341–350 of 434 posts
I'm generally suspicious of the effectiveness of ads. It always amuses me when Ibbuy something, and then I start getting ads for the thing I already bought.
The article summary says:how a bot farm gets paid" But that's not in the article and I don't get it: what's in it for these bot networks, how do they get paid?
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I keep hearing it too. The bit I don't yet understand is, wouldn't it be in Google's interest to not do this? They ban on both sides of the market for seemingly no reason. Wouldn't maximizing all legitimate participation be much better? Also seems a lot more possible to do now with AI to check all campaigns, landing pages, etc.
When you want to keep your house warm, you ordinarily should not burn the rafters. However, when the house is about to collapse anyway, it is cheaper to dismantle the roof and to burn the rafters than to buy firewood.
I've been in go to market for the better part of 20 years now (anyone remember the DigitalOcean youtube ads of the 2012-2014 era?), paid online advertising has basically gone to shit, it started about 6 years ago, but over the past 3-4 years outside of linkedin it's effectively pointless, over 55% of Americans run ad blockers now and around 40% globally - on top of that, what you do get it mostly just... bots. In Jan…
So beyond LinkedIn, what sort of channels are you using now? Is it basically all about paying influencers?
Step 1 is to understand who those people are for your product, and figure out which information sources they trust. As implied above, almost nobody trusts online ads.
The internet has so much fraud, bad actors and toxicity, yet it makes so much money.
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Wait, so I can have free movies and subvert the adtech business model at the same time? What's the catch?
Exactly my thought. For, say, $50/month I can get a second ISP to my house, host the proxy (and only that) on that link, and enjoy free movies. It is cheaper than having 2-3 streaming service subscriptions.
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Calling them a "hyperscaler" is a stretch. By all accounts it's some renewables startup that's trying to pivot into AI because obviously AI = $$$, and calling themselves a "hyperscaler" in the process. Calling them a "hyperscaler" makes as much sense as some guy who runs a homelab in his basement as a "datacenter". https://www.span.io/blog/span-announces-xfra-a-distributed-d...
My thoughts exactly. In the current environment you could slap "AI" on a potato and get $$$ for it.
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For a good chunk of businesses, ROI tracking is really not that hard. It gets harder as your business becomes larger, or oriented more towards B2B, or in specialized niches, or online only businesses. I know first hand small/medium businesses (whom I've helped myself in the past) that basically survive on traffic coming from ads. Obviously it all depends*. But I just wanted to chime in that it's not all totally usele…
Google makes a ton of money. It has to come from somewhere… so yes definitely agree that even though it’s hard to imagine for some people in the HN bubble, ads seem to be working for most people.