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Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

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Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#361

Post by thu2111 »

Judgmentality wrote: post #336
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Measuring as spend ROI is standard practice on any large scale ad campaign. The trick about having a holdout population is a neat twist. It boggles my mind when HN commenters start claiming that measuring ad campaigns is impossible or that ads are universally ineffective. Anyone who has spent time working with large ad campaigns should know the tools and methods used to measure these things. I suspect the HN sentimen…

> I suspect the HN sentiment comes from a common feeling among techies that they are somehow immune to influence from advertising, combined with a high adoption rate of ad blockers. I don't believe this at all. The reason I am skeptical of the effectiveness of advertising is despite engaging with dozens of people over the years, I have never had a single person provide me with convincing evidence that it works. Inste…

Google's yearly revenue

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#362

Post by 101008 »

This has already 303 comments so probably no one will see mine, but I was planning this year to start doing some online advertisement to get more visitors to my website and convert them into Patreons. But I think this will not a good idea after all. Any other recommendations in how to be more visible to more people on the Internet?

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#363

Post by loeg »

ddulaney wrote: post #330
alacombe wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ratio can't be negative, they can either be above of below 1. What you are talking about is "$benefit - $cost", not "$benefit / cost".

ROI is (net benefit)/(cost), where net benefit is (gross benefit - cost). Net benefit can be negative, making ROI negative if cost exceeds benefit. GP was using benefit as a shorthand for net benefit, which can certainly be negative.

Even gross benefit could conceivably be negative, if the ads are bad enough! (I.e., a terrible ad might prevent a sale.)

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#364

Post by spoonjim »

jedberg wrote: post #20

There was a freakonomics podcast recently about advertising (online and traditional). No one can actually prove it has any ROI at all. No one is willing to run the experiments necessary. In the few cases of natural experiments, where ads got turned off for some people by accident, there was no change in buying behavior. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-1/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-…

This is nonsense. I had a startup completely powered by Google Ads. Ads brought in nearly 100% of the traffic. When my billing information with Google got mixed up and the ads stopped, the traffic went to 0 immediately.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#365

Post by cortesoft »

unethical_ban wrote: post #350
cortesoft wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of traditional advertising IS pretty much to waste money, similar to how the point of a peacock's tail feathers are to waste resources... it is a signal to potential partners (business or romantic) that they are so capable they can waste resources. It is a signal of bonafides.

I'm genuinely shocked at how many people think advertising doesn't work. Just because it doesn't make a person consciously stand up and say, "I want a Snickers" does not mean the ad didn't work. Like, honestly, are there people here suggesting viral ads don't work? Or don't understand the point of Coke or Mercedes Benz ads are for? Coke establishes themselves as the defacto soda. There is no other soda, or if they ar…

Sorry, I think you misunderstood my point a bit... I think I am agreeing with you.

My point was that advertising's purpose (from a consumer point of view) is for the ADVERTISER to waste money, to signal that they have confidence that their product is good enough to recover the cost of wasting money on advertising.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#366

Post by Mountain_Skies »

jedberg wrote: post #20

There was a freakonomics podcast recently about advertising (online and traditional). No one can actually prove it has any ROI at all. No one is willing to run the experiments necessary. In the few cases of natural experiments, where ads got turned off for some people by accident, there was no change in buying behavior. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-1/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-…

Though not an intentional test, we found out what happens when a movie gets a wide release but does not advertise. In 2008, the movie 'Delgo' was released on over 2000 screens with nearly no advertising. Because the production company could not find a distributor, they spent their ad money on renting the screens for a week, with the hope that some people would randomly see it and word of mouth would spread, leading to the theaters wanting to keep it for additional weeks. It became the lowest earning wide release movie up to that point in time. Each screening averaged two people per screening. More people saw Conan O'Brien making fun of the movie in his monologue than actually saw it in the theater.

The reviews for the movie were poor but it had lots of household names as its voice talent, including Anne Bancroft in her final film. Good or bad, advertising likely would have lead to more people seeing it than two per screening. Of course there's no way to know for sure how many more would have been enticed by the ads but we do know that going with zero advertising resulted in a huge disaster.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#367

Post by Animats »

jasode wrote: post #259

>Stopped [some] Spending on Digital Ads, Nothing Happened. Why? [Added "some" for clarity.] Let me try to restate the author's article because he presents it in a confusing way. The issue is that both Google and Facebook have "core ad tech" that works decently with proven ROI -- and they both have "additional ad tech inventory" (a.k.a the partners/affiliates) that's much lower quality : Facebook "quality" ad placemen…

That's more or less accepted. Ads that appear in Google search results have some value, since they appear when someone is looking for something specific. That's measurable.

Ads that appear on irrelevant web pages have less value. That's well known. Apparently so little value that it's near zero for known brands, this article says. In the end, they're like useless banner ads. Mostly clicked on by bots.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#368

Post by nceqs3 »

acfou wrote: post #268
srg0 wrote: post #242

I wish more companies would try to find out the actual value of advertising and targeting. And it probably won't be as good as FB and GOOG would like us to believe. BTW, there was a recent episode of Freakonomics Radio which talked about this eBay experiment https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-2/

this is a really good episode, worth a listen

^agreed

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#369

Post by drewwwwww »

doopy1 wrote: post #158
htwyford wrote: post #151

Tim Hwang wrote an excellent short book that deals with this, Subprime Attention Crisis: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50403486-subprime-attent... . He addresses that most interactive advertising is never seen and prices are massively inflated. The attention is subprime, like subprime mortgages. One companies realize most of their ad money is being wasted, we might see massive recognizing in Google/Facebook val…

This book is the laughing stock of ad tech right now, it's got some good ideas, but it's 90% sensationalized and half-baked. The mortgage analogy is weak as well. This book is a money grab more than anything. It's an attempt at stirring the pot.

do you know if anyone has written a detailed critical response?

people in the industry it is about laughing it off i think is to be expected. i doubt most traders in mortgage securitization in 2006 would have agreed the sky was about to fall.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#370

Post by newbie2020 »

jedberg wrote: post #20

There was a freakonomics podcast recently about advertising (online and traditional). No one can actually prove it has any ROI at all. No one is willing to run the experiments necessary. In the few cases of natural experiments, where ads got turned off for some people by accident, there was no change in buying behavior. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-1/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-…

Maybe not for companies of uber’s size/current reach, but small businesses definitely do benefit from ads. They see an immediate uptick in sales when they start advertising on various platforms.
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