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The Internet Made Me Sad Today

raganwald.posterous.com

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Re: The Internet Made Me Sad Today

#151

Post by Tichy »

I'm saddened that you think games are a bad thing. While there are certainly crappy games, I think I owe part of the survival of my childhood to computer games, and I rank them as the highest possible form of art and expression. At least they have the potential for it.

Also, making the ad look like the text is the doing of the site owner. There are people who will recommend you do that to increase click rates, but I don't think Google actively promotes that strategy.

The placement of the ad is also by the site owner. For my own site I chose to keep ads to the side bar. Admittedly Google keeps telling me that I could put more ads on my site, but I choose not to.

There is also perhaps an economics problem: perhaps most schools, being funded by public money, have no money for ads. What entities in the education market would spend big bucks on dinosaur ads? How can you make big money with dinosaurs?

Re: The Internet Made Me Sad Today

#152

Post by tucson »

patio11 wrote: post #39

You're looking at remnant inventory. Inventory (advertiser speak for "a page view plus a slot available on that page which we could sell an ad against") are a lot like cuts of meat. Some are worth a lot of money. Some are not, and end up getting sold to be turned into fertilizer or paste to infect cows with all matter of diseases. Things that tend to make inventory worth more money: 1) Better matching algorithms. Thi…

To your definition of inventory: "a page view plus a slot available on that page which we could sell an ad against", Google does not sell an ad display, they predominantly sell clicks on ads and therefore Google has a key incentive to display ads that get more clicks per display, hence the importance of CTR (click-through-rate) because they will get more revenue for the same page views. I am sure you know that, but I think it's worth mentioning. So I would define inventory as "a page view plus a slot available on that page which Google can use to maximise revenue".

Re: The Internet Made Me Sad Today

#153

Post by rbarooah »

staringispolite wrote: post #141
rbarooah wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about not showing ads in those cases?

I'm no expert, but two things come to mind: 1a) That is sub-optimal for ad publishers. I think in building such a system you have to assume they want to make the most money. And while ANY ad may not make much money, it's certainly not capped at the $0 they can expect from NO ad. 1b) Also: imagine if you implement AdCompanyX's html, and you see nothing. Is it broken? Out of ad inventory? Not yet parsed your page? It's…

All of these seem reasonable, if the only goal is to optimize things for Google and the ad publishers. What about the end user experience?

Re: The Internet Made Me Sad Today

#154

Post by rbarooah »

lkozma wrote: post #88
patio11 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a comment, not a debate. I'm not trying to crush raganwald's constructive and collect many finger snaps from the judges. I'm just trying to explain how Internet advertising works for a community which a) viscerally despises advertising, b) often dreams of working for an advertising company, and c) even if they don't work directly for the ad company will have their careers determined in large part by their abilit…

Patrick, your argument is flawless, but you've become a bit of a robot. There must be some reason why they don't put Marlboro ads in a lung cancer clinic or a Ballantine's ad in an alcohol rehab center. Surely they would be perfect choices for the well-defined audience that frequents those places and they would make perfect sense economically, more than whatever else they put on those walls. Someone might even come a…

Economically one might say that raganwald is observing a negative externality resulting from the deal between Google and the publisher. It doesn't cost either of them anything if they interrupt a child's homework to sell them a game of bejeweled because the advertising pipeline was going to run anyway for that pageview, but in raganwald's view it does cost society.

I agree with raganwald on this. Sure search is immensely valuable, and sure, the things that internet use displaces were worse.

We're better off post-google than pre-google. But can't we improve on this? Is this how it's going to be in 100 years time?

Re: The Internet Made Me Sad Today

#155

Post by rbarooah »

e-dard wrote: post #120
bhousel wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 'value' creation is the small web site owners. And they filled the money pot for that eco system with remnant advertising dollars. I think it's great that small website owners can use AdSense to monetize what they do, but that really doesn't support the claim that "Google has created more value for more people than probably any other company in history."

Your argument, though, doesn't make Patrick's point necessarily false. Even if Google take more value from people than any other company, they can still provide a portion of that value to n other people, and assuming n is larger than any other company's n, Patrick's point still holds.

Is that assumption likely to hold?

Re: The Internet Made Me Sad Today

#156

Post by rbarooah »

donjigweed wrote: post #132
bhousel wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...Google is primarily an advertising company which makes excellent use of technology, not a technology company which makes good use of advertising. I absolutely agree with that, and don't really see anything controversial in that statement. I also think that Google has created more value for more people than probably any other company in history. If they are in fact an advertising company (which we agree) then the v…

"then the value they have created has been extracted from more people than probably any other company in history." take a basic economics course. it's not a zero sum game.

The ad consumers experience an externality to the transaction between google and the publisher. The sum of the game may be negative or positive. Which do you think it is, and why?

Re: The Internet Made Me Sad Today

#157

Post by rbarooah »

crusso wrote: post #83
tlogan wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great overview of how ads work, but the rant is still valid. As the end, the environment around us will end up to be very similar to one described in the movie Idiocracy.

Yeah, but the blame the article's author espouses is misplaced. It's not Google's fault that people want to play games any more than it's the sun's fault that it's shining outside of my window on days when I need to get real work done. As usual it's easier to blame icons and officials in situations where really it's the consumers that drive these corporate decisions with their everyday decisions. Granted, Google is s…

If you ask me for help with your homework, I could recommend a relevant and informative documentary I happen to know about, or I could tell you to forget your homework and play a game, because I'm getting a commission from the games company.

Clearly you are responsible for taking my advice or not, but am I not also responsible for the choices I offer you?

Re: The Internet Made Me Sad Today

#158

Post by rbarooah »

yew wrote: post #90
gavanwoolery wrote: post #52

This reminds me of an episode of South Park: [ http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/154597/find-the-heart ] The kids try to find the "heart of Wallmart" so they can destroy it (being the evil mom-and-pop store demolisher that it is). When they finally locate the mythical Heart of Wallmart, it turns out it just a mirror. In other words, the problem is not Wallmart (or Google, or whatever), it is us. On another note,…

The problem is actually a mutually reinforcing feedback cycle between culture and corporation that gives rise to addictive superstimuli. But I suppose "the problem is us" is an equally useful observation.

'the problem is us' is a useful observation in that clearly humans are vulnerable to addictive stimuli that were not abundant as we evolved.

That vulnerability isn't likely to change soon.

We can however recognize that activities designed to exploit it are harmful.

Re: The Internet Made Me Sad Today

#159

Post by rbarooah »

ChristianMarks wrote: post #108

Someone finally noticed that the Internet replicates the internal chatter of the mind. The web is designed to prey on human weakness, to encourage wilfing through the Internet, and to discourage learning and meditation. If our machines are to help us realize our potential, we must teach our machines to meditate. We must quiet their computations.

The web ism't designed this way - advertising companies make it this way.

Re: The Internet Made Me Sad Today

#160

Post by coldarchon »

lkozma wrote: post #74
patio11 wrote: post #39

You're looking at remnant inventory. Inventory (advertiser speak for "a page view plus a slot available on that page which we could sell an ad against") are a lot like cuts of meat. Some are worth a lot of money. Some are not, and end up getting sold to be turned into fertilizer or paste to infect cows with all matter of diseases. Things that tend to make inventory worth more money: 1) Better matching algorithms. Thi…

This is very informative and you make many cogent observations. However, you don't even remotely address the point of the article, which, as far as I understand it, is that something is fundamentally wrong if a child wants to learn about dinosaurs and he/she is lured away with addictive games. Even more so if this is considered the pinnacle of our combined capabilities and at the same time a hint of the future into w…

You DO know that the type of ads is influenced more by your own browsing history than by the type of content? So if the kid looked for games on google previously then this ad will more likely show up. But if the kid used google to search for books on dinosaurs there might be a link to dinosaur books.

I give you an example. Go to stepstone.com and browse for a specific job. Then go to thedailywh.at and find an ad of stepstone cycling through job offers of that kind you searched for. Go to ebay or dell and look for some products. Then go to the thedailywh.at again and see ads with similar products ..

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