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Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

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Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#331

Post by lm28469 »

emaro wrote: post #49

If you ask me, we should simply delete the entire advertisement sector—influencers included—and start from scratch. The amount of wasted resources (i.e. attention, money, electricity, bandwidth, time, smart people) is just insane ! The benefits I see are mostly lot's of jobs and means for the biggest businesses to sell more stuff. That can hardly be worth it. I know I'm dreaming and it will never happen, but still...…

> If you ask me, we should simply delete the entire advertisement sector—influencers included—and start from scratch

The thing is Alphabet and Meta revenues are 95% ads. All the big players are either products to show ads or products to gather data to show more ads

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#332

Post by lm28469 »

kylebyproxy wrote: post #86
emaro wrote: post #49

If you ask me, we should simply delete the entire advertisement sector—influencers included—and start from scratch. The amount of wasted resources (i.e. attention, money, electricity, bandwidth, time, smart people) is just insane ! The benefits I see are mostly lot's of jobs and means for the biggest businesses to sell more stuff. That can hardly be worth it. I know I'm dreaming and it will never happen, but still...…

I'm just amazed ads work at all. Anytime I receive an ad I didn't explicitly request, I boycott that company. I'd have hoped enough likeminded people in the world would naturally defeat the ad sector, but evidently I'm an outlier. I'll never understand why the average consumer rewards and reinforces ad spend

> I'm just amazed ads work at all.

Same, I don't recall a single time an ad made me want to buy something, if anything I think "if they have to shove this in front of my eyes and I don't already know the product it probably is bad or useless to me"

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#333

Post by c7b »

wccrawford wrote: post #122
c7b wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No. You see, the thing is, we really need the eggs. Isn't that the opposite of the problem here? If the bots actually generated sales, the adbuyers would likely be quite happy. This seems more like the Emperor's New Clothes, if you're looking for a metaphor.

I read that as his brother doesn't actually lay eggs, they're just hoping against hope for it. Same as the ads and the bots.

ok, yeah, reading it that way it is a quite an appropriate metaphor

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#334

Post by SrZorro »

kmeisthax wrote: post #301
steveBK123 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A funny anecdote that's not fraud but puts a bit more ambiguity into the alleged targeted ad eyeballs even from the big players. There's a good amount of "ambient" content on YouTube these days. Some not targeted at adults or even humans. I have been playing YouTube videos on my TV of birds & wildlife, for my house cats to enjoy. There is one guy who makes 8 hour long videos. There is one content creator basically ta…

I do the same thing, but in my case it's guinea pig eyeballs. But I'm a Premium subscriber so I don't get ads anyway. Kids videos on YouTube[0] is another vector of techincally-not-fraudulent-but-very-low-value ad inventory. The stats on those videos also tend to be highly suspicious - i.e. basically no comments but millions of views and likes. Normally you'd call this bots, but then you realize that small children a…

What kind of content are your guinea pig eyeballs watching? I have 2 and would like to put them a video and see what they do.

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#335

Post by from »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #326
from wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there’s no free lunch. If businesses realize there is a 0% ROI to ad spend due to all the traffic being bots, they will stop buying ads. At which point sites will just migrate to a subscription model.

No. Ads will be inserted server-side. Like in the old days of print magazines and TV.

It's possible to block TV ads: https://next.taiv.tv. Taiv is a startup for bars and restaurants that uses a model which basically detects when there are sudden color shifts and lets them insert their own ads or get paid to insert someone else's ads.

Although I don't know how you'd block print ads unless you had some kind of AR headset that blacked them out.

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#336

Post by darkcha0s »

hnburnsy wrote: post #145

To me it feels like companies have these ad budgets, and just feel the need to spend, spend, spend without measuring any sort of ROI. Example, almost every GM commercial these days are for EV cars\truck that you cannot even buy, some you cannot even put down a deposit or the "pre-order" is meaningless (like refundable $100 for the Lyriq, but no specs, colors or pricing has event been announced). It is like GM needs t…

I run a startup that heavily relies on ads, and I can tell you for sure that we spend and measure ROI in detail. We have metrics that tell us exactly how much we need to spend to convert a user into paying user, so that we can budget ourselves accordingly; I think most low/mid tier companies do this. Of course, when you look at real giants, its a different story as the ROI is harder to measure.

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#337

Post by kmeisthax »

SrZorro wrote: post #334
kmeisthax wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do the same thing, but in my case it's guinea pig eyeballs. But I'm a Premium subscriber so I don't get ads anyway. Kids videos on YouTube[0] is another vector of techincally-not-fraudulent-but-very-low-value ad inventory. The stats on those videos also tend to be highly suspicious - i.e. basically no comments but millions of views and likes. Normally you'd call this bots, but then you realize that small children a…

What kind of content are your guinea pig eyeballs watching? I have 2 and would like to put them a video and see what they do.

Uh right now the YouTube recommendation gods are sending them Little Adventures, Guinea Pig Jungle, and LA Guinea Pig Rescue.

The latter is actually a really good treasure trove of care information, too.

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#338

Post by ezoe »

ok123456 wrote: post #255

A few years ago, I tried to help out a locally owned gym do an experiment with Google Ad-Words. The place small storefront in a run-down strip mall straight out of the 1960s, but it had very good equipment for people that were in the know and it was 24 hours. The owner was a nice guy but he relied entirely on word-of-mouth and his technical skills extended to making expletive laced, 128-point-font signs reminding peo…

Online ad has negative effect. I never trust products or services that are showed up in online ads.

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#339

Post by alsetmusic »

ThePowerOfFuet wrote: post #268
MisterTea wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> See I run a DSP Digital Signal Processor?

The acronym was defined in the comment to which they were replying (thus two levels above your own reply); it would have been redundant to again define it yet again.

No shade intended. Just found this amusing.

> would have been _redundant_ to _again_ define it yet _again_.

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#340

Post by ThePowerOfFuet »

alsetmusic wrote: post #339
ThePowerOfFuet wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The acronym was defined in the comment to which they were replying (thus two levels above your own reply); it would have been redundant to again define it yet again.

No shade intended. Just found this amusing. > would have been _redundant_ to _again_ define it yet _again_.

The Department of Redundancy Department informs you that was not an accident.
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