You can’t really feel sorry for them, they could turn this around in a heartbeat by being more customer focused.
Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown
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Re: Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown
#72The fact that the ad model has worked so well is always a nice reminder of how much of a bubble I live in. Personally I have never intentionally clicked on a Google/YouTube/etc ad. Never. I wonder if the general population has been getting more tech-savvy and skeptical of ads over time, but this change takes a very long time to play out. I sometimes see my dad clicking on ads because he doesn't understand the mechani…
I was in Google Ads 2008-10, and people from outside the company always said, "Oh, I never click on ads!" To which I responded, "Well, someone does, or we wouldn't have all this free food." There's a simple test of your hypothesis, which they can do easily inside Google but it's harder to do from outside: has CTR gone down over the years?
...or, companies just think it's enough to be putting ads infront of people and paying for that privilege ?
Re: Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown
#73In other news Google's search continues to get worse at finding what you want. Randomly dropping words from your query, even when you quote them and + and allintext, even when they claim they haven't ctrl+f shows the word ain't in the result. They just want to get the easy money of you clicking the ad for $someco that they put in before the "i'm feeling lucky" spot where $someco should be. Want to find something you…
I basically just search Reddit now, using Google.
Re: Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown
#74In other news Google's search continues to get worse at finding what you want. Randomly dropping words from your query, even when you quote them and + and allintext, even when they claim they haven't ctrl+f shows the word ain't in the result. They just want to get the easy money of you clicking the ad for $someco that they put in before the "i'm feeling lucky" spot where $someco should be. Want to find something you…
for revenue to drop because of that, people have to massively have moved to some other way to search for things. What would that currently be?
Re: Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown
#75More layoffs coming down the line in Google so!
Re: Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown
#76The fact that the ad model has worked so well is always a nice reminder of how much of a bubble I live in. Personally I have never intentionally clicked on a Google/YouTube/etc ad. Never. I wonder if the general population has been getting more tech-savvy and skeptical of ads over time, but this change takes a very long time to play out. I sometimes see my dad clicking on ads because he doesn't understand the mechani…
I click on search ads sometimes, but it's only when it happens to be the same result that I'm already looking for and it saves me an extra second finding that same result below. This doesn't seem to be very valuable to the advertiser, but I'm sure preventing me from getting distracted or persuaded by another result in that next second has some value.
Entire model is hostile to those advertising. At least in these cases. You need to advertise your company name in searches so that your competitors advertising on your name don't beat you.
This can only last as long as there is competitors willing to pay for those adds. Which might be getting tighter.
Re: Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown
#77The fact that the ad model has worked so well is always a nice reminder of how much of a bubble I live in. Personally I have never intentionally clicked on a Google/YouTube/etc ad. Never. I wonder if the general population has been getting more tech-savvy and skeptical of ads over time, but this change takes a very long time to play out. I sometimes see my dad clicking on ads because he doesn't understand the mechani…
I think your bubble might be very tech heavy. My wife (a millennial) and her friends buy things from ads All. The. Time.
How? Back before I used an adblocker it is not like most ads were anything I really wanted or in some cases even could buy. Very few ads are a direct call to sales and they were often irrelevant.
Re: Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown
#78How did Meta do so well and Alphabet do so poorly on revenue?
Meta started getting beat up about a quarter before Alphabet. They were 6 months ahead on a hiring freeze, and 3 months ahead on layoffs. They've been thinking about this a lot longer, and markets respond to if you beat the number the market was expecting, not if you beat internal or external forecasts.
How is the number the market was expecting different from an external forecast?
Re: Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown
#79The fact that the ad model has worked so well is always a nice reminder of how much of a bubble I live in. Personally I have never intentionally clicked on a Google/YouTube/etc ad. Never. I wonder if the general population has been getting more tech-savvy and skeptical of ads over time, but this change takes a very long time to play out. I sometimes see my dad clicking on ads because he doesn't understand the mechani…
I was in Google Ads 2008-10, and people from outside the company always said, "Oh, I never click on ads!" To which I responded, "Well, someone does, or we wouldn't have all this free food." There's a simple test of your hypothesis, which they can do easily inside Google but it's harder to do from outside: has CTR gone down over the years?
I don't think it's that simple of a hypothesis to verify, even inside Google. There are lots of reasons why CTR may be constant or go up despite fewer people converting through ads. Examples are bots, crawlers, more kids playing with iPads, or malicious website design, e.g, I have clicked on ads because I was tricked on it by the HTML/JS, but that doesn't help the advertiser because I'm not going to buy anything.
CTR only matters in the short-term. In the long-term, what matters is if the market of advertisers believes ads are profitable for them. If their CTR goes up 10x but they cannot verify conversions, they may eventually stop buying ads. That won't happen quickly, because attribution is so hard and you can never be sure where your conversions really come from, but the decline of ads may still happen over a longer time frame.
Re: Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown
#80So where is the ad spend going instead?
Everyone is building their own ad platforms now. I hear even kroger has one.