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The new dot com bubble is online advertising (2019)

thecorrespondent.com

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Re: The new dot com bubble is online advertising (2019)

#111
post #67

The article explains why eBay shouldn't advertise against the term "eBay", all very logical. ... Until a competitor starts advertising against the the term "eBay". At which point, online advertising becomes protection money.

Click-through rates will be very low. In most countries you cannot impersonate another company, so they cannot call themselves „eBay“ in the ad copy.

They may not be able to call themselves by the competitor's name, but what about the "alternative to " that we see a lot.

Furthermore, Google will "dynamically" assemble an advert based on the current search to 'optimise' click-though (and they recently sent a mail out making it clear this will be the only type of text ad going forward)

They think they're optimising "click through" rate.

But what they're really doing is using heuristics to find the advert that's most likely to be confused with the top search result.

Either way, the ad platform wins.

And companies pay their protection money.

Re: The new dot com bubble is online advertising (2019)

#112

I have had the thought that there is something wrong, that I can access nearly any song of my choice on YouTube, with the small penalty of skipping an advert after 5 seconds. Many of the adverts aren't even for products I'm interested in. They're either get-rich-quick schemes, or repeat-ad-nauseum ads for software like Grammerly, which I will never use. If Google has some sort of complex picture about me, by invading…

> skipping an advert after 5 seconds YT ads are not shown on Firefox with a plugin such as uBlock Origin. Just in case you're one of today's lucky 10,000.

Among Firefox, uBlock Origin, AdGuard Home and buying (for a couple dollars) ad-free versions of apps I use frequently, the web is virtually entirely ad-free for me. It blows my mind that it's different for most people.

Every time I use YouTube on Amazon FireTV, I lose interest in the video content very fast. Just atrocious to sift through the ads, popups etc.

Re: The new dot com bubble is online advertising (2019)

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the point of the article is that ROAS is not a very good metric, and while most of the article is wrong in that it effectively calls all advertising worthless as a result, it's not wrong about that one methodological point. What matters is incremental ROAS - not the conversions following exposure, but rather the conversions that would not have happened but for the exposure. For small companies that have n…

TY. Incrementality is king. Measuring that as a marketer and advertiser is getting more challenging for a variety of reasons. The future, primarily for large brands, but increasingly accessible for smaller and smaller companies is in statistical analysis with properly controlled experiments. It is the only path I've seen that can account for all the noise in the measurement ecosystem. And even then it is far from eas…

> The future ... is in statistical analysis with properly controlled experiments.

The future? No, statistical analysis was always at the core of advertising, from the moment statistics was invented.

It's only recently in the last few years that people forgot this, and only because techies and programmers without statistics knowledge successfully "disrupted" the advertising industry.

But internet advertising sucks balls compared to classical advertising forms, especially from the point of view of ROI to the client.

So we will eventually "undisrupt" this mess and make internet advertising more like the classical forms.

t. working in ad tech for the last 17 years.

Re: The new dot com bubble is online advertising (2019)

#114

I have had the thought that there is something wrong, that I can access nearly any song of my choice on YouTube, with the small penalty of skipping an advert after 5 seconds. Many of the adverts aren't even for products I'm interested in. They're either get-rich-quick schemes, or repeat-ad-nauseum ads for software like Grammerly, which I will never use. If Google has some sort of complex picture about me, by invading…

>Grammerly

Well, you should look into it...

Re: The new dot com bubble is online advertising (2019)

#115
Tangentially related, I think political advertising actually does work. Not just ads ran by candidates, but all the different memes and infographics and whatnot. At least in America. Most Americans are sort of middle of the road, but in recent years, the right has gotten very good at drawing people in through media. I know many people who are now all wrapped up in all sorts of right wing conspiracies and viewpoints that they were not wrapped up in before, that if it wasn't for seeing it on Facebook, Twitter or Reddit, they never would have believed this stuff or even thought about it.

Re: The new dot com bubble is online advertising (2019)

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

90%+ of relevant traffic is mobile 95%+ of mobile traffic is native Don’t delude yourself

I'm sure 99% of Apple users would be happy with a popup on first use of Safari that asked "would you like to block adverts?". It would be no skin off Apple's nose.

Even if they end up being blocked by many ad funded sites?

Re: The new dot com bubble is online advertising (2019)

#117

Oof! Think about it, when was the last time you saw an ad, and went on to buy that product or service? Who are these people who see an advertisement on the side of the road and then go out and buy that very thing?

I can make at least three people IRL that do this regularly. My business has had huge success with promoted listings on eBay. People will gladly pay 20% more for a sponsored item rather than scroll down literally one inch to get better organic results. Even if these people are a tiny minority population-wise, they make up a disproportionate percentage of people that waste money on frivolous or overpriced goods.

Intriguing! I am new business, and my online ads campaign seen by 4000+ people produced maybe about 2 installations. Appealing to people in real life was much more effective for me. I know my target audience is in the hundreds of thousands but I just cannot reach them through more or less blind online ads.

Re: The new dot com bubble is online advertising (2019)

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I buy woodstain I buy ronseals quick drying woodstain because it does exactly what it says on the tin. This is because I watched tv in the 90s as a teenager and it was ingrained. The benefits of brainwashing can pay dividend over a lifetime.

Your point actually proves that, advertising gets the customer through the door, but, your product needs to be actually decent to keep the customer.You saw the advertisement, you bought the product and it worked as described, and continued to work in that way in the future. The product is successful not because of advertising, because it is actually good. I find it weird that, most people spend huge on advertising, b…

I have no idea. It’s rare I stain wood, I have never compared any other stain, I don’t know if it’s any good or not, or indeed the price. They may charge twice as much as bobs woodstain but it’s not worth me thinking about.

Re: The new dot com bubble is online advertising (2019)

#120
post #11

What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising? The effectiveness of online ads is easily measurable: Return on ad spend (ROAS) = (revenue from ad referrals) - (money spent on ads)

Exactly what the marketers thought.

The point I took from the article is that you have to factor in what you would have gotten for free.

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