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Google: End of the Online Advertising Bubble

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Re: Google: End of the Online Advertising Bubble

#111

Post by AznHisoka »

Kesty wrote: post #53
AznHisoka wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bloggers. The Internet is not short of quality content at all. If Mashable can't afford to write about Trump, a blogger will.

Not with the same quality nor with the same consistency. While there are some great bloggers that might cover this, it's usually people that are starting to do that to have an "head start" while waiting to be able to do that full time. Most bloggers also still run ads to offset some of their costs and they usually provide commentary of news that are reported by more traditional news outlet. Without those incentive I…

Then we'lll go back to watching TV, or playing smartphone games. Most publishers satisfy the problem of boredom in the office place. They don't provide anything that is critical/unique.

Publishers writing content 'for free' and trying to push ads to you is like a wealthy man throwing money off a bridge, and scolding at us for not praising him in return. We never demanded it from him, it was just thrown at us.

Re: Google: End of the Online Advertising Bubble

#112

Post by zaro »

prof_hobart wrote: post #31
zaro wrote: post #12

Ads have turned the internet into a sh*thole. It's time to go back to a more sensible way ...

What would be paying for most of it? An awful lot of the content out there exists because there's money in it (or at least the hope of money). And most of what pays for that is ads.

Just scrolled down HN a bit:

http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/03/adblock-plus-teams-up-with-...

Seems like one feasible solution :)

Re: Google: End of the Online Advertising Bubble

#113

Post by takno »

mtanski wrote: post #71
Udik wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google ads in search will always be valuable because you can advertise nail varnish to people who have just searched for "buy nail varnish" Yes, how dumb is that? A few weeks ago I googled for a company I was going to interview with. Since then the ad spaces in my web pages have been filled with ads of this company, which sells IT services for logistics. I'm a sort of atypical consumer - not very willing to spend m…

> That's silly and a big waste of money. Most sites that do retargeting do it based on number and stats. They know that if a rando that visits their site (but doesn't buy anything, doesn't sign up for a new letter, doesn't click on contact me) will convert at X percentage if they show him an ad. So they do the math to figure out what that looks like after impression 2, 3, 4, 5, etc... somewhere there's a point at whi…

Certainly this seems like the way it should work. In order for it to actually work like this it would require the marketers to actually understand retargeting rather than believing the hype spread by ad networks, and it would require the inventory to be delivered through systems which could provide adequate tracking.

Click-though is often not the expected success criteria for these ads though, instead they depend on overwhelming you with reminders until you crack. This has two consequences, the first is that successful campaigns are absolutely designed to annoy you and not give up at a point which is decent, and secondly the tracking becomes extremely weak, with high rates of inferred success where the retargeting ads may not have had a positive influence at all.

Re: Google: End of the Online Advertising Bubble

#114

Post by TheCapn »

Udik wrote: post #43
red_admiral wrote: post #15

"Facebook on the other hand, has a better control of who is actually seeing its ads, and will benefit from the turmoil by gaining market share." Did they pay you to write this? Google ads in search will always be valuable because you can advertise nail varnish to people who have just searched for "buy nail varnish". This is also about the millionth post I've read which assumes that companies simply throw money at adv…

> Google ads in search will always be valuable because you can advertise nail varnish to people who have just searched for "buy nail varnish" Yes, how dumb is that? A few weeks ago I googled for a company I was going to interview with. Since then the ad spaces in my web pages have been filled with ads of this company, which sells IT services for logistics. I'm a sort of atypical consumer - not very willing to spend m…

My biggest gripe is when I explicitly search for a product instead of using their URL and the first ad is the same as the first result. If I go to Google and type in "TeamViewer" the first ad is for TeamViewer, the first result is for TeamViewer... I hope they're not paying for that.

Re: Google: End of the Online Advertising Bubble

#115

Post by geocar »

qaq wrote: post #105
geocar wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if you're trying to be confusing, but you're being confusing. You might try using plain language like, "For every dollar of advertising I spend, I generate two dollars of sales per year." Or adjust as needed. If you meant 200 sales out of 1000 ads, then that's very impressive, and as I said: I'd like to know more. However: If you meant 20 sales out of 100 visitors, then I'm not impressed. That means ther…

I have no intention of confusing you. I mean 20 "sales" out of 100 visitors. I was a tech lead for the partner network so have no skin in trying to impress anyone by results of external partners. To me a 20 year old dude making 50-60K per week is pretty impressive, I can't speak globally of what was the cost of traffic acquisition for all of them but for the guys I knew that was their net profit on +- 100K payouts.

Right, so as far as the advertiser is concern, this is still in the "may or may not be working" space.

The fact that a company working in digital advertising can get hundreds of thousands of dollars in "payout" without having to actually justify their value to the brand's bottom line, alludes to exactly what this article is about:

Google is offering a diminishing opportunity for brand exposure, and as those "payouts" get bigger, legitimate publishers are receiving less for their content (because they're competing with scammers), and advertisers are getting less sales (because they're buying more from scammers).

The article then predicts that those payouts you're enjoying are about to go away because Advertisers are soon going to realise it's all crap.

Of course, people have been predicting this for a long time...

Re: Google: End of the Online Advertising Bubble

#116

Post by geocar »

rbinv wrote: post #28
geocar wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Not necessarily. Most exchanges allow the publisher to supply their own domain, either explicitly, or because the real information comes from JavaScript that the Publisher can subvert and control. This happens. 2) Many (most?) markets don't have direct response, making measuring return very difficult. 3) That's basically everybody. If you know someone who actually knows what they're doing with ads, then I've got a…

Care to elaborate on 3)? What do you consider "knowing what you're doing" if you think no one does?

Well, the scammers know what they're doing.

Re: Google: End of the Online Advertising Bubble

#117

Post by dsugarman »

I agree with all your analysis on the ad fraud, there is definitely a bubble and there is a shit ton of fraud going on and it's costing everyone money. Where I disagree is the effect that a cleanup would have on Google, people aren't going to just stop paying Google, the portion of money that was going to shitty intermediaries will go primarily back to Google. Bids may go up, fake views may go down, but sales should remain the same for the same budget.

Re: Google: End of the Online Advertising Bubble

#118

Post by andrewstuart2 »

red_admiral wrote: post #15

"Facebook on the other hand, has a better control of who is actually seeing its ads, and will benefit from the turmoil by gaining market share." Did they pay you to write this? Google ads in search will always be valuable because you can advertise nail varnish to people who have just searched for "buy nail varnish". This is also about the millionth post I've read which assumes that companies simply throw money at adv…

More importantly, in my opinion, is that Google can serve ads to people who are simply researching something, which is quite often significantly prior to the time at which they're ready to share with the world, if it's even something worth sharing.

Nearly everything is affected by a search for information. Not everything is appropriate or desirable to share with your friends/family. Facebook may make up for this slightly by having the ability to process private messages (whatsapp, facebook messenger, private groups) but I would conjecture that Google has them, perhaps fundamentally, beaten on the advertising front.

Re: Google: End of the Online Advertising Bubble

#119

Post by bduerst »

zaro wrote: post #112
prof_hobart wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be paying for most of it? An awful lot of the content out there exists because there's money in it (or at least the hope of money). And most of what pays for that is ads.

Just scrolled down HN a bit: http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/03/adblock-plus-teams-up-with-... Seems like one feasible solution :)

Contributor is good too, since it has more reach than Flattr: https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/

I've been using it for months now, and while it's not 100%, it's pretty nice to see cat pics instead of ads.

Re: Google: End of the Online Advertising Bubble

#120

Post by deprave »

jonatanheyman wrote: post #72
Rzah wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of all the things that might happen, users going directly to websites rather than through google/facebook is by far the least likely. Whats more likely to happen is that someone will come along with better search with less advertising (just like Google did), or someone might build a better social network with less advertising (just like facebook did). There's as much precidence for these things reoccurring as there i…

Rather than using the URL bar, I think it's more likely that people will just open their Uber app, flight booking app, shopping app, etc. I don't think that is an unlikely development.

I agree. Here's what Steve Jobs had to say about this, in the context of mobile search: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JC8LR9cryG0

If we assume that different search queries are better served by different engines then I wonder if it's not possible for someone to develop a "thin" search engine that would do semantic analysis of the query and then redirect it to one or more sites, or show results side by side...

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