151–160 of 177 posts
Does internet advertising work, or is it possible that companies are buying more in desperation? If the latter, it will peak just before it crashes.
Maybe big brands pay over, or pay for just to be everywhere, but I wouldn't call it desperation.
Yes, Internet advertising works surprisingly well.
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I highly doubt none of these three will be disturbed in the near future. For one, ad blocking is on the rise.
It'll be hard to block video ads that are stitched into your stream.
Amazon, Facebook , Google - three stocks to rule the world. They cannot do any wrong, and I don't mean that sarcastically. Buying these stocks is like investing in the companies that are building the matrix, but it's real life. It's just nuts..even Microsoft and Cisco in the 90's..the growth was finite, but there is no limit to Facebook, Google and Amazon. Every quarter is a crusher..over and over, year after year. J…
Does internet advertising work, or is it possible that companies are buying more in desperation? If the latter, it will peak just before it crashes.
Does internet advertising work, or is it possible that companies are buying more in desperation? If the latter, it will peak just before it crashes.
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It's simple extrapolation That's the problem though. There's a good reason why just about every financial prospectus includes the phrase "Past performance is no guarantee of future results". Then from the 5 to 10 year span, what's going to come flying in that is going to steal their $70 to $100 billion in cash? Why are you so confident that you can predict everything that might happen in the next 5 to 10 years?
Why are you so confident that you can predict everything that might happen in the next 5 to 10 years? The conservative, baseline prediction is generally "things tomorrow will be the same as today". Even if you stop their revenue growth (and there doesn't seem any good reason to think that is happening) then the parent's predictions are still basically true. For the opposite to be true, FB doesn't just need to stop gr…
Note that this line of thinking means that you'd never predict the rise of exceptional giants like Google & Facebook in the first place. If your line of thinking can't entertain the creation of these companies, it's unlikely to be any good at predicting their fall either.
Can you think of a possible way Facebook could lose all their traffic in that 5 year timespan?
My point is that since we can't imagine all the possible things that can or will happen in the next 5 years, the fact that we can't think of a possible way Facebook could lose all their traffic becomes meaningless and useless as a reliable source of predictions.
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Possibly because that's not how advertising budgets are really set? Nobody says "lets throw more cash at the thing that isn't working anymore". Certainly people will accept slimmer margins if they're still making money but every ad campaign has KPIs that are optimized for and no VP of Marketing is going to keep their job by accepting a status-quo of less effective, more costly advertising.
Except that's the fundamental issue of advertising? Attribution has always been wickedly difficult. It was supposed to be easy with Google/FB (click -> sale, duh), but now people are clicking on fewer and fewer ads, so Google/Facebook et al. are repositioning as "oh no, they saw our ads for x seconds, we definitely swayed them."
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With logic like that it's remarkable that our markets aren't dominated by 50, 100, 200, even 500 year old goliaths. "They're big! They'll be here forever and only get bigger!"
Standard oil, founded 1870, is worth well over $600 if you count the companies it was broken into (ExxonMobil, Chevron, Amocco before its purchase...) Cargill, founded 1865, makes over $120B of revenue annually. (That's half of Apple, but two Google). Probably worth around $300B GE, founded 1892, $286B IBM, founded 1911, $154B JP Morgan & Morgan Stanley, both descendents of 1854's Peabody, Morgan & co: $300B Ford, fo…
Woolworths [2], founded 1878, the first department store in the country, once owned the tallest building in the world. Started losing market share to Sears & catalog retailers in the 1930s, defunct in 1997. Sears was itself eclipsed by WalMart, which is on the verge of being eclipsed by Amazon.
International Mercantile Marine [3], owners of the Titanic, once monopolized shipping so thoroughly that the British government paid to keep Cunard (its only competitor) alive. Bankrupt in 1916, sold White Star Lines in 1926 to a company that collapsed in 1934, lost 2/3 of its fleet in the 5 years between 1930-1935, acquired in 1931, divested all passenger vessels by 1968, bankrupt in 1986.
TWA [4], founded via merger in 1930, almost went bankrupt in 1931, dissolved by act of Congress in 1934 but the brand was maintained by one of the daughter companies, purchased by Hughes in 1938, forced (by the government) to be sold in 1966, purchased by Icahn in 1985, bankrupt 1992, bankrupt 1995, final bankruptcy 2001.
There's a pretty massive survivorship bias when looking only at companies you've heard of, and even if they've survived in name for a century, it's not unusual for them to have periodic bankruptcies every 10-20 years that wipe out the shareholders.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erie_Railroad
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._W._Woolworth_Company
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Mercantile_Marin....
In other words, Google profits surge because it is using TensorFlow to accurately predict how to price ads to maximize revenue.
That's not how it works at all. It's a market: there is a limited supply of impressions/clicks, and it is _buyers_ who decide the price. Buyers are rational -- I like to take that charitable view at least -- and are bidding less than the value to their businesses of those clicks. CPCs are actually down on average. If that's true, then it must be simply inventory growth: mobile is providing ever more interaction point…
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It stuck around for a long time, but it's stock price has been crushed.
Yahoo's stock price hasn't been crushed, unless you're comparing to 2000; in the last 10 years (because it's conveniently available), it's up 33% vs s&p500 up 66%. Not good, but hardly crushed like say Blucora (formerly Infospace), down 53% over the same time period.