The $300B Google-Meta advertising duopoly is under attack(economist.com) |
The $300B Google-Meta advertising duopoly is under attack(economist.com) |
Replace the operator and the subaru with a drone then the prospects change. With a single drone flying a programmed route at 20mph during daylight you'd have mapped the ~22000 miles of maintained roads in Los Angeles in under 100 days. Maybe you could contract with city vehicles who would like to have street view maps of their cities, and just stick the cameras on garbage trucks and the like and have the bulk of the area mapped before long over the course of their regular job duties coming into different areas.
Google's big advantage is that their core product has fundamental value (search and by proxy: ads) and their secondary products are such loss-leaders that outcompeting those freebies (Google office suite, Gmail, maps, YT, chrome, ml tooling) is where the real difficulty comes in. But building a core-search competitor is far easier than competition with Apple or Msft's core products. Google has a lot more scaffolding that FB, but they too have a single point of failure. A sea-change (like Mapreduce, pagerank, the smartphone) can see them collapse swiftly.
On the other hand, enterprise / feature-checklist companies lie in a stable equilibrium. You can't really beat them unless you invest a similar amount of resources into it. And even if you defeat them, they'll catch up to you in time if they're run at similar levels of competency and can throw a ton money money at it. Microsoft and Apple are exactly that. It's like trying to start a Boeing or Nvidia competitor. You better at least be at Airbus's or AMD's level before even trying to compete against boeing.
Microsoft's weakness is best displayed by Adpbe's acquisition of Figma. If Microsoft is run in a similarly predatory manner and a competitor gets 10 free years to catch up on 1 feature while you continuously fail to innovate, then you feel a mild threat, at which point you can simply outbid and acquire them. That shows how remarkably comfortable of a position Adobe is in, and Microsft and Apple sit a couple of orders of magnitude above that.
Microsoft Office adoption in the enterprise dwarfs GSuite.
Why don't we put Apple in with somebody like: MAIA -- Microsoft, Apple, Intel, AMD. Maybe add NVIDIA, you have to work out a good acronym though.
MANIA
Likewise, Apple sells luxury goods.
If I had to bet on one FAAMNG in a sharp recession it would be Amazon. They have the most diversified revenue streams.
How is a luxury good affordable by over 50% of the US market?
The later has a "bot protection" page that looks like Cloudflare's but someone suggested it is not. Makes sense because archive.today and Cloudflare were in a spat some time ago. Archive.today wanted to allow monitoring of users' locations, e.g., via EDNS Client Subnet, but Cloudflare did not send ECS.
Unlike Archive.today, Internet Archive does not try to force users to enable Javascript or make them solve CAPTCHAs. Nor does Common Crawl.
It is interesting to contrast the Internet Archive (IA) with Archive.today. The later is vague about how it is funded and admits it could sell out to advertisers in the future.^1 There is obviously no small amount of data it could collect about user interests and behaviours that could be used to support advertising. For example, what usage data does it store, if any. What are the Terms of Use for that data. There are no public statements about any restrictions on what the website operator can do. The operator invites users to "Ask me anything" but AFAICT the website has no Privacy Policy. The operator admits it sends the client's IP in a X-Forwarded-For HTTP header. This is not something one would experience with IA. The server hosting the page being archived receives an IA IP address as the client IP address, not an IA user's IP address. IA has a Privacy Policy, last updated in 2001.^2 Unlike Archive.today, I feel reasonably confident IA wil not sell out to commercial interests but who knows.
1. From Archive.today's FAQ:
How is the archive funded?
It is privately funded; there are no complex finances behind it. It may look more or less reliable compared to startup-style funding or a university project, depending on which risks are taken into account.
Will advertising appear on the archive one day ?
I cannot make a promise that it will not. With the current growth rate I am able to keep the archive free of ads. Well, I can promise it will have no ads at least till the end of 2014.
2. YMMV, but IME but the fewer "updates" to a Privacy Policy over time the better.
Advertising ruins every form of media it touches. From radio, television, newspapers (it's arguably responsible for killing journalism), and now the internet, and all the services we use it for.
Web search is useless because of it. Most websites are pretty much spyware. A large percentage of them are SEO spam, existing only to serve ads. Most content on YouTube, the largest video platform, is unwatchable due to constant ad breaks and sponsored content. Astroturfing is everywhere, promoted posts flood social media sites. Advertising is instrumental to spreading of disinformation, propaganda, toppling of democracies and companies like Cambridge Analytica. And if all that wasn't enough, _paid_ subscription services have started serving ads. It's the same business model from TV, but even more intrusive and lucrative since user tracking and microtargetting is now possible.
Stop. Just stop. Users want none of this. Of course, everyone loves getting services for free, but what adtech companies are getting in exchange for user data now is worth much more than the "free" services they offer. *They should be paying us instead.*
We need new business models that are as easy for content providers to implement, yet don't come at the expense of user experience, and don't cause services to deteriorate into a privacy nightmare. This should be easier nowadays with cryptocurrencies. I still think the Basic Attention Token[1] is a step in the right direction. Are there more examples of this?
Archive.today FAQ:
Do you preserve archivers' privacy? E.g. not disclose the source IP address?
Yes.
But take in mind that when you archive a page, your IP is being sent to the the website you archive as though you are using a proxy (in X-Forwarded-For header). This feature allows websites (e.g shops or the sites with weather forecast) target your region, not mine.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220913195108if_/https://archiv...
You can easily test this. You will find that, actually, it does not send this header. Or the client's IP address in any other way.
This solution is backwards; people should not only create content for you, but they should pay you for the privilege of having you enjoy it?
It wasn't ads that killed journalism; it was the proliferation of free content that killed the funding for any kind of meaningful journalism. BAT isn't the right direction; they just tack on a crypto grift to make other people rich. I'd argue services like Netflix and Disney+ are the type of business models that work without ads, its just that people dont want to pay for content.
I was specifically referring to "free" services from the likes of Google and Meta. The value they extract from user data is worth much more than the value users are getting from their services. Tech companies paying users isn't a novel idea[1].
For content providers I'm arguing that there should be new business models they can rely on that doesn't detract from the user experience. Patreon is also a good alternative.
> BAT isn't the right direction; they just tack on a crypto grift to make other people rich.
That's the cynical take, and, sure, I don't trust Brave Inc. either. That said, funding a crypto wallet from which I can selectively pay for the content I consume is a sound model, even if this specific implementation isn't ideal.
> I'd argue services like Netflix and Disney+ are the type of business models that work without ads, its just that people dont want to pay for content.
People are definitely paying for it. For a short while there a few years back, there was probably a reduction in pirated content. But large studios got greedy, enforced region locking even more, the market split up into dozens of similar services, and now consumers are expected to subscribe to many different streaming services to access content, which is exactly what we were trying to escape from TV by cord cutting.
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2020/10/30/sh...
You don’t see an issue with that statement?
but they perform important economy function: connect buyers and sellers..
Do they? I've never once clicked on an ad and made a purchase, and I'm a fairly regular consumer. If I have a need for a product, I'll search for it.
All advertising does is create a false desire to own a product by psychologically manipulating the viewer. It is dishonest by definition.
In order to make a purchase, I first have to have a need for a product. This should arise naturally, not via some artifically produced desire. Then I'd like to read the true specifications of all suitable products that I can find, and read hopefully real and honest reviews by people who've purchased them. After that, I will narrow down my search and will only make a purchase if I think a specific product will fulfill my needs.
Advertising directly interferes with this concept, steps in as a middle man between buyer and seller, and introduces all kinds of psychological tricks to manipulate me to not even make the purchase--I just need to click on an ad, and I make the advertiser money. It is unnecessary at best, and outright harmful at worst.
Without ads we wouldn't pick products blindly we'd simply have more product-comparison sites.
I don't see blockchain as a knight in shining armour here. Search is one of those hard things. Like sending a man to the moon. No one can compete overnight. Maybe the hope is AI could create a scenario where a search engine running locally is realistic (like all the prompt-based image generation stuff that has come out, can be run locally now).
There's nothing making the search engine refrain from additional ads.
Remember magazines? They were paid. And still had lots of ads.
Companies track conversion rates from Ads, and since they still put money, it means Ads work for many cases.
and you would need ad to promote your product comparison site. And then we will go full circle with leading sites abusing their power, and manipulating search results.
If search becomes a utility, like water or natural gas, presumably there would be some limit to the advertising. I think the original Google results with ads on the right format is a good compromise. Because 2% of the time an ad is what you actually want, and those options are then presented still.
TSMCs market cap is 4x Intel’s and produces far more processors and has a more advanced manufacturing process.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3637079/as-google-move...
> Google grew its share of the productivity software market to 10.3% in 2020, according to research from Gartner, taking about 2% from Microsoft. Microsoft is still the clear leader however, with 89.2%. Overall, the productivity software suite market grew 18.2% during 2020.
YouTube is making 10s of billions a year profit. Its margins on absolutely bonkers.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2022-Q2...
“Productivity & Business Processes” - $7.698 Billion in revenue.
That segment includes Office 365 and LinkedIn and Dynamics
As far as YouTube having huge margins
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/26/youtubes-huge-miss-shows-dig...
Gmail, yes it would be huge without google but its only so bug because google forced it down everyone's throats with mandatory google accounts for android, maps, youtube, drive, etc.
GSuite again this would never be s big without google's backing. Just look at its non MS competitors.
Not to mention that even with “great design” any Android phone is still stuck with being Android and the lack of integration between software, hardware and ecosystem.
Google isn’t exactly known for great customer support or anything else that requires high touch.
It's the design and ecosystem that keeps consumers buying Apple product but what used to be seen as cool and hip can turn old-fashioned after a while; Sony's Walkman products used to be everywhere but where are they now?
Do you remember that Apple became dominant in the iPod era by buying up all of the worlds supply of 2.5 inch hard drives and later flash chips?
Anyone else is going to struggle to get the prices or manufacturing time from suppliers to produce at scale.
Heck Sony is struggling to make even 21 million PS5 in a year. If Sony can’t manufacture at scale, which electronic manufacturer can?
It’s not just priced for design, it’s processor design, supply chain management, software, software/hardware integration etc.
1. Who else can Apple put as default search engine? -- Bing? But Microsoft is Apples direct competitor on laptop and desktop market. Who knows what Bing would show users? And other competitors in search market are extinct. Yahoo, AOL, etc. Duck is using BING's api.
There are local market search engines (like Yandex in russia), but they already are default search engines on mobile in that markets(at least on lot of android devices, don't know about iOS).
At most Apple would offer user to chose search engine on first set-up, and guess what users would chose?
So we slowly are moving to second point.
I don't thing Google needs to pay for this, they just are doing this by inertia. Most competitors are extinct. And people know by word of mouth, that google "is the best search engine".
About Firefox it might be tricky. People who decided to try firefox can be more interested in trying another search engine as well, so here their payment for default SE makes some sense.
If Google didn’t need to pay, why are they paying $18 Billion a year?
I added the part “are forced to” because as much as I rail against the government getting involved in the free market when it comes to tech, it even makes me feel uneasy that the two major mobile platforms are unabashedly colluding and one is outright paying the other to funnel customers.
Not sure about PC, but I bet availability of more apps and games can tip the scales. I consider MS more competition than Android. But that's just my perspective.
> it even makes me feel uneasy that the two major mobile platforms are unabashedly colluding and one is outright paying the other to funnel customers.
Indeed sounds creepy.
P.S. As other commenters mentioned -- there is Brave search, about which I was not aware, that it has their own Crawler. Apple could potentially switch to it(or buy it).
https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/o68v4c/comment/...
Perhaps Apple can switch to it, then :D
Needs lots of servers and expertise how to write this spiders.
IMO, The vulnerability from most vulnerable to least goes:
Facebook > Google >> Apple ~> Microsoft = Amazon
What else busdines does Meta have beyond FB, Instagram, Whatsapp?
I guess they are somehow wurnelable to search market problems(including regulations), but that won't make them collapse, just less wealthy. And they can start monetizing WA and Insta more agresively.
Perhaps your concerns are one of reasons why they are investing so much in metaverse.
Google on other hand has bigger hold. They have Hosting business(which is not profitable currently, if that is truth), and YouTube. If something happens with search business, YouTube would feed Alphabet. Also money from play store and licensing fees from android vendors. I bet, Google's investment in Android was great move. It makes them more secure than Facebook.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-oracle-google-lawsuit-idU...
Android was already dominant as far as market share. Also Google is non existent in the worlds largest mobile market - China. That’s Apple’s biggest market.
Apple has to be making more from Google on mobile from the money that Google pays Apple to be the default search engine (a reported $18 billion) a year than Google makes from Android.
Just thinking, who would be screwed more... hm.
These days as long as consumers have Office, Adobe’s software and a good web browser, they don’t care.
Apple does have its own crawler - AppleBot. It uses its own “search engine” in parts of the interface.
I’ve spent most of the last 10 years earning my living from an e-commerce business I own. The online advertising industry is unrecognisable from when we started. My thesis, in beef, is that the industries excessive uses of personalised data and tracking lead to increased regulation, and then a massive pivot to even more “AI” as a means to circumvent that (to some extent). The AI in the ad industry now, I believe, is detrimental to the advertiser. It’s now just one big black box, you put money in one side and get traffic out the other. The control and useful tracking (what actual search terms people are using, proper visible conversion tracking of an ad) is now almost non-existent. As an advertiser your livelihood is dependant on an algorithm, not skill, not intuition, not experience, not even track record.
Facebook, Google and the rest of the industry were so driven by profit at all cost, and at the expense of long term thinking, they shot themselves in the foot.
Advertisers are searching for alternatives, but they are all the same.
I think online advertising, as a whole, is probably f***ed…
Trying to restrict my advertising budget to just one city and do a hard geographic restriction to just US IP addresses did not work. I filed 5 tickets over two weeks with Google trying to get this resolved, only to have over half my budget spent in another continent making impressions with people that will literally never buy the local specific product advertised.
By default it's set to "People -interested- in your target location" . You need to change it to "People who are -in- your target location".
This setting is hidden under a toggle, so it's very easy to miss. Definitely a dark pattern and results in a lot of garbage clicks if you overlook that setting.
This is just one of many dark patterns which makes Google Ads effective only for people willing to spend the time tuning and tweaking every single setting.
A big part of the problem is Google themselves - they say always use "broad" keyword matches (and of course it's the default). Broad matches are really not good for most campaigns unless you have an extremely large budget, yet if you read their documentation they heavily encourage it.
While we're at it...
1) Never enable the "auto apply recommendations" setting. If you do, it gives Google free reign to modify your campaigns (this has always resulted in worse performance and more spend in my experience)
2) Never listen to a google ads rep if they call. Once you're spending enough, they'll call you every week trying to convince you to change various settings. 95% of the time their advice is just plain bad. The quality of the advice does increase once you're spending enough and get assigned more senior reps. But even the senior reps are there to get you to spend more money, their job is not to make your campaigns more effective, "ad specialists" are simply sales people in disguise.
Google intentionally modified both geo-targeting and mobile app targeting, removing the options advertisers set. For example, you opted out of mobile app targeted. Then they removed the option and you had to set it in the domain blacklist. Then they removed that. This wasn't a one off, hid, modified, and moved these options repeatedly.
Advertisers didn't know that when you geo-targeted a location, by default it was set to users searching that location. You didn't want people in India who were interested in NYC? Too bad.
Remember the whole Adwords prescription drug settlement. This is an organization run by people who would be serving hard time if they didn't have a legion of lawyers and bottomless pockets.
For whatever reason, Google was showing my ads to people on the other side of the planet and then taking my money for the privilege.
Most other non-faang ad networks are hot garbage. So many bots. In my view, Google has a "monopoly" not because of anti-competitive behaviour... It's because they have the best ad product.
If google is making it harder for people to spend money on ads, something is either seriously broken or alphabet figured out another way to make money that isn't ads
This is not possible unless the end user are willing to provide geo tracking for your convenience. The IP of the phone is the one of a datacenter, and it can be in any state (speaking about the US) - heck, in some cases, there could be multiple outgoing IPs in different datacenterss, different states.
It's just a fallacy and wishful thinking... unless google combines the geo location data where the user has been logged with the browser one. Which, of course it is.
In other words, companies now have to compete by making useful products at a good price, rather than gaming SEO.
Say, In a world of 1,000,000,000+ great products, reaching consumers through word-of-mouth is hard.
I bet there are products that solves a lot of your current problems at a decent price. But you don't know about it and none of your friends or network have the same problem for you to give you the solution.
The only way to solve this problem is for the product/service provider to know about you and the fact that you have a problem.
Advertising is actually an optimal / scalable way for companies to reach you.
In a Billion+ product world, you need at least 10 Million Trust worthy reviewers to give you an unbiased review of everything. But, how do you trust the reviewers?
If you don’t pay Google/Facebook you’re absolutely screwed. You will lose no matter how good the product is.
What this actually means is that now companies have to pay a Google/Meta tax simply to enter the playing field. And once they enter the playing field. And once you enter the playing field, the only winners will be the ones who pay them the highest amount of money.
So a smaller business, which in the past could potentially use some ingenuity, or target a specific niche audience to get some traction and then build word of mouth and let the product do the talking, doesn’t even stand a chance now because they simply cannot differentiate themselves as your exposure is entirely dependent on how much money you give Google/Meta.
This is a delightful turn of phrase. I wonder if it was deliberate or an autocorrect happy accident.
It shouldn't surprise anyone here that online advertising is wildly saturated and that users are unable to engage with thousands of brand voices a day.
Maybe we’ll move back to a better model that helps support decent content.
You can say it's their fault for building on top of someone elses land, and you would be mostly right. But online commerce has become a mess, and it is just hard to make it work without being on these platforms. They have hoovered up all the customers, and dominate all the avenues for advertising online.
It seems to be that Google basically collects the whole profit margin. Companies will do this to keep growth as high as possible to justify their high market caps and hope that they can eventually scale back on advertising and keep their customer base.
People complain about the tracking of visitors, but the tracking of advertisers own business is equally as abusive.
Look, I’m about as anti-consumer at you can get, but whoever is in charge of advertising over at Instagram has me literally scared for my life. I want almost every product they try to sell me, and I’ve never been this targeted by any ad in my entire life. I even recently made a new purchase of shoes outside of Insta because of the influence their ads had on me. It’s pretty fucking incredible.
In short, and paraphrased a bit to speak to your context, you're no longer buying impressions / clicks in the traditional transactional sense. Instead you're buying the influence on behavior within the broader context of what these networks know about the individuals within a market, but also what other influence these networks have accrued on the individuals.
It's a blackbox be because it's no longer a simple transaction, but also because the AI (?) is in a broader sense exerting proactive influences. Nudges on behavior that add up and ideally can not only be predicted but also created.
The book is long and deep, but it will also change how you view the world and Big Tech.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capi...
Search advertising is in real trouble, it's one of the reasons I sold my Alphabet shares a year ago. I see long term headwinds in this space. I don't doubt Google can engineer their way out of this, I'm just not willing the market has priced that risk in.
It still felt like a total money pit into which you toss offerings to a dark god which may or may not grant blessings.
Could you elaborate on some of the things that have changed to make it unrecognizable? Wasn't it still targeted ads 10 years ago by the same players mentioned in the article i.e FB and Google?
Does this say anything about AI in general?
My issue with the AI behind ad networks is that it a hostile AI, it is trained with an agenda that does not align to that of the user (the advertiser). The AI is trained to maximise the profits for the platform (Google or Facebook) at the expense of the advertisers own business and the viewers of the ads. It’s an exploitative relationship (to both advertisers and viewers), compleat with all the usual gas lighting and manipulation.
In my view there needs to be a separation of ad placement vendor and advertising exchange. The exchanges need to be regulated in the same was a securities exchange is.
If one subscribes to the idea that reducing spending can help curb inflation, then consider that the "business model" of online advertising-supported "tech" companies seem to require that consumers keep spending, in spite of inflation.
I think companies that are so large, and do one thing (advertise!) cannot be immune from business cycles. But is it a bad thing if these companies don't grow every single damn year.
As far as I know, the technical term for that is greed.
Here is just one of MANY possibilities: https://qbix.com/ecosystem#Decentralizing-the-Marketplace
disclosure: i'm a co-founder
"No, no... we're not competing with ad firms. We're about bringing products to users before there's even a need to advertise them."
In my view advertising can't end fast enough, but my worry is that our economy is so tied to advertising as a model that it would cause a deep depression - as spending would shift and slow down to a halt.
Psychopaths with money that want to trick people into doing what they want will always seek out the most targeted way to manipulate people.
If there's a system that allows advertising psychopaths more granularity in their attempts to burrow into your brain they will be all over it, until all the competitive advantage is burned out and then they will hop to whatever gives them even better advantage
My evil genius idea in 2016 was to eventually just inspect every piece of trash that people throw away (legally possible) to build the most personalized and predictive profile of a consumer possible without strapping a camera to them, which is the ultimate goal.
Would it, though? I can't think of the last thing I bought because I've seen it in an ad. There certainly were some, but I'd be surprised if it all added up to even 1% of what I spent on products and services.
I sympathize with this position. I operate a one stop shop for digital advertising for huge brands.
First I agree that the regulations (the government ones and Apple's) have benefitted no one. This is in a sense totally factual, and I challenge the blowhards here to like, name one substantive harm someone has experienced from ad ID tracking on an iPhone. While I believe government regulations should be proactive, rather than reactive, I believe the sum total history of ad tracking has pretty much confirmed that there aren't any substantive harms to correlated ad IDs.
From the perspective of advertisers:
An enlightening explanation of the Google value ad I read came from another guy explaining how he advertised dev tools on Google. He created a YouTube ad so that Johnny Programmer, watching YouTube videos on a weekend, would see a demo of his devops tool because Johnny searched "how to connect git to kubernetes" or whatever in the previous 10 days. And those ads converted really well. Even though the YouTube video had no contextual relationship with the ad the user saw.
So it sounds like you are complaining about the flaws in Google's tracking UI. Well, I guess e-mail them some more.
The sense of entitlement from those on the other side of the ads business, and their disdain for what users might want or how they feel, shows exactly why this business and industry is broken. And frankly why the whole thing is being dragged down right now. Figure it out. Adapt. It's what every other business has to do all the time.
You then give a perfect example right in the next paragraph:
> so that Johnny Programmer, watching YouTube videos on a weekend, would see a demo of his devops tool because Johnny searched "how to connect git to kubernetes" or whatever in the previous 10 days.
So now Johnny Programmer's work life is hounding him on weekends. Even worse, he is being influenced to buy a paid product to do something that could probably be easily achieved with open source tools as well.
How quickly we forget/forgot this proof of concept:
http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-...
Twitter is now a unit of being moderately unsuccessful at advertising.
the amazing thing about social media ads, is that they make me less engaged than more... i wouldnt touch a facebook url with a ten foot pole... I will never update my linkedin again.... blech
How is it so inconceivable to you that people use LinkedIn?
Twitter advertising should be the highest CPM out there, with the probably wealth and influence level of its audience.
You and I have very different experiences of Twitter
What? Twitter is firehose news for, in my experience, the lowest common denominator unless you spend an inordinate amount of time curating your own experience.
1. Platform power: Apple was a key supplier to Facebook in the sense that they provide platform driving a significant % of their Ads revenue. With Apple tightening privacy they have become an indirect but significant threat to Facebook. Google is relatively safe.
2. Threat of substitutes: as seen in Amazon, Ecom platforms are much closer to the customer. Us timer is about to make a purchase. I think over time Advertisers will eventually shift to platforms like amazon, Etsy etc so that can reach the customer right when they are about to make a purchase. Some what same appeal with snap and TikTok.
Overall online ad industry will continue to flourish but will see big changes in who are the big players.
Second is using my search for socks elsewhere on the platform. This is essentially using user-data outside of the intent it was given and that should be controllable by the user and default to the most conservative option without annoying dialogue boxes or other harassment. Whether it's within the platform or not shouldn't make a difference.
So competition is good, but unfortunately what I'm taking away from this that companies are going to bake more ads into their products because the products themselves aren't seeing much competitive pressure (except maybe for Meta and rightfully so).
[1] https://www.makeuseof.com/windows-11-remove-ads/
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-08-14/apple-...
Everything you just said is voided by the fact that Google's ad business continues to boom. It's going nowhere. And I say that as someone that dislikes Google. Your pitch is emotionalism, I've been reading rants like that on HN for the past ~15 years. They're in practically every thread on Google or advertising. Meanwhile Google has gotten 17 times larger in that span of time.
Their business has doubled in size since the beginning of 2019. Their operating income has skyrocketed.
When did the death struggle begin for them exactly?
Google once had the right approach - showing ads related to the search terms. It was polite and nicely delineated. But that wasn't going to earn them money from unrelated ad campaigns.
Google may very well face competition from device manufacturers and the like, but this article does not provide any details about it whatsoever.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/small-businesses-cou...
Apple accidentally attacked small businesses that used to rely on geographically relevant advertising by increasing privacy protection.
There is no easy solution here.
The reason I see TikTok as a threat is largely because the company ignores all the rules and regulations that protect the privacy of minors and adults alike and companies will want that data regardless. Facebook won't be able to supply it to them since it has to abide by our laws.
OTOH TikTok being based in a nations that's a strategic competitor to the U.S. may well mean the company is simply banned. IMHO it would be more fortuitous for Meta and Google to lobby for a ban. Fighting TikTok will not work.
Real-Life ads became competitive with internet advertising. In fact, they might be better for a large number companies.
Unless they can manage to guarantee that ads are being seen by real humans, I think their revenue will keep dropping.
It might be in our individual best interest to have super effective advertising (for increased revenue), but it might be in the world’s interest to not allow that, because effective advertising leads to consumption… (and for privacy reasons,etc.)
Oh wait..
https://ethique.rexel.com/en/competition-law/abuse-of-a-domi...
"A dominant position is not defined merely by market share, but by classification as a market leader. Typically, a company is considered to hold a dominant position if it has a market share of more than 40%, but even a market share of 15% may be considered dominant if it is the largest player in a fragmented market. "
kagi.com bets on becoming a business with revenue. In the same way, Google could start asking money for searches without ads.
In the long run, Google should make more money because a society that runs on the best available information will be more valuable. The information market will be bigger and thus Google's income should be bigger.
The problem is that it's too easy to pitch advertisers against each other and force them to pay a huge fraction of their profits. On the other hand, profit margins in a transparent market are small.
Google could become something like Bloomberg and sell their good information to companies for high margins.
I refuse to believe I'm some kind of one of a kind special snowflake, but whenever I wanna buy something cheap or disposable, like food, socks etc. I just see it and buy it.
On the other hand when I'm looking for something I'm planning to get a bit more mileage out of, like a laptop, a pair of headphones or a cordless drill, I usually read the reviews and buy the product I think is most appropriate for me, not what the ads show.
Of course that's not what the article means, but it's interesting that Google, Meta and TikTok are described as advertising giants when their products ostensibly serve different purposes. I wasn't aware they were comfortable with being so mask-off about the actual nature of what they are, namely vehicles to generate ad impressions.
Having US social media in your country is a huge geopolitical risk, especially if you're one of the regimes that isn't just doing what the US wants at all times.
Key quote:
> For Meta and Google’s corporate parent, Alphabet, the cyclical problem may not be the worst of it. They might once have hoped to offset the digital-ad pie’s slower growth by grabbing a larger slice of it. No longer. Although the two are together expected to rake in around $300bn in revenues this year, sales of their four biggest rivals in the West will amount to almost a quarter as much. If that does not sound like a lot, it is nevertheless giving the incumbents reason to worry. Five years ago most of those rivals were scarcely in the ad business at all (see chart).
- today: Google and FB have 75% of all sales combined and those other rivals have 25%
- 5 years ago: those other rivals had 0%
What does this say about the market share of FB and google 5 years ago? Nothing. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Maybe it was 90%. Maybe it was 75%! But hey, whatever, let’s publish that clickbait article.
YouTube, in my opinion, is far more effective as users are forced to watch 5 second ads prior to watching the video that they are interested in. 5 seconds is too short to context switch and can also convey a lot of information.
Spread that click amongst billions of users, and you have a good revenue stream.
"a combination of independent commercial or industrial enterprises designed to limit competition or fix prices"
They have been sleeping while making money. Now it's time to wake-up and do some serious innovation or become irrelevant
Things don't have to cause obvious harm to still be inappropriate.
Building up a huge library of data about you in an unregulated fashion has never backfired on the public at large, oh wait those exact data warehouses have been continuous sources of pain for users.
The reality is these breaches cost the business next to nothing. After all even if millions of users have <$100 worth of damages it is impossible to recover that. So the business did hundreds of millions of damages at no cost to itself.
People do not want to be tracked and then bombarded with the cloud's idea of who they are (right or wrong), they want to be in control.
Do you think all the uBlock origin and other "anti ad/pro privacy" folks really pay for, say, Youtube to remove ads when they use it. Of course not. Talk is cheap
That will definitely work
Making zuck and google richer.
2. This has already happened. Amazon's Ads is making more profits than Amazon E-Comm itself.
It is nice we finally have some decent discussion on Ads. Rather than the usual HN rant about how all ads are evil. Or Internet should be free of Ads.
In the meantime a new crop of semantic search + question answering engines appear (like DeepSet.ai's Haystack). It's time to ditch link based results. They are primitive and actually don't work well today.
The solution is proper oversight. We've gone too long without regulating advertisements, app stores and video platforms, and we've witnessed the consequences. It's time that we put the interests of the people before FAANG shareholders and HN pundits.
Just like how streaming killed cable, not for the good of the consumer, but so they could simply take on the same profitable business practices.
not necessarily. I don't see how there could be a correlation between the two. When you see "sponsored" on a listing, that doesn't tell you how much the vendor paid. Also many large and reputable vendors will pay simply to guarantee they are at the top of the listing. For the vendors that don't sponsor, you don't know whether the amount they save goes into a higher quality product
> This is essentially using user-data outside of the intent it was given and that should be controllable by the user and default to the most conservative option without annoying dialogue boxes or other harassment.
Except feeding user data back into the system makes certain things technically possible that weren't possible before. Do you think modern map applications would have the same degree of accuracy if they weren't able to use user data to improve it?
> Whether it's within the platform or not shouldn't make a difference.
It does make a difference because keeping it within the platform could be used to improve the platform itself. Sending it outside the platform could be used for more malicious purposes. In the map application example, the user knows their data feeds into improved accuracy. But they don't know where that data goes outside the platform
For the vendors that don't sponsor, you don't know whether the amount they save goes into a higher quality product. Maybe it did, maybe it didn't.
But for the vendors that DO sponsor, you definetly know that the money didn't go into a higher quality product.
Some eCommerce companies who are agressively using Google/FB/Social will spend 30%+ of their revenue just on online/influencer advertising (based on companies I have worked with).
It's pretty disgusting and dehumanizing.
I can't wait for Windows 13 when Microsoft has sold installer ads to the highest bidder and I'm asked if I want a case of Mountain Dew during install.
The fact that matchmakers always make way more money than the makers is not a new phenomenon.
As a matter of fact, I'd wager that it's been this way since the day man invented barter.
Cosco doesn't make the goods they sell - they are just being an intermediary between you and the the manufacturer. An intermediary that takes a 60+% fee for their work.
https://twitter.com/modestproposal1/status/10026493600422830...
One place to start on the difficulties is an excellent paper by Lewis and Rao from the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2015. The original title was something like: “on the impossibility of measuring the returns to advertising.” Just getting enough data to reject the hypothesis “this ad campaign did nothing” is extremely challenging. Lewis is a great producer of research on this topic and has written papers based on his experience at Yahoo.
Another great paper is by Blake, Nosko and Tadelis from Econométrica in… 2014? They turned off all of eBay’s keyword search ads in some markets as an experiment. They found that they maintained about 95%+ of their business while saving $50 eBay million dollars or so.
Beware confident assertions from people in the ad industry that ads clearly work. It is not so obvious that they do. This isn’t to say they don’t work! But it’s a challenging scientific question.
advertising creates a barrier to enter a market, not the market.
when you spend on ads, you are not creating new market for you, you are just unlocking some of the reserve market the established leaders secure via misinformation and brand brainwashing.
I.e., people buy stuff they wouldn't buy if they got honest information.
It works against the main argument in favor of the free market: not the best product wins, but the one with the biggest advertising budget.
I have a broad-market/horizontal smb Saas and tried google ads to not much success. Was getting charged ~$3/click for quite irrelevant searches even after lots of negative filtering. Suppose I could’ve tried some more…
That being said, I tend to agree with you in the sense that I never buy the obscure products that are recommended to me on FB/Google.
On the other hand, I think paying YouTubers to promote products is super effective. People are extremely receptive to influencers recommending products, esp. when it doesn't seem like advertising.
Not sure I buy the first premise of this argument.
I suspect a lot of people are immune but also a lot of people are very susceptible.
While we may identify and scroll past all sponsored google results (or even use adblockers or custom host files to block certain actors, etc) most other people are not at the same level of computer sophistication and won't necessarily do the same. Ads get clicked a lot.
Online advertising is far, far better than other forms. Marketers can tie individual sales to specific ads and improve ads by making them more like successful ones. This kind of specificity isn't possible with TV or print ads.
what the ads show
A good chunk of advertising is "brand awareness" not necessarily just selling one product. The point of brand awareness is to associate your brand with its brand values in a person's mind.
But I did notice a couple I'd fallen for. I happened to see Harry's Razors and Tommy John underwear in a store. They are heavily advertised on podcasts -- go to the online shop, the host will say, put in the code, get it shipped blah blah, your face and/or balls will feel nice. Somehow as a result they'd gotten into a mental niche in my brain as "things that would otherwise require jumping through annoying hoops to get," so when I saw them in a store, I ended up grabbing them. Because getting them otherwise would have been annoying. Yes in retrospect I recognize how silly this thought process was.
The razors I've been using for a while. They are basically fine I think -- which is to say, you only really notice is a razor is really shitty, and they aren't, so I'll call that a win. Just got the underwear recently, no notes yet.
I'd assume you bought those things because you lend a higher degree of credibility to the podcasters' recommendations than TV ads or side banners.
These ads have nothing to do with the high tech $300B AI and data driven ad industry mentioned in the post, there were sponsored segments on radio talk shows more than half a century ago.
I can say that my bad ads get less sales than my good ads.
My good ads consistently work, my bad ads don't.
So, ad copy matters.
However, a good advertiser accepts that not everyone is a good ad target.
You may not be a good target for advertising.
I would say, I'm not a good target.
Some people are very moved by advertising.
Others are not.
The 80/20 rule applies here.
80% of the profit in advertising probably comes from 20% of the target population for a given product.
I've learned that it's better to think of good advertising as just a form of communication.
A great ad is factual information that answers questions customers have, and provides urgency.
An ad might contain some fluff, but to really sell it usually needs to state explicit, accurate facts, in easy to understand language.
There is a lot of bad marketing from people that think they can make an ad just because they're a hip or a cool person, or they have an eye for color.
Those ads can be egregiously bad.
Just as some marketing sites are all fluff no substance, but sold to unsuspecting business owners, the same happens with advertising.
But the key idea is that, for certain products, good ads sell "enough" to the target audience to be very lucrative.
A great book on this topic is "Ogilvy on Advertising." Specifically, the first chapter.
As an avid internet user, my mind is automatically turned off to ads on any content I see.
I also blindly ignore the YT ads and focus only on the skip ad button. Strangely, I also ignore the audio, it just doesn't register.
However, If I am researching to buy a product or service, I keep getting shown ads about it everywhere I go to, so I do click on some ads.
Also a lot of people won’t be able to make the distinction between an ad entry and an organic entry in a listing. I’ve mistakenly hit ads, and might be hitting some here and there without realizing it, and I would bet you do too.
That’s part of why legit businesses have to buy ads for their own product to avoid having a competitors eating up their result page and getting all the misplaced hits.
Same for my solo stove.
My first thought when asked if online ads work is “No. Of course not. I just ignore them.” But then I remembered these purchases.
most web pages are up to 60% ads, search results are almost all ads, tv is mostly ads
google with their "answering question" thing has thought people to just trust it and click on first results, most of which are ads
ads, cookie banners and privacy popups cover easily most of the page, especially on mobile.
During lockdown I found several fantastic butchers who decided to launch a delivery service to reach more people through ads on Facebook. I'm still a regular customer.
For things that are available in a supermarket, brand advertising is better, for smaller businesses operating online, ads do indeed work.
Amazon is trying to sell me dental office equipment, or specialized restaurant tools, and a dozen other things that few outside of a particular area of expertise would remotely consider. It’s bizarre.
Of course you have to qualify Advertising as being a persuasive Ad' shown to an audience that may purchase your product at some point!
What constitutes an Ad' is also open to some debate, but you get the general idea!
There was a promotion like 25% off on Thermomix. For a week only. I wanted one, but I naturally distrust campaigns that urges yoi to buy in a short time.
Now it is like 25% more expensive.
I was compelled to note this. I'm Sorry.
Put another way, the book would argue that with the traditional way "relevance" was a reactive guess. Going forward the ability to create the desired behaviour is less of a guess and more predictable.
The ad crown is already being passed to Amazon and Apple.
I have no real way of knowing how many people see my online advertising, I just get a number and a bill, and I have to trust them. The pixel does help for visits but not views and other metrics.
Road signs, sidewalk signs, and billboards are worth every penny.
They work.
But we DO need to call out /r/latestagecapitalism defacto...
<3
To be honest, I didn't use TT. Ecept when someone gives me direct link. But I am using YTshorts, coz I am already at youtube watching long vids.
Pretty addictive this shorts are.
I hate TT for trying to force me into registering.
Also I hate TT for baning porn and even erotic couple tears ago.
Apple desperately wants to grow their ad business and has found a great wedge under the guise of privacy to kick push away competition.
Theoretically, at least.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/286526/coca-cola-adverti...
That said I believe journalists are definitely getting fucked by the government, Google, Meta and even Apple, with the shit payouts of Apple News being unsustainable too. You misunderstand me, these giant corporations are definitely the antagonist.
It's just not necessarily most advertisers, who just want to get you to buy shoes or whatever the fuck. Nobody forces you to buy anything. But someone has to feed the journalists.
"It exists in nature" is not a solid argument for anything. I've read about insects that coerce their mates into copulation under threat of predation. Yet nobody seriously argues that humans should be allowed to rape because rape exists in nature. Such an obviously sociopathic argument just doesn't fly.
It is not a one way street from "mores of society" -> "business practices". Large corporations frequently go to extreme lengths attempting to manipulate what society does and does not allow.
It's worse than that. Some insects (I think it's mantises) will murder each other after copulation. I'm not sure what the evolutionary advantage there is, but this doesn't seem like something humans should emulate.
>How about we make humane business models a pre-condition for existence?
No, because too many people don't want this.
This is hard to follow for those of us not in academia with access to journals. Or time to figure out how to hunt these sources down.
I feel like your comments contain pointers to deep quantitative insights.
Another way to look at it is the duopoly is being forced to retreat into their safe havens, yes that "90%" of their revenue that they can safely take for granted. I would wager on a guess that Alphabet and Meta are not happy if they can only serve ads on their owned and operated properties like google search, youtube and instagram. They are risking losing the wider web advertising market.
I agree that it's important to recognize the differences between monopolies, duopolies, and oligopolies in theory and practice, as you say, but I also don't think that using the wrong term nullifies validity of the actual point.
I understand this is a stylized opinion.
There is actually a great deal of innovation in advertising! I don't think the ad ID tracking is going to, on net, matter. For example, Fortnite already has unavoidable branded advertising that doesn't require tracking at all to work. Native ads can't be blocked by uBlock.
The big forces at play move around where advertising goes, but it doesn't really get rid of it or necessarily make it "better". Probably we should not allow advertising to kids, and yet here we are, Roblox and Fortnite branded experiences primarily for very young children! Thanks Obama.
> disdain
I don't know, I only have a jokey disdain for the end user. People have rehashed these arguments a million times. You can't just righteous your way into being right here. I would just say you didn't name any harms, and then you went and blew very hard.
I think the context in which the phrase "if you're not the customer, you're the product" is often used implies that we should upgrade our relationship by paying, however this is not necessarily the case as shown here.
The problem with computers today is you get advertised to no matter what you do. Can't boot goddamn Windows without it finding an excuse to show you stupid Taboola ads. Can't open a simple website without being literally flooded with ads all around the "content". This "content" is just an incidental abstraction, an arbitrary square on the screen that ads mold themselves around like parasites. It doesn't matter what the "content" is, it could be anything that draws in users, the real product is their attention being captured by the ads.
You want to consume plastic stuff; Disney World wants to sell you plastic stuff; a magical time ensues.
But you buy Windows because you want a useful OS; whereas Microsoft make Windows as a shop-front for their paid-for services; your purpose and the makers' purpose are misaligned, and you end up frustrated and annoyed that Windows isn't what you want it to be.
Similarly, if a website's purpose is to make money (which is fair enough of course), but you're there because you want to read interesting stuff, that's a misaligned purpose and a frustrating time for you.
Websites that exist primarily to show off interesting stuff tend not to tax the content-blocker so hard, because the author and audience's purposes are well-aligned. And community-governed OSes/distros tend not to push other services, because the purpose for making them genuinely is to be a useful OS (for their intended niche).
My suggestion for what it's worth: choose tools and services where the maker's purpose for making it aligns with your purpose for using it.
What if they don't exist anymore? Because not taking advantage of your users by advertising to them means leaving money on the table. Eventually some executive is gonna show up, notice that and demand that it be done because his compensation is directly tied to revenue growth or something.
But you are blaming US in all problems. Typical.
The issue is that they have not been good faith actors for many years now.
As explained by other comments above there is a hidden setting you need to change to get Google to actually run your ads in the areas you selected.
I don't think that's even close to a given, but consider how much time and money it would take to fight that lawsuit — they would be loathe to settle since it'd validate the idea for other customers, and you'd have to put in that effort hoping that they wouldn't succeed in being able to say it was a misunderstanding on your part or some nebulous “bug” which has reportedly been fixed. Most people don't lose anywhere near enough money this way for it to be worth fighting, especially since a lot of businesses would be worried about potentially being demoted on Google Maps, search, etc.
I don't know what you're trying to say, but that sentence is complete nonsense.
You can't make an illegal action legal by putting it in a contract.
And if someone is likely to use an open source solution, they’re also unlikely to be influenced to switch to a paid product based on an ad instead.
> And if someone is likely to use an open source solution, they’re also unlikely to be influenced to switch to a paid product based on an ad instead.
This is assuming that the ad isn't promising something too good to be true, or using deceptive pricing to make it seem cheap enough to be better than the OSS, or using psychological tricks to try to override your rational choice (which may not work for this particular example, but may well work for many others).
Isn’t that victim blaming?
But I still use a password manager to protect myself online. I also use different profiles to split my work and home digital lives.
But they have no motivation to fix it and no one outside Google has the data to tell.
when i interviewed at twitter in ~2006? i was asked what i thought twitter was, and I Replied that it was a "sentiment barometer'
They didnt like that.
Ads just try to drive up sales. This is something we don't need given current energy/climate issues.
There are better ways of bringing supply and demand together. Several decades ago we had yellow pages, and they worked fine. I'm sure in the internet age we can come up with an even better system that doesn't involve user tracking and/or distracting ads.
"Clickbait" can be used with a lot of publications. But in the list of publications it can be applied to... I'd say the Economist would be ranked about dead last. Maybe tied with Der Spiegel.
So that's the case for the headline claim that they're "under attack" being linkbait. It isn't really affected by how you feel about the Economist's (or even less Der Spiegel's) brand.
A clickbait can be used by any publication. Apparently, including The Economist.
It can take such "fee" because it’s so enormous that it can negociate prices in a way you couldn’t, as well as handling the logistics and having lots of different products at the same place. It’s not "just an intermediary", it’s an intermediary that adds value.
If you want to eat a yogurt, would you prefer paying $4 a pack of four at Costco or $1500 for 4000 yogurts you have to transport from the manufacturer to your home with your own truck?
So what's the solution to this problem? In one way I think this could be framed as rent seeking via economies of scale.
There’s no problem; Costco is an intermediary that brings value and so it takes its cut. Why do people buy from Amazon, who is also "just" an intermediary? Because you can buy millions of different products from one single place instead of having to go see each manufacturer where you wouldn’t be able to buy individual items anyway.
This situation is a lot more effective than forcing each manufacturer to develop its own customer-facing business with all the costs and logistics that go with it.
Disagree.
A retailer does add tangible value beyond matchmaking.
For example, to name a few:
- transport
- quality control
- inventory management
- fine-grained understanding of local demand and providing the corresponding supply.
I can understand that people are going to have ad-blockers or just accidentally click ads, but it's scummy that FB charges me for it. They have the technical means to filter those out, but they don't.
I guess money generators aren't that easy to come up with.
You might know it as your phone number.
look up google ad affinity groups
Smaller, looser, less-commercial organisations have fewer or no executives, less concern with making as much money as possible, and (in my opinion) tend to produce less bullshit.
This is distinct from producing good-quality work — their output may be unpolished, but it'll generally be sincere, and free of over-commercialised tat.
Most software licenses say the software is sold "as is", so if there are bugs you can't complain.
It is also entirely fine if IT is leading the US economy where IT is a bunch of guys playing ping pong.
Companies can just dig a little deeper into their pockets, customers can pay a bit more for products. Specially nowadays everyone has plenty of money and the economy is solid as a rock.
It is the responsible thing to do.
But the "so big it can strongarm suppliers into pricing" is not value added - it's value taken from someone else.
It’s money taken, not value. And giving you the customer the ability to buy something cheaper is value (for you, at least).
If they are purposely making it difficult to understand and choose options then that can be a form of fraud.
Why? If you consider Netflix without the cost of content creation, then less than 1 USD per month per user would cover the infrastructure cost just fine. Maybe cents suffice.
Youtube is just one big profit center for Alphabet.
And then on the flipside, YT has a much harder infrastucture problem than Netflix. There's probably like 1000x as much content (both new and existing), and much more diversity in what is being watched. That means 1000x more storage and transcoding, and far lower cache hit rates.
(I've got no idea of whether/how profitable YT is. Just saying that if you're trying to reason about it via analogy to Netflix, you've got the directionality wrong on both of the issues.)
YouTube: 20 billion USD profit in 2021 on 28 billion revenue
Netflix: 12 billion USD profit in 2021 on 30 billion revenue
There's a reason why people call YT a money printer. And I just heard they are trialling showing five(!) ads before each video now.
And no, I don't want "government-approved ads", either - that's a surefire way to corrupt our political system even further.
And how to incentivise people in redistributing content?
For example in perfect decentralized p2p world, people on mobile clients would be leaching content from fat clients. You either have to rent server, to host for your own phone, or go to some company to do it for you.
That's complicated :-(
Of course copyright laws make this "perfect p2p world" illegal, so there was never even a chance for it to materialize.
Perhaps. But I for one would like to try this just to see what that Internet would look like. I think it would be a refreshing change from the Internet we currently have.
So people wanted to get paid for the content, if nothing more than to cover the hosting costs, and LEPT at the chance to put their crap in some walled garden that handled the monetization. If we had it to do all over again, we'd wind up right back at the same spot.
The only thing that will fix this situation is to force YouTube to charge for subscriptions at a price point that gets rid of the advertising, like Netflix. And then YT can share THAT money with creators. And this goes for every other "free" service where the product is YOU, like Facebook and Twitter.
I still can't wrap my head around how advertising is so valuable that the entire US economy seems to be based on it now. I just can't fathom there's apparently this strong of a correlation between annoying ad campaigns and consumer spending, but it MUST exist, ipso facto.
Those wanting their stuff seen can pay money to host it or just host it on their computers/rasberry Pis
Next step? Rent a data center and start buying contract lines and millions in hardware.
They then called me to tell me " YOU DID GREAT ON YOUR interview, you'll get an offer letter tmrw"
The next day they called me back to tell me "yeah, we arent going to give you that job"
They then proceeded to call me for FOUR FUCKING YEARS for the same job.... and I finally had to tell them " DELETE MY FUCKING NUMBER BITCH!"
As a Linux user, I look forward to that, so I can laugh even more at Windows users and what they're willing to put up with. I just wish Apple would follow suit with this kind of bad treatment of users.
At the end of the day, what the average person wants is an OS that works properly without requiring complex configuration, and the people making Linux distributions don't understand or respect this.
If you pay attention closely, you'll notice that sometime in the last year, the Windows 11 installation slide for onedrive went from "hey do you want onedrive, yes or no?" to "hey here's onedrive, we've enabled it for you" (with no option now for opting out of one-drive).
It's still possible to disable one-drive once you boot up for the first time, but the steps are kinda hidden and convoluted:
1. open onedrive settings, go to the "backup" tab, then "manage backups" and uncheck all the folders
2. go to another tab to the left (whose name escapes me, but was something like "sharing" or "syncing") then go to "select which folders are shared" or something like that, then uncheck all the folders. You can even uncheck the "personal vault" folder if you expand it and uncheck its contents (consisting of a single subitem) first.
3. go to the first tab and unselect "start onedrive at startup"
4. Right click onedrive's menu and click "quit onedrive".
These steps are now necessary, when in the past you were able to opt-out of onedrive with one click during installation.
Recently, I got an image of a tropical island. The text was all about how Jurassic Park was shot on the same island, and how, more importantly, Jurassic World Dominion was also shot on the same island, and that Jurassic World Dominion had X many dinosaurs.
A very thinly disguised ad for Jurassic World. Right on my home screen.
https://www.digitalcitizen.life/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/w...
The graphic says a thousand words.
They casually want your credit card info, documents, schedule, calendar, conversations, what other people know about you, and what you search for.
And that's just for Cortana.
If all these corporations will concern themselves with is "line go up" then it's time for society to step in and seriously constrain what they're allowed to do in order to drive that line up. Frankly, corporations making line go up by shoving advertising into everything everywhere aren't adding a lot of value. They're just increasing audiovisual pollution and that's an extremely charitable interpretation of their activities. What I actually think is they're violating my mind every single time they show me an advertisement. My attention is mine, it's not theirs to sell off to the highest bidder. I couldn't care less how much money it costs them, it should be illegal for them to do it.
Global corporations are in a league of their own.
Alphabet does not break out YT's profits in their financial reports, just the revenue. So that $20 billion is just a total fabrication. Shame on you.
It's also not at all a credible number, because YouTube's split of the ad revenue is known to be 45%. It's literally impossible for them to have 70% margins like you claim.
Weirdly antagonist response.
I would consider myself fairly tech-literate. Software engineer, use git from the command line, can exit vim. Even then I gave up on Linux after using it for a couple of years because it's just so darn stressful.
When I need to get shit done, the last thing I want to is read pages and pages of documentation about someone's pet project or some Stack Overflow post containing the random incantation I need to fix some hardware incompatibility that is fixed out of the box on some distros but not others.
The Desktop Linux experience, at least for me, was like owning a car with an incredibly detailed repair manual and amazing parts availability but broke down every 6 weeks. Even the best mechanic in the world wouldn't want to use that car as a daily driver.
Then I switched to Arch Linux and never had problems ever again. Been running it for years with no problems despite its inexplicable reputation for instability. Whenever I want to do anything, I just look it up in the Arch Wiki which is the best Linux documentation ever made.
I have to use Windows at work and it's nothing but constant never ending pain. The god damn OS just does all sorts of stuff I couldn't care less about that have absolutely nothing to do with my job. It actually costs me money in lost productivity. All this for what? The only thing it does is launch the browser, and very rarely Libre Office when the network is down and I have to save a document locally. Yes, Libre Office.
I feel like most of the people complaining about constant trouble with Linux were using Fedora...
>Then I switched to Arch Linux and never had problems ever again.
Same thing here with Ubuntu-based distros. Sometimes I wonder if Fedora is secretly made and pushed just to ruin Linux's reputation.
Further, in Windows, whenever I was trying new things or doing out of the normal stuff, it required modifying a lot of registry values. I found it horrible compared to Linux, where everything is a file and you can immediately change the file.
Unironically, they've already done that.
Microsoft put a PC on every desk, running Microsoft software.
Facebook connected the world to all their friends and relatives.
Amazon first revolutionized e-commerce, making it possible to buy almost anything from almost anywhere. Then they revolutionized server computing, making it possible for anyone to spin up a software backend and scale it out without buying or leasing your own servers.
Apple got pocket sized general purpose computers into the pockets of the majority of people in the world (through iPhone and inspiring Android).
Google enabled people to find pretty much any piece of human knowledge or information.
The problem is, once those goals were accomplished, there was a still a need to keep revenue and profits rising. Which always seems to end up with selling ads at some point.
As someone who was in the industry in the 90s and 00s, and saw just how many man-hours were wasted in dealing with problems caused by MS's buggy and insecure software, I don't really count this as "improving the world and people's lives". Even at the time, there were far better alternatives available; they just didn't have the same marketing or lock-in advantages.
I'll grant you the stuff about FB, Amazon, and Google though, and maybe Apple with their iPhone.
>The problem is, once those goals were accomplished, there was a still a need to keep revenue and profits rising. Which always seems to end up with selling ads at some point.
Yep, this is the problem: unsustainability. These companies should have been able to shift into a "utility provider" type status where they don't really grow much (except from expanding population, or new untapped global markets), where they can simply provide a fairly constant service and have a regular revenue stream.
Microsoft provided the operating system that allowed the commoditised IBM PC, and later laptops, to launch.
Without this, no Google, no Amazon and no FB.
Put another way, if every workstation still cost $5k and up to own, far fewer people would have bothered in the first place.
No complaints about your views on Microsoft software ;) I'd argue I'm not sure Google or Amazon are "making the world a better place" when you get into the details, but this is purely about the wider impacts of their strategy.
These were lies calculated to help them recruit idealistic young people, who lack the experience to disregard companies making grandiose claims about themselves and their motives.
After a while though, the business gets big enough that no new innovation can actually move the needle on the businesses revenues, the people at those companies who do have ideas are better off getting paid well for some period of time and then leaving to make it themselves.
That's the stage google is in more or less, innovation won't move their bottom line very much so they're trying to extract as much as possible from their existing businesses, which basically means as many ads as possible in as many places as possible.
Consumers vote with their wallets and keep voting for more crap!
Change OS, lean new software, try something new.
Excellent advice. I was helping manage an Adwords campaign for an online shop, only had search ads turned on, was carefully watching and tweaking ads and managed to get a pretty decent CTR which had a big impact on cost per click.
I was in a different time zone (15 hours ahead) than the company. I went to bed one night and next morning I checked and found that our CTR had gone through the floor, was way less than 1%. And as a result our cost per click had sky rocketed from 10 to 15 cents to several dollars.
Turns out that a Google ads rep had called the office and convinced someone to turn on display ads, which killed our CTR. Our advertising budget was depleted, our Adwords account had received the dreaded low CTR slap which meant it would be very costly/impossible to get CTR back to a reasonable level. We were done with Adwords.
Things may have changed since then. It was years ago and I haven't touched Adwords since.
Sorry - is there some kind of hysteresis? You can't revert the setting and get back to exactly where you started?
Here are some direct from the source help pages that might clear up your understanding of the system. https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/156066 https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6167118
From your first link, "how relevant your ad text is to searches, how likely people are to click your ad, and the quality of their experience once they reach your landing page"
This is all data that's generated based on the overall learning that Adwords does against your site presence. It's why it takes weeks to really get your data settled in, and why if you (or your Google rep) start to mismanage your account, things will rapidly go bad.
The challenging thing about this advice is that for most people it feels unnatural to do the opposite of what Google recommends. Usually people need to get ripped off a few times before they accept that fact that Google is no longer a good actor.
The agency staff can then claim the campaigns were optimized based on Google's suggestions, which is the perfect smokescreen.
Most big brands that outsource media buying don't have SMEs to audit the media buying they've outsourced, so the result is Google makes a ton of money via their preferred middleman, advertising agencies.
By far the most dissapointing thing was that the client often just wanted to go with Google's recomendations or they had even worse ideas. Even when we really tried to look out for the best interests of the client it was like fighting an uphill battle both ways.
Another problem is that anything that isn't direct response is hard to measure so it's tough to make a clear and compelling case. Anybody can chalk up any hare brained idea to brand value and it is tough to push back on that when the client doesn't really care.
However it's worth pointing out that Google as an org have absolutely hated ad agencies for many years, in fact being nice to the agencies was a strategy used by FB when I was there.
I'm not disputing your point about optimisations, but the notion that Google like ad agencies is just ludicrous.
What I have found works best is to always start playing around with the most restricted type of ads. So restrict by location, test, restrict to the most exact keyword or semi exact (instead of general), do not use common words as much as possible (or quote phrases instead of single words), etc etc.
I really don't get this part. What's Google's interest in pointless clicks? Short term they could get some extra charge for those, but if they don't convert they lose a customer. On the other hand, for quality clicks they could just charge 5x the price and nobody would complain.
Because there are humans in the loop, and "Google" isn't a monolithic all-seeing entity. Sales guys, devs, etc. are rewarded on a quarterly (or yearly) basis, and short-term gains are prioritized over long-term effects ( I mean, how _do_ you measure the fact that, say, after getting 9 months of pointless clicks, the advertiser decided to cut their Adwords budget by 30%?)
So, someone runs an experiment (replace the obvious radio button with a hidden drop-down box, say), the clicks on the advertiser's ads go up, so the experiment increases revenue week-over-week by, say, 3%; and voila, everyone involved gets a pat on the back and a nice phat bonus come the next eval cycle, and maybe a promotion too.
Oh man, this is _the_ problem with metrics. We must find a way to measure and demonstrate aversion (instead of conversion).
They _might_ lose a customer — I suspect that they've determined that enough people either simply don't review their results closely or increase their spending to make it a net profit for them to do this. That would fit with the general pattern of hubris you see in many of their decisions where they've been coasting on their old reputation for at least a decade and don't seem to be fully aware of just how much loyalty they've sacrificed.
An end user might say 15% is pretty good and don’t touch it.
Google just earned 5% by giving you worst ROI.
If you start comparing with other ad providers you’l you might notice you’re being screwed. But low spenders rarely do proper checks.
Maybe it isn't causal? But the correlation is pretty near 100%.
Only way?? No.
No no absolutely not.
If/Since we are talking ideas and hypothetical, the preferred way would be for me to search for a product / indicate my need, and then marketplace to provide / compete for it.
The whole notion that advertiser must understand what I need, all the time, without my involvement knowledge or permission, then shove what it thinks I need up my throat constantly, is dystopian.
Basically, I think we are mixing up a pull paradigm to satisfy the consumer, with a push paradigm to satisfy the business. This is not to be naive about realities of world, business, saturated market, crappy products and differentiation, etc. But it peeves me when companies lack self awareness to be honest with themselves about which model is beneficial to which party.
Edit (and if we are going to talk about consumers being ignorant of the realities, let us not please pretend that the ultimate purpose of advertising is to perfectly satisfy a need with optimal product. Ultimate purpose of advertising is to make a sale. Sometimes, that sale is in fact optimal for the consumer. We can disagree how often that occurs as a percentage.)
Edit edit : the more I think the more I disagree. It's the word "optimal" that really bugs me - there's nothing optimal about modern online advertising. Clever, persistent, pervasive, desperate, obnoxious, hard work, devious, are some attributes that come to my mind. But it feels far from optimal - there's so much money and effort in this arms race which is increasingly hostile between an advertiser and consumer, and knowingly so; google and meta are 300 billion worth of not optimal :->
That thread was quickly killed before it could grow any legs, but I did have a knee-jerk response anyway:
I'm sure there are some other reasons for those employees having potential to do more noble work, but aspiring to become an "ad man" on an aggressive media platform has always had an appeal to a certain amount of selfishness at the expense of others.
Now when the entire process is geared to appeal more strongly to even more greedy individuals, that's what you're going to end up with more so than anyone else.
I'm certainly not the innocuous one, with the toxic petrochemicals and all, where the oil business has always appealed more strongly to the greedy get-rich-quick types in its own way.
Rather than add to the size of a growing behemoth, I chose to do my survival activities more as a parasite instead.
There's definitely less money for the taking when you have to earn every dollar by adding value to resources, as opposed to collecting pay from accounts where funds were accumulated wildly before you showed up.
But that's the kind of decision you've got to make.
It's not about making money by serving ads, it's about "organizing the world's data". It's not about winning defense contracts to put military hardware into space, it's about "colonizing mars to save humanity". It's not about printing money by getting poor people to sign up for 50,000% APR payday loans, it's about "providing liquidity to undeserved communities". Etc.
Yes and then AI to find the best matches for me.
But there are also things that would benefit me that I don't even know exist, so I can not ask for them.
I sometimes browse random awesome-[thing] lists just to see what they have in store and if anything in there gives me any new idea or seems to scratch some itch I didn't even know I had.
No need for any invasive tracking or obnoxious pop-ups.
True, but those are categories of products, not products. That's not something companies are interested in advertising to you, so you can't rely on advertising to learn about them.
Furthermore, rather than trying to find the few people whom a product matches, it is often about pushing the product on people who never needed it in the first place - such as the diamond industry marketing inventing the practice of giving diamond rings for engagements, or the toy industry creating ads to specifically teach children to nag their parents. Or the vast amounta of pills promising penis enlargement.
Sure, these things may not happen so much in B2B specialty advertising, but in B2C they are the norm, and exceptions are few and far between.
Convincing people who are happy that they have problems they need to spend money to solve for your personal benefit is morally dubious at best.
How would you let people people know that they may be prone to cancer?
How can you inform the world population that there exists coursera that teaches you skills on any imaginable subject that may change their lives?
Most people aren't looking for those categories of information.
Provide universal healthcare and continuing education for doctors.
Advertisers sure as shit aren't the answer.
The parent you replied to believes everybody else is unduly influenced by 'asshats' and that his/her favored influencers are not 'asshats.' As if Ezra Pound or Edmund Teller weren't 'asshats' for nuclear explosive mining, or fascism.
Dismissing advertisers for being into the 'filthy lucre?' So what should we do with all the engineers doing the same?
I’ll use a recent example of my own. I am in the market for new hardwood floors. Some Googling confirmed my believe that engineered hardwood floors are the best option. A couple of good review sites then told me the features that I should care about. From those I also found six candidate manufacturers.
One of them seemed to have a nice product, but their web site was just awful and had literally no information. You had to download hard-copy PDF to get any info – and good luck there. The others were better. One really stood out in the breadth and depth of information provided.
Friday, I emailed the four that made the short-list asking for more information in the context of my specific project.
If the problems actually need solving, ill go looking.
If I'm not looking, there's no problem (to be solved).
I don't need companies to reach me - that's their problem.
> I bet there are products that solves a lot of your current problems at a decent price.
I bet not. The problems I care about are not solvable with products. Even if there were unknown products I might be willing to learn about, the problems they solve would necessarily be minor things relative to the primary concerns of my life, and I will very happily forego the opportunity to discover them in order to shut down the overwhelming firehose of inane, manipulative toutery.
Absolutely. How else are you going to grow 15% YoY or hit your sales quotas?
Are you comparing women to children in their ability to discern advertising drivel from real facts about a product? Not only is that insulting, it is obviously false.
i) You can only use factual information.
ii) You can't use visual props unrelated to the product (sexy women, beaches, fancy cars, spas)
But to burn advertisements due to shortcomings is like hating/shutting down internet because of 4chan or QAnon
Now, this is simplified, they don't get to bear all the blame, and there are worse industries, but we better reform them fast, and radically.
But as I said, the vast vast majority of advertising by any measure you chose to use is of the manipulative kind, not informative. And this despite the existence of truth-in-advertising laws for decades.
And banning advertising is not even that harmful to industry - we have the case study of the tabacco industry, which didn't exactly die away once advertising of all of its products was entirely prohibited in all wealthy countries.
You can't. I don't understand how so many engineers can't do basic logic.
What if you are looking, but an advertisement helps you find it faster?
As an example, I was shopping for a keyboard the other day. I spent several hours looking through different specs. It would be handy if a website would have popped up "hey, here are the 3 you are probably looking for, pick one!".
The benefit would have been for me (less time looking) and for three site (less server time serving pages to me)
The only time advertising has been of use to me is advertising clothing. It's an extremely saturated market, so searching for "cool t shirt" or "nice jeans" is worthless. Before COVID I would go to a nice area in Tokyo, NYC, or some other major city and just load up when it was time to buy new clothes.
I block most ads, but a couple ads have gotten through over the years and I've learned about new brands or atleast new styles and had a jumping off point.
I still feel I am way better off blocking as many ads as I can, but can't say they've been completely worthless.
Most of the HN crowd can't fathom the idea of spending money on clothing outside of necessity. Shirts that will last ten years is more popular of a topic than shirts that actually look good.
OTOH if an ad popped up and said "here's the best keyboard for you" - or even "here's the top 3 choices for you" - would you seriously trust that?
The vast majority of the population, they don't even know there are solutions that would change their life.
E.g: In a world of 8,000,000,000 how many people know that there is Coursera which has top-level courses that can change their lives, improve productivity and make impact?.
"I know everything, don't tell me. I'll ask" is exactly the attitude that prevents learning (and prevents people from knowing about coursera). You are just advertising that personality to the rest of the world
I would bet there are more people who know Coursera exists than people whose lives would literally change if they took a few Coursera courses (though that doesn't mean that there aren't some people whose lives could be changed by Coursera if they knew about it).
However, seeing an Ad for Coursera is not likely to help anyone find out whether Corusera can actually help them or not - since there is absolutely no way to tell from an ad whether the product being presented is going to be even close to fit for purpose. The only thing the ad tells you that can be trusted is "Coursera is a company that is trying to sell online courses" (note: that doesn't mean that they actually provide online courses, you can only trust that they are trying to sell them - see the myriads of ads for mobile puzzle games whose gameplay has literally no relation to the game play shown in the ad).
Note: I'm not trying to take potshots at Coursera here - they are a reputable business and have many good courses - which I know from my own and friends' personal experiences. I'm trying to look objectively of what an ad for a company you know nothing about can actually tell you.
> I know everything, don't tell me. I'll ask" is exactly the attitude that prevents learning
This feels parental-- a version of mommy knows best. Why not let me, by default, decide if I want personalized advertisements? What if I want to be ignorant in regards to the new fad product? What if I don't want companies to mine my interests, location, prior searches, etc just to tell me that coursera exists? Advertisers are afraid of using an opt-in model because they know most people won't do it.
The thing is, in our society, institutions mostly develop venues for advertising rather than for listing - since both the owners of the venue and the entities offering products/services have overarching profit motives, and advertising is more profitable.
There is an ideal world where everyone spends a lot of time getting to know themselves on an intimate level and then broadcasts their very personal desires to an advertising industrial complex, which finds the solutions to these deep and difficult-to-articulate drives. But the advertiser can't realistically get that kind of information on anyone. I know that's not what advertisers claim, but I'm confident in calling bullshit on what they say about knowing their customers. They can't even tell when they're irritating someone to the point of installing an adblock, and they're supposed to know what self-actualization looks like to each of their many customers? I ain't even renting that.
I agree with the basic premise that advertising can be a force for good. But the advertisee has to be an active participant, else the advertiser will reliably determine that the target's telos is 'maximize shareholder value for <advertiser>'.
The Palace Economy central planner says, "give me wheat." The Soviet central planner says, "more steel comrades." The American style technocrat planner says, "we will tell you what you want and then deny market alternatives."
I think there's no reasoning with these people
But again, that was years ago. Things may have changed.
Or is it a thing where the client only cares about the default metrics calculated over the full history of an account?
HN is full of elitist arm-chair critics, whose life is so good that they need to feel persecuted by ........ Advertisements. OMG
Want to buy some new clothes and shoes soon? Go to an ad directory and browse the offerings - it’s beneficial for everyone. Users, because they’re getting what they want (when and how they want it) and for providers too: their audience are self-selecting their target, they have high intent to buy. This would make actual advertising cheaper, brands would get more creative freedom (have to stick out more, have to help your target market quickly identify you and you don’t need to spend oodles of time and money setting up complicated arms-race-sequence AI targeting run by a duopoly of “totally trustworthy companies”). Users are happy because they’re freed from the cognitive burden of constant harassment.
It's happening more and more often to me. I've been caught on this spiral of mistrust ever more often, even when wading through what once was a good place for human reviews: reddit.
I can't tell anymore what's an honest review to a paid one, be it affiliate links bullshit all the way to astroturfing on social media, it's exhausting.
Whether X’s CTR is 10% (what it used to be) or 1% (what it is now) drives the decision of which ad is better to serve in that inventory slot.
Now, there are situations where this is more ambiguous, and in general any display of a company's products or brands, especially one that is not critical, is suspect of being advertisement for that brand.
I'm not even sure how you can even claim that there is any sort of ambiguity between, say, The Raven and a Super Bowl commercial.
You completely dodge my point because it's a stake in the vampire heart of your non sequiturs.
Second, you present a false binary that we have either the duopoly, or the self-starting individual.
Marketing is a subset of Influence. Influence is a subset of the Arts. Arts being defined as non-axiomatic symbolic ordering.
You want to ignore all these distinctions, so you can stop annoying advertisers.
In the process of doing that, you either push advertising into the arts, or you kill the arts. Both are stupid. And that shows so are you.
You would dispense with the market, because you don't like that it's a meany.
You conflate because that's the standard tech scumbag method: you interpret 'restrictions' as 'damage' and route around it. Like a virus that crashes the whole system.
How would you find a book that didn't try to influence you? How would you find information that did not exist to influence? You are asking for an invisible pink unicorn. It does not exist. Your whole argument is stupid, sloppy, and sophomoric.
You want to strawman my point, because...?
InCityDreams: "In a funny kind of way, I'd rather have unsolvable problems than be advertised at. If the problems actually need solving, ill go looking.
If I'm not looking, there's no problem (to be solved)."
Summary: "If I'm not looking, there's no problem (to be solved)."
Then Deltree replies:
"Newsflash: There are unknown, unknowns. The vast majority of the population, they don't even know there are solutions that would change their life.
E.g: In a world of 8,000,000,000 how many people know that there is Coursera which has top-level courses that can change their lives, improve productivity and make impact?.
"I know everything, don't tell me. I'll ask" is exactly the attitude that prevents learning (and prevents people from knowing about coursera). You are just advertising that personality to the rest of the world"
Summary: ""I know everything, don't tell me. I'll ask" is exactly the attitude that prevents learning."
Me: "Seems obvious. I agree. However I think you're not going to get through to those with central planning biases. By which I mean, the notion that perfect planning can beat the market. The Palace Economy central planner says, "give me wheat." The Soviet central planner says, "more steel comrades." The American style technocrat planner says, "we will tell you what you want and then deny market alternatives."
I think there's no reasoning with these people"
Summary: Yes, I know everything don't ask people can't be reasoned with. Same as Soviets or Palace economists. Same as American duopolies, which have gotten worse and stronger as government spending and share of national economy has increased. I took for granted that this is obvious, as others in the thread seemed to instinctively grasp this point.
Not you though.
Duopoly exists from too much government influence so solutions involving more government influence are doomed to failure.
Let's teach you to fish anyhow: the duopoly only mirrors the power structure of the government which allows it. More regulations to enforce what is advertising and what is art, means lawyers are then involved with case uses of the English language. An area that is a known incompetency for the trade.
Any individual who says, "I know everything. If I don't, I'll ask." How did they know anything in the first place? From the government schools? From their parents? Parents can't know everything. And AHA! Government schools are influencers and NOT AT ALL institutions of learning. Any learning done is incidental.
This is Kuhn's argument: you cannot revolutionize a flawed paradigm inside the flawed paradigm. If you prefer, you could say it's the Dunning-Kruger effect.
You're a jack@ss. I addressed my interlocutors arguments directly. You do not. Eff off, you MF.
EDIT: And as a concluding point, because you're so daft, this means that only influence from outside a power structure can possibly change the decision control flow. Ie Art, the child of which is applied symbol, the child of which is advertising.
Why are so many information scientists afraid of information?
you just described the ad retargeting industry, like Criteo
Would an Icelandic saga be considered an advertisement for murder?
You really have not thought this through.
In fact, the definition is extremely simple: if a company payed you (with money, free product, free trips etc) to say or show something about their product, that is advertising, regardless of what you are saying or of whether you believe it. No more, no less.
Note: some countries extend this to any display or mention of branding, whether payed for or not, at least in broadcast media. So, for example in my country, a TV show has to blur out brands on bottles of water or cars shown, or display an explicit "this is advertising" logo on the screen while the branding is shown.
You imitate the tone of rationality, but you cannot even follow the simple rules of debate.
You need 2 premises to rebut my 1. In logic, we call that a f*kk up.
E-commerce: people are looking for the best deal. You pay google to “show up first” and capitalize on brand awareness once they see your competitors. The customer is going to think, “ah nice, at least it’s on Amazon in case all these other stores are too sketchy.” The other stores probably play a better SEO game than Amazon because /they have to to survive/ while Amazon merely throws money at the problem to capitalize on the brand.
Now, the biggest problem with advertising is that it is an arms race. If your competitors are advertising and you are not, or are investing significantly less than them, you're very unlikely to remain competitive for long (assuming the products are even vaguely similar in quality).
Banning advertising would collapse industries or reduce market size and limit any expansion efforts.
Why? If I go to a hardware store and see a new power tool on the shelves that looks sturdy and costs less than the existing ones, why would I not buy it, or at least look for reviews on it?
Edit: this would be especially true in the longer term, as consumers start forgetting the marketing and there are no more "premium brands". In the near term after a ban, the older advertising still holds some sway, which of course creates a disadvantage for new brands. Still, a small price to pay for making the market more rational.
