231–240 of 552 posts
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Wouldn’t that increase the ad spend? You will need to show more ads to find your target audience
This would predominantly affect businesses where that audience is not trying to find that business. Which sort of businesses are those?
Monopolies
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That's generally my thought as well, I am not implying you don't need to advertise. I just believe the industry has more or less reverted to an even worse version of what we had before (TV & Radio ads). At least before, there was ~100 networks you could sell to, now there's basically 10 if you include major networks. Of course you don't actually launch new products with TV ads, so it is more or less 2 platforms.
The problem is that most businesses used to be local. This naturally limited competition and gave your business a chance, even if it sucked. Nowadays the competition is global.
There is something to be said about the state of advertising. Increasingly it seems you must go to the almighty Google or Meta in order to launch any business. We're looking to expand into a new business line and have out grown our pharmacy capacity. The new business line will cost about $2M in software dev, and $3M for the new facility. The advertising budget? $40,000,000 (annual). We can build 10 robotic pharmacies…
Advertising spend being too high is a symptom of a supply glut. Too many products in the marketplace, not enough consumers to buy them. In a different world where there are higher wages, more people would have more spending power. Then companies wouldn't have to spend as many dollars on advertising, which they could split between higher wages, higher margins and lower prices. Alas, the short-term single-firm directio…
Then why don't employers, the ones with essentially all the power here, tend to choose actions that go against the interests of the working class? Simple: regardless of what you think "should" happen, a study of history tells us what actually tends to happen in reality, and that tendency is towards class war between the ruling and exploited classes.
Anyways, in what way is "ownership" not rent-extracting in general? If you own shares of a stock and you get paid a dividend, that is rent plain and simple. All the arguments you can make against that being the case -- eg that you deserve a premium for parking your capital in a risky asset -- apply to advertising conglomerates and even literally renting out land too, so either they're all renting or none are.
The A in AGI stands for Ads
Predicting OpenAI's ad strategyThere is something to be said about the state of advertising. Increasingly it seems you must go to the almighty Google or Meta in order to launch any business. We're looking to expand into a new business line and have out grown our pharmacy capacity. The new business line will cost about $2M in software dev, and $3M for the new facility. The advertising budget? $40,000,000 (annual). We can build 10 robotic pharmacies…
Advertising spend being too high is a symptom of a supply glut. Too many products in the marketplace, not enough consumers to buy them. In a different world where there are higher wages, more people would have more spending power. Then companies wouldn't have to spend as many dollars on advertising, which they could split between higher wages, higher margins and lower prices. Alas, the short-term single-firm directio…
Interesting hypothesis. I looked it up in Wilkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level.
The authors provide cross-sectional data across 23 rich nations, showing a strong positive correlation (r~=0.70) between income inequality (Gini coefficient) and advertising expenditure as a percentage of GDP.
They attribute it to increased status competition & anxiety in more unequal societies, leading to pressure to consume more.
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Rent seeking is all Capitalism is about. They call it a moat.
This is misuse of language. Rent seeking is anti-competitive by definition. The current system, as far as it encourages and rewards rent seeking, is anti-capitalist.
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Advertising spend being too high is a symptom of a supply glut. Too many products in the marketplace, not enough consumers to buy them. In a different world where there are higher wages, more people would have more spending power. Then companies wouldn't have to spend as many dollars on advertising, which they could split between higher wages, higher margins and lower prices. Alas, the short-term single-firm directio…
> The class conflict shouldn't be between workers and employers. Then why don't employers, the ones with essentially all the power here, tend to choose actions that go against the interests of the working class? Simple: regardless of what you think "should" happen, a study of history tells us what actually tends to happen in reality, and that tendency is towards class war between the ruling and exploited classes. Any…
And I hear you on ownership. It's "just" figuring out how to make that change.
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I don’t know how subtle or stealth you can be in text. In movies, there’s a lot of stuff going on, I may not particularly notice, I’m going to notice “Susie, while at home drinking her delicious ice cold coca-cola….”
> I’m going to notice “Susie, while at home drinking her delicious ice cold coca-cola….” It will be much more subtle. Asking an LLM to help you sift through reviews before you spend $250 on some appliance or what good options are for hotels on your next trip… Basically the same queries people throw into google but then have to manually open a bunch of tabs and do their own comparison except now the llm isn’t doing a…
Biasing actual buying advice would be feasible, but it would have to be handled very carefully to not be too obvious.
There is something to be said about the state of advertising. Increasingly it seems you must go to the almighty Google or Meta in order to launch any business. We're looking to expand into a new business line and have out grown our pharmacy capacity. The new business line will cost about $2M in software dev, and $3M for the new facility. The advertising budget? $40,000,000 (annual). We can build 10 robotic pharmacies…
Advertising spend being too high is a symptom of a supply glut. Too many products in the marketplace, not enough consumers to buy them. In a different world where there are higher wages, more people would have more spending power. Then companies wouldn't have to spend as many dollars on advertising, which they could split between higher wages, higher margins and lower prices. Alas, the short-term single-firm directio…
Ads aren't a long-term viable model for tools. Each year it gets more feasible to self host tools (email being the od exception, but there are still many ad free alternatives). Ads shifting vehicles to AI will extend the lifetime a bit, but even still local models are getting better and that's without even much architectural advancement. I don't see an end to advertising all together though, public spaces and enterta…
The middle users get benefits, but aren't treated quite like the previous set.
Then you have your late adopters, these are the ones that are lightly abused, but they get a mature product, so it isn't that bad.
Finally you have your last users. These are milked for every drop. They have irrational loyalty or are locked in.
I imagine AI will follow this trend and we are entering past those middle users as we speak. Seeing how little difference there was between GPT 3.5 and 4, and how computationally expensive 4.5 was, I think we've hit the end. Now its just how many prompts do you want to run for COT/Thinking?
GPT 5.2 is cheap and they are proposing ads. They see the end is near and need to capture profit before local models take over.