Do they really think there is an infinite growth in ads
It certainly feels to me like a lot of tech companies believe there's infinite growth in every domain.
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
#142The 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…
Ads are becoming way more complex entities than a banner/image that you click on. Companies are recognizing this and investing accordingly - think of influencer sponsorships, video inserts, in-game tokens, campaign based mobile apps. There are constantly more pipes to market through, there is restructuring the same way billboard/print advertising started to drop in the 2000s.
Re: Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown
#143The 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…
It's not clicking. It's that it may have popped up somewhere in your awareness, the industry calls this an impression. That's monetized along with that space on the sides and within articles and content. It's like real estate that this industry trades at low latency.
Re: Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown
#144In 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…
Honestly it should be viewed as a utility at this point rather than a private company with too many rights. It's critical to find businesses, medical information, hell, you can say democracy itself can be affected by what happens in search results.
Google is treading a fine line. I imagine the smart people in the room know their days of infinite monopoly are numbered.
Re: Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown
#145The 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 fo…
I've noticed this mostly on Google properties, YouTube in particular. Most of my YouTube viewing is done on my TV through an Amazon FireTV device, so I see a lot of ads.
Now, Google knows me very well and should be able to target me with super effective and compelling advertisements. Yet, I get tons of ads for products that I would never, ever purchase. Things like women's beauty products (not a woman), alcohol (never drink), trucks (not interested). While things that I would be interested in are never seen; science fiction movies, technology news, etc.
I really don't see how Google (or any other ad company) are successful at all. I'm guessing they are just spewing ads to everyone on the planet and hoping that some stick. It feels like the "male enhancement" emails have the exact same process and probably work just as well.
Re: Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown
#146Re: Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown
#147Re: Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown
#148Earlier 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?
CTR are and always have been comically small - its like spam and scam calls - a pure (big) numbers game.
Like spam: 1% of a gigantic number is still a pretty big number.
Re: Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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 Google considers all of those spam, and goes to great lengths to detect them, refund them, and remove them from the stats. Changes in spam-cleaned CTR, which is what advertisers see and what Google talks about for aggregate metrics, should not be explainable w…
Thanks for the note about cleaning CTR. The Ad Spam team was large even in my day.
As for "impressions" -- that's a term for content-based ads, not search ads. Search ads are enormously more valuable than banner ads.
Re: Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown
#150What is the chance that adtech is all a house of cards? Meaning that all of the "precision targeting" for segmenting married men over 30 who speak German and English while having house cats doesn't work at all? For a while, I was getting ads on Instagram in Spanish, and I don't speak Spanish.
If someone clicks on an ad, don’t you think it is because it resonated with them? Even from first principles, it stands to reason that the more precisely you can craft a message (e.g. an ad) for your audience, the higher the chances that it would resonate, and be something you can monetize.
That does indeed stand to reason. But GP got an advert in a language they didn't speak, so they are arguing that even if great targeting would improve ad conversion/monetization, after the > 1 decade of this being worked on, targeting doesn't really work.
And I tend to agree, I am in the minority who always clicks "accept all cookies", primarily because if I have to consume ads then they might as well be relevant to me. But they are very often not relevant at all, e.g. for cars (I live in a city with great public transport and have no desire to drive) etc.