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Google is dead. Where do we go now?

circusscientist.com

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Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#321

Post by sidereal1 »

bsimpson wrote: post #219
nostrademons wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my anecdotal experience, it's moved to private, trust-based channels: iMessage, WhatsApp, email, face-to-face interactions. Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring the public and the private has finally ended: people don't want to be online, don't trust social media, don't really trust any media, and are living simple local lives with a small circle of friends that they get together with regula…

It's interesting to see how much of a behemoth Discord has become. Seems like there's a Discord for everything - from open source projects to hobbies and games to individual groups of friends/family. It's occupying the segment that subreddits historically have. However, it's perhaps-intentionally search-opaque. You can't Google to find a message/link/download that's gated by Discord. And it also gives a sense of comm…

One thing that's having a little comeback is the email newsletter (see Beehiiv). There's something nice about being able to get exactly what you signed up for and nothing more. No ads, no recommended content, no infinite scroll.

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#322

Post by pesus »

lostlogin wrote: post #255
nostrademons wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my anecdotal experience, it's moved to private, trust-based channels: iMessage, WhatsApp, email, face-to-face interactions. Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring the public and the private has finally ended: people don't want to be online, don't trust social media, don't really trust any media, and are living simple local lives with a small circle of friends that they get together with regula…

> Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring the public and the private has finally ended I wish you were right. We took our kid to a stage show she really wanted to see. People round us kept checking their phones. They weren’t even really checking them. They held them and would turn the screen on and off, lighting the place up. They couldn’t be without them for more than 5 minutes. This, after 30 mi…

I don't think the vibe shift they're describing has fully taken place yet, but I think the foundations have been laid and it's started. It's probably going to be a while and take further societal changes to fully come into fruition, though.

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#323

Post by margorczynski »

xthe wrote: post #51

Google isn’t dead, but it’s no longer the single answer. Even Mark Zuckerberg recently acknowledged how fast Google is improving, which explains why Meta is pushing AI harder. Still, competing shouldn’t mean replacing what already works.

But what's the endgame? What if Google has the "best" AI offering if most of their revenue that comes from ads is gone?

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#324

Post by gcbirzan »

nostrademons wrote: post #203
spoaceman7777 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the numbers I've seen on web usage, platform usage, etc. indicate people are significantly pulling away from online lives. Though, there has been a slight dip in daily social media browsing time in the last couple of years (of course, it also follows the end of the pandemic, and it hasn't ceded back to where it was prior). That does sound like a rather charmed life though. Could also be a sign that people are…

Would it show up in the numbers on web usage, platform usage, etc? People who do this drop out of the sample - they don't show up in the numbers. As far as your stat gathering is concerned, they don't exist. If you're actually doing a census of people and asking about their web usage and social habits, it'd show up. So maybe Google or Facebook has the data if they were to do say cohort analysis on Google Analytics or…

But they still READ. So, if you 'interact' (and by that I mean do any write-like action, like commenting, posting, liking, whatever) less, that's gonna show up.

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#325

Post by tsunamifury »

bix6 wrote: post #318
tsunamifury wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who leads large parts of ad tech for TikTok and worked at Google for 10 years, it’s the K shaped economy that is pressing SMBs out. Pure and simple Everyone can make up some complex theories but I see it in the numbers every day. Spend distribution is now k shaped and SMBs simply can’t compete at top end performance levels.

Can you share any numbers ie roughly how different the spend is? SMB spends $1k on ads but grandes spend $1M or something? Idk how it works.

SMBs broadly spend 200-400 dollars a month on ads and see marginal to negative returns against 10 million in spend for large clients. Even 1000-5000 see marginal returns at best unless the target small demo high return (local premium services). They lack the budgets for learning and optimization let alone optimal price per placement.

This combined with SMBs targeting everyday joes with increasing less demand availability for anything it leaves them crushed on both sides.

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#327

Post by kunley »

Where do you go know - maybe realize that ads make everyone around miserable and with this bitter understanding go through painful but necessary process of finding other means of earning money.

PS. Seriously.

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#328

Post by LunaSea »

nottorp wrote: post #239
mapontosevenths wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is built with content from the open web, but it has also killed the open web. The death of Adwords is only one symptom of that. I don't know what comes next, I just know it will be worse.

No, google search has stopped being useful years before "AI".

Is that why it kept it's market share and usage numbers?

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#329

Post by akoboldfrying »

mmmBacon wrote: post #117

I think Google’s search and ad business are at risk. Search has become such a mess that it’s become harder and harder to use to find quality results. It reminds me of Yahoo before Google in a way. I’m using ChatCPT or equivalent for 60% of my searches. The remaining 40% is just muscle memory. Of that 40% about half the time I regret using Google search due to the difficulty of finding the relevant result. I can see s…

You don't think putting ads in Gemini output has crossed Google's mind?

I've never understood the "AI is eating search! Google is dead!" theory. The specific mechanism (whether that be keyword search, LLM conversation or something else) by which users describe their needs to a company doesn't matter, all that matters is that (a) the company makes that mechanism available for free, (b) it does a good job of satisfying the user's need and (c) ads can be smuggled into it.

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#330

Post by pixl97 »

tsunamifury wrote: post #273
fidotron wrote: post #77

I love knocking on Google, and have been doing so for longer than it was cool, but this sounds more like the business is no longer attractive than Google having become suddenly wildly ineffective. My anecdotal evidence is the smarter normies are increasingly allergic to screens. They only use them to watch stuff they hear about by some other means, but parents, for example, look for any excuse to keep their kids off…

It’s googles fault no one wants my product! It certainly can’t be the basics of demand! - most SMBs I ever work with.

> the basics of demand

If you've been around longer than internet advertising you realize the basics of demand have changed pretty considerably.

Let's go back to 1980 and say that you have widget X that person A would absolutely buy if they saw/heard it advertised. They live in Podunk Minnesota that had coverage by 3 radio stations, 3 TV stations, and 2 newspapers. But you have no idea what media they actually consumed to target the right one.

Right now you're at the point you would have to contact at least 8 different media companies for ad spend if you wanted coverage. Most likely you'd cut it down to one of each, and maybe a billboard. This said, the cost for just this little area is going to be wildly expensive! Ads were huge money, and this is just for one little town.

These costs were slightly lower for large corporate buyers, but not that much because as you go back farther and farther you were typically dealing with more companies before consolidation. Being an SMB was great in this market in a local area because you weren't competing with the world.

Fast forward to now and you compete with the entire world at any given moment. In the West we've forgotten about competition and allowed a huge portion of our economic product to consolidate to a small number of companies. This is very apparent in advertising as the old media entities are dead or far more expensive than you'll ever recoup with the competition out there. Instead you're looking at Google/Reddit/Facebook style ads, but with that kind of ad you again, complete with the entire world. If your ad actually does good and drive business, then Google metrics will feedback to players watching the market and they will advertise products in the same space driving up competition and the base costs for ads. The supply from your competitors is practically unlimited which will drive your profits to almost zero unless you happen to have something very special.

Welcome to the K shaped economy, where the big get bigger and the small die.

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