Social media cannibalized itself to death in pursuit of ad revenue via increased engagement . The harder they pushed, with content assumption algorithms, the more toxic it became. The more toxic it becomes the more it appeals to extreme personalities while alienating everyone else, a poisonous viper eating itself. It’s only market lag between the revenue source, media source agencies, and the realization that better…
I genuinely believe that AB testing as practiced by every major tech company (and the incentives it creates) has caused much of this. AB testing is a really unsophisticated way of measuring extremely short-term incremental gains in isolation. That's how we've ended up with products which have gradually become so hostile to users. Because individually the changes seem like small wins, but taken together and over the l…
A/B testing media (advertising) is extremely misleading compared to testing against something transactional. The goal of a transactional sequence, called a conversion (payment in exchange for a product or defined service), is a supremely simple metric. Although the goal is simple to define and recognize the costs associated are wildly complex. Media is the inverse of this where the goals and consequences are not immediately clear or known but both the costs and revenue are immediately straight forward.
The reason the financials of conversion are complex is because you need to account for the expenses to third parties to pull a user in, the purchasing horizon in time, potential for cannibalism against other purchasing decisions, and various other factors that cost the business money.
The reason metrics associated with media are complex is because users HATE it. Increased advertising presence drives traffic away. Shifts in traffic occur over a wide duration due to a variety of factors so it is almost impossible to measure just how toxic advertising is to a given product oriented business in isolation in accordance with a variable time horizon. Its actually much worse than that for a variety of technical factors. In the past legitimate ad placements have been delivery vectors for content and logic of malicious criminal activity. Advertising logic is frequently poorly written. Many websites will isolate their advertisements into iframes in order to protect their website from accidental defacement of presentation and/or broken logic. Advertisements come into the page super slowly which completely pushes out the waterfall for what might have been a quick loading page.
When I did A/B testing I would describe the media side of the business in terms of illegal job deals. I did this because of so many parallels in the transactions and risks in those markets, not because they are both filthy evil things.