371–380 of 933 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That the products are overpriced?
No, that the product is good enough that it makes enough money to afford expensive advertising. There is a really good essay about this that I re-read quite often: https://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a smoking crater maybe. The web was orders of magnitude smaller before the adtech.
yep, but it is mostly those parts I want back. I can almldt live fine with: - programming blogs that doesn't have ads - Wikipedia - three or four online newspapers/websites that I pay for anyway. - HN - all the old stuff: web rings and enthusiast web sites - I'd probably miss stackoverflow but I use that site less and less these days anyways. Most of the rest can burn and we'd maybe be better off. At least search res…
As for HN, how long have you been using it? Are you aware it's ad supported? Some stories are ads, usually for hiring.
Augustine fou is basically a troll in r/adops.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd take that report with a big grain of salt and run my own tests independently. Google is more than slightly biased here.
You’ve got a point. Plus attribution modeling isn’t for the faint of heart. One popular method is a geolocation test. Turn off the test campaign (usually remarketing) in certain geos and see what happens.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sure, you're never going to know exactly how many people you advertised to would have organically, eventually found your product and bought it. But that honestly doesn't seem that important compared to the other metrics... Wait, why wouldn't that be important? It seems like the most important question since it asks whether advertising has any significant impact at all.
The thing about the "advertising doesn't matter" argument is that there are situations where advertising absolutely matters - when a company is just starting out and there's no way they can get organic referrals, when the public is unaware of their existence, etc. Moreover, most companies started small at some point so advertising and maintaining advertising made sense up to a point. And if we look at those companies…
You can A/B test ads pretty easily, and this is quite common. With some degree of statistical certainty, you can tell how one ad performs to another. You don't have control over your SEO results as well - but you can also measure against SEO traffic with a high degree of certainty. All big companies do this. Sure, you're never going to know exactly how many people you advertised to would have organically, eventually…
Did you actually read the linked tweets?! Uber turns off a shitload of ad spending, nothing bad happens to new user acquisitions. I'd say there are about a million better uses of a million dollars than just pissing them away on a scam.
Also people either need a hired transportation or not. If they don't have a car or don't want to mess with the traffic and need to go somewhere, it's either Uber or Taxi usually.
It's not like Coca Cola, which is well known, but people could do without it (unless addicted), so needs to constantly nag people.
And it's not like some new product, which without advertising nobody would even know it existed.
In fact most of Uber's existance its operation has been 100% advertising (spending VS money to offer cheap rides and expand and gather "eyeballs" and "customers" without a profit). In my book, customer acquisition without profit is another name for advertising.
So it doesn't sound strange that it could do without advertising today.
But what if there were 3-4 strong players in the same, each eating in Uber's market share? You'll see how fast they'd found advertising indispensable again...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Likewise, I probably haven’t seen an ad for coca cola or kleenex in a while. Once a brand is ubiquitous to the point where soda becomes coke and tissues become kleenex in the lexicon, it feels like ad spend is wasted.
Coca Cola spends billions on ads. 8 million views: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg4Mq5EAEzw
So, less than a viral cat video?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's critically important for adtech companies' customers, since it's an essential part of determining return on investment. But it's also critically important for both adtech companies and data scientists who work in the space to direct people's attention away from those sorts of metrics. You generally don't want to call the attention of the person who signs your paycheck toward the fact that it's all but impossible…
This is creeping pretty close to the legal definition of fraud. But advertising has had a fair amount of safe-harbor carve-outs for over a 100 years or so that are not available to other industries. So it is no surprise it continues today. edit: I hate to say it but the auto-downvoters here on HN are approaching reddit levels. Everything I said above is true.
It's not that you're wrong, it's that you're boring.
"I knew this years ago, look how my cynicism is superior to your naievite" is a boring comment to read. You could explain why you think this is any closer to fraud compared to selling anything else and claiming it's the best in its class, or what safe-harbor carve outs by whom, or why they matter more than other effects, or what you think should be done to change them, or anything more substantial than "I'm not surprised". Oh aren't you? Great, cool story bro. Except it's not /even/ a cool story.
It's old man "get off my lawn". It's every tech forum's old-man status grabbing which is now approaching Reddit /r/SysAdmin levels on HN. The only question is whether aggressive downvoting can curb its growth here before it gets a choke-hold.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's critically important for adtech companies' customers, since it's an essential part of determining return on investment. But it's also critically important for both adtech companies and data scientists who work in the space to direct people's attention away from those sorts of metrics. You generally don't want to call the attention of the person who signs your paycheck toward the fact that it's all but impossible…
This is creeping pretty close to the legal definition of fraud. But advertising has had a fair amount of safe-harbor carve-outs for over a 100 years or so that are not available to other industries. So it is no surprise it continues today. edit: I hate to say it but the auto-downvoters here on HN are approaching reddit levels. Everything I said above is true.
It would appear jodrellblank is perfectly demonstrating how to misuse the feature, by calling you boring. Not exactly the kind of attitude that we want to have around here.