: short-form video, WhatsApp/Messaging, YouTube long-format - in that order.
GuB-42 10mo ago
> ...vertical, shortform video. Not sure how that plays out in terms of advertising... I have seen a comment about them being terrible for advertising, it looks like a "good" idea but it is not. The problem is that the attention of people watching these videos drop to almost zero, too much is happening in a too short amount of time, and as a result nothing is remembered, including the ads. It is a very good deal for whoever is monetizing this content, they show a lot of ads, plenty of revenue, but not for those who are paying for the ads. It is like subliminal messages, "good" idea, but not very effective. For ads to work, people need to pay attention. I don't know how ads in chatbots will turn out and what form it will take, but I think it is inevitable.
- SunshineTheCat 10mo ago
  For sure, I've been hesitantly awaiting ChatGPT's first "sponsored" reply, or at least, one that features a "sponsored" product or link.
  - actionfromafar 10mo ago
    How would you know?
    - GuB-42 10mo ago
      They are probably going to make them obvious at first, like with Google search. But they can also make it more pernicious. For example by having companies pay them so that they can train their AI on their products, with regular updates. Not technically an ad, but the AI will be more aware of their products so that they are more likely to be recommended to the user. In other words, that's paying for the right to advertise to the AI rather than to advertise to consumers directly.
      - jabwd 10mo ago
        probably, probably and more probably. Why would they ever make it obvious? It makes no sense. google just had the luck of political inaction, and eventually enshitified it further to the point where you might not know it was an ad.
Moto7451 10mo ago
> 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. And to add to this, the dark pattern of the time was to register in the Phone Book as “AAA Your Real Business Name” which was exactly what my first job did.
moralestapia 10mo ago
Nice, I really enjoyed this interpretation of Jobs famous quote. Even getting into the character "I used to be a goalie" was pretty cool as well!
underlipton 10mo ago
>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 chill that ran down my spine when I realized that you and TFA think that the part people care about is Google as an ad platform, and not as a way to access websites. Jesus fucking Christ, things are bleak.
- PantaloonFlames 10mo ago
  Do you know how Google makes money?
  - underlipton 10mo ago
    I actually don't care. Most people don't. We care about the quality of service. Aside from Google employees and shareholders, I assume that most users would prefer a useful service that barely makes the company any money, versus a money-printer that's useless and a PITA to use.
blueboo 10mo ago
The recent Acquired ep on “Alphabet Inc” put it aptly: social media moved into Google’s space, video (reels, “pivot to video”), and social media for socialising moved to message groups, iMessage/Whatsapp/Discord. Revenue-wise, video ads have always been the sun to print ads peanut m&m. Look where the pucks going then: Implication: ChatGPT as a realtime video avatar will hit the jackpot with ads, but not before. Count on the ChatGPT device having a screen for that reason
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
sharinsights 10mo ago
Interesting way to put it!
cryptica 10mo ago
It's moved to AI training sets. If you can't get your product into the training set of a popular model, it's game over.
giardini 10mo ago
So maybe the puck is on TV? Reason I say this is that this guy (Bob Hoffman) https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=Ad+Contrarian&mid=887326486600BF78E242887326486600BF78E242&FORM=VIRE https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=Ad+Cont... says people watch ads on TV not the Internet.
noisy_boy 10mo ago
Maybe magnifying the puck could be a good use case for AR glasses
KellyCriterion 10mo ago
> 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. < Interesting! I thought, they did it because of the stock-item-list order :-D
makeitdouble 10mo ago
This is an analogy that is very appealing, which is precisely why I feel it sends the fundamentally wrong message. There is not one single puck in the web search field, and we actively don't want that situation in the first place (want no monopoly or cartel). There should be at least 2 if not a ton more. Everyone focusing their attention and resource on a single thing is the absolute worst case scenario. I also hope the future of search is not where every existing player is looking at. That means there is no disruption happening, money straight dictates the winner and nothing truly innovative is expected. Even "skating where the puck will be" is essentially following someone else's play. It can be fine, but I'd prefer to focus on the person actually acting on the puck, where they're trying to lead the game.
goosebumps 10mo ago
So, The King is dead long live the King!
instagraham 10mo ago
I know this might seem reductive but when you say "look where everyone is looking", the answer hasn't really changed since the 2010s — it's our phones. (and to some extent, monitors if you account for the amount of time 9-5 people spend on their work laptops or screens. desktop is not dead but that's another matter) The hot apps are for now, chatbots and vertical shortform platforms. We know advertisers get much better bang for their buck marketing where the influencers are. Google is "dead" because search advertising is much worse at figuring you out and showing you stuff when you're not necessarily looking for it. But Google can easily advertise where the eyeballs are - your phones. We must remember that enshittification is an ongoing process and Google has the power to reach billions of people, one shitty update at a time. From their POV, it definitely feels like a miss that they don't own a successful and dedicated social media platform. Maybe they will make another foray into it.
lelanthran 10mo ago
As someone who is completely disinterested in sports[1], I like this analogy. ----------------------------- [1] Watching them, anyway. I like playing, but I get almost sleepy-coma-like boredom by watching it. Probably a personality deficiency, but meh.
ruslan 10mo ago
Ice hockey player also here. Defence. Pretty neat analogy with Google. :)
pankajdoharey 10mo ago
Google is far from dead we need grounding of truth, and from what i hear they already have perplexity like answer engine in testing internally.
darubedarob 10mo ago
Shortfirm video generated based upon ai search?
raincole 10mo ago
> Look where everyone is looking In other words, Google. Google search grows every year despite people are dead sure it's "dead." [0]: https://sparktoro.com/blog/new-research-google-search-grew-20-in-2024-receives-373x-more-searches-than-chatgpt/ https://sparktoro.com/blog/new-research-google-search-grew-2...
- autoexec 10mo ago
  Google search sucks and it's sucking worse all the time. Nobody knows what else to use though so people keep using it. The results are mostly spam and AI slop. If a searcher has to search several times to get information they used to get with a single query suddenly the average number of searches per searcher spikes and it looks like growth I guess. Worse, lots of people are trusting the AI results which is bound to lead them astray with lies and eventually be corrupted with ads/paid manipulation. For now though, the results Google returns are also mostly AI generated crap so at least people save themselves a click.
microtherion 10mo ago
> From what I can tell, everyone seems to be looking at chatbots A friend recently explained to me that this trend is awful for newer businesses trying to get into a niche: * Chatbots give a lot of weight to Wikipedia in their training data. * Wikipedia demands "notability" for pages being created. * So non-incumbent businesses have a hard time getting on Wikipedia, and chatbots keep recommending incumbents.
- autoexec 10mo ago
  Eventually the solution for this will be you paying the AI company to promote your products or suppress your competitors. Even now, chatbots are a terrible way to get product recommendations. They're trained on way too much ad copy and too many bullshit reviews. As ever, the best thing a company can do to advertise is simply to be excellent at what they do and be very affordable.

philco 10mo ago

Skate to where the puck is going

kevin_thibedeau 10mo ago
Better to stop playing the game. --WOPR
- AndrewKemendo 10mo 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
  - willturman 10mo ago
    Revenue generation via advertising is an emergent property of humanity?
    - pixl97 10mo ago
      100%, but it's not a direct 1:1 relationship. First you need agriculture so people tend to settle in one place. After ag comes more specialization, farmers need houses, graineries, and as society grows social specialists in which we'd call government. These things in an area typically cause the area to grow because of their stability. As they grow you get more than one person/business doing the same line of work and you get more people than fit in ones monkeysphere. At that size you may not know a person that knows what you need to know and start looking further. This is why as cities grow advertising itself becomes an emergent property. Just go to a Roman city and look for dick pavers for example. Then someone will think "Hey, I can give some poor kids a board with a message on it and have them cry out to go to the place that people pay me to advertise" and suddenly you have an emergent property of humanity.
      - willturman 10mo ago
        I (mis)attributed an element of pre-destination to the word emergent that apparently doesn't map to the word properly used. That said, there's a petroglyph (circa 1150-1600 CE) of a macaw (among other sign-like petroglyphs)[1] on the walls above the pueblo ruins in Frijoles Canyon in Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico that came to mind when reading your explanation. The pueblo ruins themselves are immediately above an agriculturally developed riverbed floodplain with structures previously used for food storage. It doesn't seem too far fetched to analogize a macaw above a pueblo in a canyon to, say, a flamingo on a neon sign (Circa 20th century)[2] above a bar along a highway, or an ad on a phone in 2025. Perhaps advertising is emergent (and, dare I say, with an element of pre-destination). [1] https://www.nps.gov/places/petroglyphs-pueblo-loop-trail-stop-21.htm https://www.nps.gov/places/petroglyphs-pueblo-loop-trail-sto... [2] https://www.flickr.com/photos/25229906@N00/4056975591/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/25229906@N00/4056975591/
      - 10mo ago
- tomjuggler 10mo ago
  Whoever said that lived with their parents and didn't pay rent

tomjuggler 10mo ago

It's short form video for sure. My wife just got 4 WhatsApp messages from our new Instagram campaign in 1 hour. Spent $1.50 so far. So Zuckerberg is the ref now?

AznHisoka 10mo ago

AI SEO is where the attention is going, with ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/Google AI Overviews replacing the need for people to visit websites

echelon 10mo ago
It's unnatural to search an LLM for a product. It's why Alexa never became a shopping portal. Best way to get the word out about a product now is through an influencer in the space. -- Edit: Show of hands for anyone using ChatGPT to shop. Be honest. People don't even use Google to shop. They try to find something either (1) by brand name, eg. "iphone" or (2) generically by category, eg. "best cold weather tent". In the former case, Google used their enormous, antitrust flaunting power and 90% browser marketshare to turn the URL bar into a competitive trademark bidding dragnet. Apple pays out the nose for the iPhone spot. For every click. And every other major corporation selling to business or consumer does the same. This is the source of Google's enormous wealth. Google is a middle man. You cannot conceivably get to a brand or product without paying the Google tax. In the latter case, when people try to look up blogs and reviews and Reddit posts to compare products, Google gets in the way and inserts themselves into the flow. If LLMs make this experience even shittier, there won't be upstream content to source as no reward will reach the people providing the value. It will naturally atrophy over time. As a new sales channel, young people are buying content off of TikTok and Instagram directly now. When they see influencers using products they like, it leads to massive sales volume. New unicorn consumer businesses are being minted regularly from this.
- ben_w 10mo ago
  Alexa never became a good shopping portal because voice interfaces regularly mishear you, so there was always a lot of doubt about what it might be ordering, and also has anyone except the obscenely rich ever gone "yes, the first result, that's always fine, no I will not bother looking at any of the prices on any of the results"? Hence the joke about the reason why Amazon bought Whole Foods being that Bezos said one day "Alexa, buy me something from Whole Foods" and Alexa mishearing it as "Buy Whole Foods". LLMs are not limited to voice interfaces. You absolutely can use ChatGPT as a search engine if you want to: it does give you results you can compare, telling you about pros and cons of various options, and you can discuss with it what your end-goals are and have it turn a vague idea into a shopping list (that may or may not be complete for your project). I don't have any reason to think these are the best, ChatGPT is not a storefront and OpenAI does not have a long history as a search engine, but it absolutely can be used this way.

bluedino 10mo ago

> The person kept making the comment that she couldn't see/find the puck and it made it frustrating to watch. Lifelong hockey fan, I never understood this complaint. I believe it was FOX that did the 'highlight the puck' thing for a few years in the 1990's. You can't see the ball in American football, either. But you don't need to. The guy that's running and everyone is trying to tackle? He has the ball. Just like the guy skating across the ice with his stick on the ground? He's got the puck. When you CAN see the puck/ball, either someone lost control of it, or they're shooting/throwing/passing it.

pedalpete 10mo ago
I'd go a step further and say the ball/puck is not the interesting thing to watch. Imagine if you couldn't see the players, and just saw the puck. Would that be interesting at all? Think about tennis. There is the trope of people's eyes going back and forth following the ball, but I don't think they are following the ball directly. They are going back and forth looking at the person who is going to hit the ball.
- tshaddox 10mo ago
  I think you might be conflating knowing where the puck is with being able to fix your eyes on the puck at all times. The complaint is usually about the former. People are complaining that they don't know where the puck is.
  - basch 10mo ago
    you dont know what you dont know. walking into hockey for the first time, you may think you should be looking for the puck. but really, what you want to look for is how the players are moving. it's sort of a "which one is different from all the others." one person will clearly be moving in a completely unique way, as the others chase them or vie to get open or get in somebodys way. to acomplish this identification, youre looking at their legs, shoulders, hands, feet, and heads.
- autoexec 10mo ago

imiric 10mo ago

"AI" is the next advertising frontier, no question. People are throwing themselves to feed you personal data. You no longer have to come up with sneaky ways to collect it, or build out their profile from inferred metadata. Less work for you, more accurate profiling, and less risk getting fined by pesky regulation. Ad campaigns can be much more personal and targeted. You can push them at just the right moment to optimize the chances of conversion. They can be much more persuasive, since chatbots and assistants are deeply trusted. You can dial the sensitivity knob to make them very subtle, or completely blatant, depending on your urgency and client. If I as someone outside of this hostile industry can think up these scenarios, the world is not ready for what advertising geniuses are cooking up as we speak.

mcphage 10mo ago
> the world is not ready for what advertising geniuses are cooking up as we speak. Advertising directed towards AI models, at the very least. If you can get into ChatGPT's weights that McDonalds is the cheapest and tastiest hamburger, how many millions of people would ChatGPT tell that to?
- criddell 10mo ago
  If ChatGPT told you to go to McDonald’s, would you?
  - smileson2 10mo ago
    yeah, it's always a good time for a egg mcmuffin
  - mcphage 10mo ago
    Personally, if ChatGPT told me the sky was blue, I’d go out and check. But if you’re someone who takes advice from ChatGPT, maybe? It’s not like I don’t ever go to McDonalds.

beloch 10mo ago

Bang on. It's advertising, so literally looking at where people are getting their info from is the way to go. Google searches don't produce good results these days. The enshittification has become too extreme. Google openly admits as much (and further intensifies the enshittification) by placing a huge AI summary above those results. The answer is self evident. If, before, you were relying on clicks resulting from google searches, today you need to be what an AI recommends when somebody uses an AI like they used to use google. (Users will eventually become more sophisticated though!) Lots of people are using AI like a search engine and getting better results than google gives simply because massive resources are currently being put into training AI, while mere neglect is insufficient to explain how fast Google search results are getting worse. Is this how AI companies plan to cash in? Accept money from advertisers to promote their products in interactions with their LLM's? Were I an advertiser, I'd be trying to get Anthropic to take my money instead of giving it to Google. AI might be what finally makes it impossible to tell content and ads apart. That's great for advertisers... I guess. Not so great for the rest of us.

PaulDavisThe1st 10mo ago
> Google searches don't produce good results these days. The enshittification has become too extreme. Google openly admits as much (and further intensifies the enshittification) by placing a huge AI summary above those results. I haven't asked Google a question it has failed to provide a more than adequate answer to in ... months? years? And on all my devices, I run google search with &udm=14, so I am not talking about AI summaries. I also have search personalization disabled. I see a lot of people complaining about this on HN. It simply doesn't match my experience at all, in any way.
- JKCalhoun 10mo ago
  I don't want a list of links that I have to then click through in a kind of Russian roulette—hoping I don't get some kind of SEO crap.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 10mo ago

nostrademons 10mo ago

In my anecdotal experience, it's moved to private, trust-based channels: iMessage, WhatsApp, email, face-to-face interactions. Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring the public and the private has finally ended: people don't want to be online, don't trust social media, don't really trust any media, and are living simple local lives with a small circle of friends that they get together with regularly in person. But then, my anecdotal experience may not be representative of most of the world. Most of my friends have money, houses, kids, friends - all of which are, by the numbers, rarities these days. It's an interesting thought experiment to explore what it means if that actually is the new normal, and people are not consuming media or much of anything, or even if the people who are still addicted to social media are now tapped out and don't have any more disposable income left to spend. Probably economic depression. If everybody bought only what they needed and ignored all the advertisements, our present level of economic activity would plunge.

mikepurvis 10mo ago
Absolutely this. I recently got a nice photo taken with my kids and for the first time I... didn't post it on Facebook. I sent it to my family group chat. Yesterday I posted on Facebook for the first time in months and it was about the power being out for an hour in the ice storm. I haven't posted travel photos to FB in years. I'm mostly still on FB at all for the acquaintance-level connections to things like neighbourhood, church, and hobby communities. All the people I actually care about are in private group chats. I was reflecting recently that Google Plus actually had the right idea back in 2011 with "circles", but at the time we all said it was too hard figuring out which circles we wanted to share a particular message or thought with. Hmm, maybe they were ahead of the game all along?
- hinkley 10mo ago
  One of the things I hope will come from the Trough of Disillusionment in cloud computing will be families running redundant file servers hosting the family photos instead of doing everything on IG. Your three tech savvy family members should all have redundant copies of the photos of memaw’s wedding and Uncle Jim when he was 2 and looked exactly like your cousin’s second kid. I don’t need to see those. Your stalker ex boyfriend definitely doesn’t need to see those. It’s none of our goddamned business. Someone, I think WD? Already made a play at this but I think it fell on deaf ears and will have to be tried again after the hype cycle calms tf down.

baxtr 10mo ago

This is a great analogy and approach! One rough heuristic I use is people-watching on the subway. Just a quick glance from a distance at their phones. What are they actually looking at? (Yeah I know it's a bit nosy...) I see: short-form video, WhatsApp/Messaging, YouTube long-format - in that order.

GuB-42 10mo ago

> ...vertical, shortform video. Not sure how that plays out in terms of advertising... I have seen a comment about them being terrible for advertising, it looks like a "good" idea but it is not. The problem is that the attention of people watching these videos drop to almost zero, too much is happening in a too short amount of time, and as a result nothing is remembered, including the ads. It is a very good deal for whoever is monetizing this content, they show a lot of ads, plenty of revenue, but not for those who are paying for the ads. It is like subliminal messages, "good" idea, but not very effective. For ads to work, people need to pay attention. I don't know how ads in chatbots will turn out and what form it will take, but I think it is inevitable.

SunshineTheCat 10mo ago
For sure, I've been hesitantly awaiting ChatGPT's first "sponsored" reply, or at least, one that features a "sponsored" product or link.
- actionfromafar 10mo ago
  How would you know?
  - GuB-42 10mo ago
    They are probably going to make them obvious at first, like with Google search. But they can also make it more pernicious. For example by having companies pay them so that they can train their AI on their products, with regular updates. Not technically an ad, but the AI will be more aware of their products so that they are more likely to be recommended to the user. In other words, that's paying for the right to advertise to the AI rather than to advertise to consumers directly.
    - jabwd 10mo ago
      probably, probably and more probably. Why would they ever make it obvious? It makes no sense. google just had the luck of political inaction, and eventually enshitified it further to the point where you might not know it was an ad.

Moto7451 10mo ago

> 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. And to add to this, the dark pattern of the time was to register in the Phone Book as “AAA Your Real Business Name” which was exactly what my first job did.

moralestapia 10mo ago

Nice, I really enjoyed this interpretation of Jobs famous quote. Even getting into the character "I used to be a goalie" was pretty cool as well!

underlipton 10mo ago

>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 chill that ran down my spine when I realized that you and TFA think that the part people care about is Google as an ad platform, and not as a way to access websites. Jesus fucking Christ, things are bleak.

PantaloonFlames 10mo ago
Do you know how Google makes money?
- underlipton 10mo ago
  I actually don't care. Most people don't. We care about the quality of service. Aside from Google employees and shareholders, I assume that most users would prefer a useful service that barely makes the company any money, versus a money-printer that's useless and a PITA to use.

blueboo 10mo ago

The recent Acquired ep on “Alphabet Inc” put it aptly: social media moved into Google’s space, video (reels, “pivot to video”), and social media for socialising moved to message groups, iMessage/Whatsapp/Discord. Revenue-wise, video ads have always been the sun to print ads peanut m&m. Look where the pucks going then: Implication: ChatGPT as a realtime video avatar will hit the jackpot with ads, but not before. Count on the ChatGPT device having a screen for that reason

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

sharinsights 10mo ago

Interesting way to put it!

cryptica 10mo ago

It's moved to AI training sets. If you can't get your product into the training set of a popular model, it's game over.

giardini 10mo ago

So maybe the puck is on TV? Reason I say this is that this guy (Bob Hoffman) https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=Ad+Contrarian&mid=887326486600BF78E242887326486600BF78E242&FORM=VIRE https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=Ad+Cont... says people watch ads on TV not the Internet.

noisy_boy 10mo ago

Maybe magnifying the puck could be a good use case for AR glasses

KellyCriterion 10mo ago

> 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. < Interesting! I thought, they did it because of the stock-item-list order :-D

makeitdouble 10mo ago

This is an analogy that is very appealing, which is precisely why I feel it sends the fundamentally wrong message. There is not one single puck in the web search field, and we actively don't want that situation in the first place (want no monopoly or cartel). There should be at least 2 if not a ton more. Everyone focusing their attention and resource on a single thing is the absolute worst case scenario. I also hope the future of search is not where every existing player is looking at. That means there is no disruption happening, money straight dictates the winner and nothing truly innovative is expected. Even "skating where the puck will be" is essentially following someone else's play. It can be fine, but I'd prefer to focus on the person actually acting on the puck, where they're trying to lead the game.

goosebumps 10mo ago

So, The King is dead long live the King!

instagraham 10mo ago

I know this might seem reductive but when you say "look where everyone is looking", the answer hasn't really changed since the 2010s — it's our phones. (and to some extent, monitors if you account for the amount of time 9-5 people spend on their work laptops or screens. desktop is not dead but that's another matter) The hot apps are for now, chatbots and vertical shortform platforms. We know advertisers get much better bang for their buck marketing where the influencers are. Google is "dead" because search advertising is much worse at figuring you out and showing you stuff when you're not necessarily looking for it. But Google can easily advertise where the eyeballs are - your phones. We must remember that enshittification is an ongoing process and Google has the power to reach billions of people, one shitty update at a time. From their POV, it definitely feels like a miss that they don't own a successful and dedicated social media platform. Maybe they will make another foray into it.

lelanthran 10mo ago

As someone who is completely disinterested in sports[1], I like this analogy. ----------------------------- [1] Watching them, anyway. I like playing, but I get almost sleepy-coma-like boredom by watching it. Probably a personality deficiency, but meh.

ruslan 10mo ago

Ice hockey player also here. Defence. Pretty neat analogy with Google. :)

pankajdoharey 10mo ago

Google is far from dead we need grounding of truth, and from what i hear they already have perplexity like answer engine in testing internally.

darubedarob 10mo ago

Shortfirm video generated based upon ai search?

raincole 10mo ago

> Look where everyone is looking In other words, Google. Google search grows every year despite people are dead sure it's "dead." [0]: https://sparktoro.com/blog/new-research-google-search-grew-20-in-2024-receives-373x-more-searches-than-chatgpt/ https://sparktoro.com/blog/new-research-google-search-grew-2...

autoexec 10mo ago
Google search sucks and it's sucking worse all the time. Nobody knows what else to use though so people keep using it. The results are mostly spam and AI slop. If a searcher has to search several times to get information they used to get with a single query suddenly the average number of searches per searcher spikes and it looks like growth I guess. Worse, lots of people are trusting the AI results which is bound to lead them astray with lies and eventually be corrupted with ads/paid manipulation. For now though, the results Google returns are also mostly AI generated crap so at least people save themselves a click.

microtherion 10mo ago

> From what I can tell, everyone seems to be looking at chatbots A friend recently explained to me that this trend is awful for newer businesses trying to get into a niche: * Chatbots give a lot of weight to Wikipedia in their training data. * Wikipedia demands "notability" for pages being created. * So non-incumbent businesses have a hard time getting on Wikipedia, and chatbots keep recommending incumbents.

autoexec 10mo ago
Eventually the solution for this will be you paying the AI company to promote your products or suppress your competitors. Even now, chatbots are a terrible way to get product recommendations. They're trained on way too much ad copy and too many bullshit reviews. As ever, the best thing a company can do to advertise is simply to be excellent at what they do and be very affordable.