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Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown

nytimes.com

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Re: Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown

#81

Post by readthenotes1 »

bamboozled wrote: post #72
AlbertCory wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

About 2010 I published a stupid little Android app and added ads to it just because I wanted the experience. I was shocked to actually make $25 a week off of an app that I didn't think anybody was really using.

I put the ad someplace where people had to click on it on purpose, and I guess a lot did. That or Google did it for me

Re: Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown

#82

Post by Ekaros »

seydor wrote: post #31

So where is the ad spend going instead?

Inflation also. If the ones buying adds have not managed to fully transfer their input cost increases to output price. They have to cut that money from somewhere. And adds are pretty reasonable place as it is not mandatory to function in short term.

And elsewhere, you have VC driven companies who have tougher situation for getting money to burn on adds for growth.

Re: Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown

#83

Post by chrismorgan »

qilo wrote: post #15
loveparade wrote: post #5

The 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'm clicking somewhat often on youtube ads, because there's no way to escape them without the content blocker, so you have to watch the ad anyway. So if I have to wait anyway until the ad ends, I just waste aditional click. But I never buy anything nor have any interest in the advertised product. I do this mainly for 2 reasons: - waste the budget of annoying/scam ads in hope that in the future I'll see less of those…

> there's no way to escape them without the content blocker, so you have to watch the ad anyway

I’m confused. So you use the content blocker.

Re: Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown

#85

Post by kenhwang »

HWR_14 wrote: post #41

How did Meta do so well and Alphabet do so poorly on revenue?

Meta genuinely has a good ad product. It's not hard to setup a campaign that very cost effectively hits an otherwise difficult to target audience that actually has potential for a conversion. It's very easy for Facebook ads to mix media and textual information because it's well integrated with their products that display the same thing.

Google's ads are either contextual to the query, thus, predatory (to both the client and the user) since it's trying to pass off marketing as information, and companies practically have to defensively advertise targeting their own keywords so they outbid competitors doing the same. Or they're video/display ads which are pretty much garbage in their conversion rates because they tend to be interruptive to the product experience and creatively restrictive since they can't mix images, videos, and text in the same ad container. It's also difficult to set up a successful campaign and it's very easy getting burned with expensive mistakes. Nevermind the high amount of fraud in their network and very poor brand safety (ad sharing a context with undesirable content). You can only burn advertisers so many times with poor returns before they start to drastically cut their spend.

Re: Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown

#86

Post by wewxjfq »

loveparade wrote: post #5

The 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…

My dad browses the web without adblocker on his smartphone and tablet and he never clears his cookies on these devices either. It should be easy to target him with advertisement, and yet he mentioned how irrelevant all the ads are and that he couldn't understand why companies kept paying for them. So they can't show him interesting ads despite observing his browsing activity for years.

I believe the only effective form of online advertisement is saturating search results with sponsored links, which is also kind of scummy because it hinges on making the ads look like regular search results.

Re: Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown

#88

Post by malermeister »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #61
petesergeant wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am tech savvy and run ad blockers on all my devices. However I consume Instagram through an app, and can’t be arsed setting up an ad blocker that would deal with that. I have bought a whole bunch of stuff through Instagram ads. I see too many ads on Instagram, but not enough to make me stop using it, and the ads are apparently relevant enough. I assume this is a large reason why websites are so keen for you to use…

I've been so much happier with YouTube when I removed the Android app and replaced it with an icon on my home screen that goes to https://m.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions in Firefox (with uBlock Origin). Works perfectly.

You could try NewPipe instead!

Re: Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown

#89

Post by dgb23 »

bamboozled wrote: post #73
harry8 wrote: post #70

In 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.

Interesting, I specifically do that in order to get a general feeling of what people think of a topic.

Reddit is moderated and curated. Makes sense that it’s often more useful than say, SEO spam. However please note that there’s a ton of advertising hidden in sheep’s skin.

Re: Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown

#90

Post by asdff »

AlbertCory wrote: post #57
loveparade wrote: post #5

The 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 identify with the "oh I never intentionally click on ads" segment, but I still click on ads mainly on mobile. That's because mobile developers are entirely user hostile like the early 2000s web developers who brought us popup ads. half the time I try and scroll some article on a mobile website these days, I get a banner ad that pops up which I accidentally misclick. I even misclick 'benign' banners on ios native apps all the time. If you were looking at clickthrough rates from, say, before smartphones to now, you might be observing an artificial bump just from people fat fingering an ad that's honestly tricky to avoid not tapping on by mistake.
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