How Google Sliced Away Our Knife Ads • Hacker News Board

Re: How Google Sliced Away Our Knife Ads

#181

Post by ChuckMcM » Mon, Mar 25, 2013, 10:16 PM UTC

jordoh wrote: post #174

ChuckMcM wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it works that way. When you say "Amazon and Walmart also have X% disallowed knife ads, but X is an extremely small percent of their overall number of items. Accounts remain active." the implication is that total ad spend vs banned ad ratio prevails. That would suggest that the knife guys could start advertising flowers, buy 90% of their AdWords for their buddy the florist and only 10% of their AdWords f…

Do you have evidence to support the assertion that it isn't purely percentage based? Perhaps there is some account out there that has the same ratio of prohibited items as knife-depot, but has not been banned? Whether AdWords should allow "assisted open knife" ads is beside the point. Correct or not, AdWords is counting those as prohibited, the allegation of the OP is that AdWords banning criteria are applied differe…

"Do you have evidence to support the assertion that it isn't purely percentage based?"

No. I reasoned to it by flipping it over. If the banning is purely percentage based then a viable business would be to create an entity that laundered AdWords spend. This is how it would work.

Let's call our company "Ads-r-us" and it contracts with Knife Depot and 1-800 Flowers. It charges Knife Depot a 'premium' to get its 'ban-inducing ads' and it charges 1-800-Flowers a discount because its ads are "clean." It structures the premium and the discount such that there is a bit of cream in the middle for it to keep. Then our entity goes off and buys Ad insertions at various bid points. Knife Depot can advertise forever since there is no risk of them being banned because Ads-R-Us is keeping the percentages in check.

I looked around for these guys, I don't see them. (And as a web search engine they aren't talking to me either). So either they don't exist (which I reason is unlikely given how much thought people put into 'scamming' the advertising business on internet ads) or such a scheme wouldn't work. And if it really is strictly percentage based it would work.

From that my thinking was that it might not be purely percentage based. No one is picking up the Canadian Pharma ads, and they have a LOT of money to throw around.

Re: How Google Sliced Away Our Knife Ads

#182

Post by ams6110 » Mon, Mar 25, 2013, 10:18 PM UTC

Comcast is doing something similar, they have banned advertising from legitimate, legal gun shops, but of course continue to carry copious amounts of programming featuring glorified, gratuitous gun violence.

I want to cancel my Comcast account; they used to be my only option but very recently AT&T is now offering their "U-verse" internet in my neighborhood.

Re: How Google Sliced Away Our Knife Ads

#183

Post by rodgerd » Mon, Mar 25, 2013, 10:19 PM UTC

kamjam wrote: post #56

msrpotus wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knives are a lot less lethal than guns.

That's bullsh*t, knives kill just as guns do. In the UK we have many more knife related crime than we do gun related crime. That said, the issue here is not how lethal one is over the other, but Google playing judge,jury and executioner for something they should have no right to jurisdict over.

Kives are just as lethal as guns? Hey, good news, armies of the world! Stop wasting money on complex mechanical weapons and ammunition, just buy knives! Your soldiers will be just as effective!

Re: How Google Sliced Away Our Knife Ads

#184

Post by jlgreco » Mon, Mar 25, 2013, 10:26 PM UTC

corresation wrote: post #148

ianstallings wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fold out knife is intended as a weapon? Don't tell the other fisherman. They may get scared.

No one using a knife as a tool is going to buy an assisted opening knife. Aside from usage reliability considerations, having it trigger unintentionally (again, a tool they would handle constantly) would be a major concern. This is product sold only to teenage boys desperately seeking that high of invincibility.

> No one using a knife as a tool is going to buy an assisted opening knife.

Bullshit. I did.

> having it trigger unintentionally

There is no way in hell. Do you even know what assisted opening knifes are? They are not switchblades.

> This is product sold only to teenage boys desperately seeking that high of invincibility.

They are sold to anybody that wants to have a knife that is safe but can be opened with one hand. In other words, damn near everybody who has a use for a non-kitchen knife.

Re: How Google Sliced Away Our Knife Ads

#185

Post by Macha » Mon, Mar 25, 2013, 10:29 PM UTC

greyboy wrote: post #105

vacri wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK has knife crime but not knife murder , despite what the fearmongering press would have you believe. The UK murder rate is a quarter that of the US, and is in line with similar countries.

The UK also has 1/5 the US' population - what does all this mean?

http://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2013/01/12/fact-checkin...

4.8 murders per 100,000 in the US vs 1.2 per 100,000 in the UK.

The figures _do_ take size into account.

Re: How Google Sliced Away Our Knife Ads

#186

Post by pja » Mon, Mar 25, 2013, 10:30 PM UTC

I suspect the short question + answer is: are you buying Amazon or Walmart levels of AdWords? No? Well, congratulations, you're SOL.

It's no wonder that Google has started pouring large amounts of effort into lobbying in the last few years, because it's precisely this combination of de facto monopoly combined with poor treatment of customers who have no-where else to go that leads (eventually) to legislation or possibly even break-up of the company in question.

To paraphrase a famous quote: you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you, whether you like it or not.

Re: How Google Sliced Away Our Knife Ads

#187

Post by smsm42 » Mon, Mar 25, 2013, 10:31 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #178

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #16

You cannot wield the kind of economic power Google does and not be evil, at least for the working definition many people have of "evil". We've put a huge hunk of our intellectual and economic capital under the control of a marketing company. I really, really like Google, but I don't see this situation as being stable over a period of decades. Maybe 5-10 more years or so, but not a lot longer. These kinds of decisions…

>This is the same way you'd criticize a king, somebody you are beholden to. "Golly! I know you, the king, are not at fault, but some of these advisers of yours must have accidentally goofed up somewhere..." I don't buy it. People don't criticize a king at all . You don't criticize the communist party in Stalinist Russia, tactfully or otherwise. Doing that gets you sent to the gulag. The reason people say that it was…

>>>> They have an obligation to the shareholders. Turning down paying customers because of some moral objection to pointy objects is a little bit crazy.

Happens all the time. For example, Groupon recently dropped all firearms-related deals on the wave of the craziness that is going on. I, personally, cancelled my account with them the next day and would never buy from them anymore. I am completely certain them and the shareholders don't care too much. Same Google - losing couple of ad dollars from some independent shop is nothing to them. If their deals with Amazon would be under threat that'd probably be different business. And the government probably has absolutely nothing to do with it - if it were government-enforced, it would apply to Amazon too.

Re: How Google Sliced Away Our Knife Ads

#188

Post by vacri » Mon, Mar 25, 2013, 10:31 PM UTC

corresation wrote: post #145

vacri wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK has knife crime but not knife murder , despite what the fearmongering press would have you believe. The UK murder rate is a quarter that of the US, and is in line with similar countries.

This is a gigantic diversion, but saying that the UK doesn't have knife murder is pretty profoundly ignorant. The last stat I saw was that the UK had some 330+ stabbing murders a year.

There is an implicit "of the scale of gun murder in the US"

Murders in the US are currently sitting at 14k, ~11k of which are from firearms. The US only has 5 times more people than the UK, which would turn your stat into a rough US-equivalent of 1.7k.

Re: How Google Sliced Away Our Knife Ads

#189

Post by anigbrowl » Mon, Mar 25, 2013, 10:33 PM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #175

anigbrowl wrote: post #156

I watched his video that purported to explain the difference between a switchblade and a spring assisted knife. As far as I can tell the only difference is that the location of the switch has changed. This is a distinction without a substantive difference. So yo would need a slightly different hand movement to trigger this alternative spring-assisted knife. Big deal; as someone who used to like knives enough to have…

Agree. To me it seems like the entire purpose of this design is to make an end-run around the restrictions on switch-blades. But with respect to this article, the biggest problem I see is not whether or not they are allowed, but that Google is setting arbitrary rules, rather than democratically elected representatives, and that the policy is the even arbitrarily enforced.

According to themselves, they are fine with the pre-existing ban on switchblades and balisong knives, so I'm just refuting the argument they're making, as opposed to the broader one.

Google is a corporation, so I don't see how the views of anyone besides their shareholders are binding. i don't agree with the premise that you have to use adwords or you're stuck; if people think that's he case, then maybe they should raise the issue with the FTC.

Re: How Google Sliced Away Our Knife Ads

#190

Post by corresation » Mon, Mar 25, 2013, 10:37 PM UTC

jlgreco wrote: post #184

corresation wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one using a knife as a tool is going to buy an assisted opening knife. Aside from usage reliability considerations, having it trigger unintentionally (again, a tool they would handle constantly) would be a major concern. This is product sold only to teenage boys desperately seeking that high of invincibility.

> No one using a knife as a tool is going to buy an assisted opening knife. Bullshit. I did. > having it trigger unintentionally There is no way in hell. Do you even know what assisted opening knifes are? They are not switchblades. > This is product sold only to teenage boys desperately seeking that high of invincibility. They are sold to anybody that wants to have a knife that is safe but can be opened with one hand…

Bullshit. I did.

I see in your other post you claimed that, then listing exactly the use that people resort to a box cutter for (cutting twine, opening boxes, etc, safely opened and closed with one hand, etc).

Do you even know what assisted opening knifes are? They are not switchblades.

Instead of having a button on the side of the knife that causes it to trigger open via spring actuation, it has a trigger lever on the blade back that causes it to trigger open via spring actuation, almost certainly being designed specifically to get around overly specific anti-switchblade laws. They are legal only by a trivial technicality of switchblade laws.

You know there's a video directly in the linked blog posting. And anyone not lying to themselves can clearly see that the differences are laughable.