331–340 of 369 posts
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A way to pay for that service, as well as generate an extra $40 billion a year.
Sure, most businesses exist to provide a good or service and get some bit extra beyond their costs. This is known as "profit".
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You tell a cab driver to take you to Morton's Meats and instead they take you to Shelly's Steaks (who pays them a kickback each time they do this), and then charge you for that detour to earn their kickback when you demand they take you to Morton's like you asked in the first place. Is this appropriate behavior by the taxi driver? Would a regular person consider this deserving of punishment? Is Google's search result…
You ask the waiter for a Coke, they ask you if you want Pepsi instead (because they get kickbacks to sell Pepsi). Is that appropriate behavior for a restaurant? How much is Google charging you for your searches? I get them for free. Sure, sometimes it's a pain to scroll down past the ad results when they're not relevant but it only costs me time and attention.
Related: I happened to be acquainted with a founder of one of the major coupon sharing sites, after they’d sold it for a rumored 8-9-figure sum. It didn’t make sense to me that it could be so attractive to brands to promote coupons there. People have already decided they want to buy the product; why would you want them to go hunting for a big discount after they’re already sold? He told me that the people who like it…
Groupon
> Technically, when someone does a Google search for “Williams Sonoma Cast Iron Skillet,” they probably would have clicked on one of the first 10 organic results, EVERY ONE OF WHICH leads to their website. But, y’know what ol’ Billy Ma’s performance marketers couldn’t then do: prove their value to their bosses. > [picture of that search term and williams sonoma ads with shopping links] The main problem here is that i…
Wouldn't that be solvable if it was forbidden to place ads using as search terms the tradename of another company?
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Is it enough just to click on the link? There surely are browser extensions that click on every link, just to make the companies pay, and make advertisers look even shitter.
No, it's got to be a real person intentionally clicking the link, and very large teams of skilled people work exclusively on figuring out which clicks fall in this category. Cursor movement patterns, delay time, whether the link was actually rendering on the display when it was clicked, IP address, cookies, signed-in identities, previous click patterns, location, all of these things and more factor in. When people ta…
If ads are no longer profitable, then this should sink both the online advertising market as well as Google.
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If I can do 10 of these, which would take a few minutes, I could cost a company $100. Which means, with the right tools for spoofing my identity, I could cost them $1000 an hour. If I spend a good work day on this, I could probably cost them $10,000. If I convince 10 people to do this with me for a day, we could cost them $100,000. We might be able to cost them $1M in a week.
> Which means, with the right tools for spoofing my identity, I could cost them $1000 an hour. Very, very sophisticated systems exist to prevent spoofed identities from counting as ad clicks.
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Defensive spending to protect otherwise organic traffic could also be called extortion.
Forget about the corporate POV for a second, as a user, if I'm searching for X, I probably want X in my results, no? It's the fundamental contradiction in Google's search ads model. If Google delivers users the thing they want, ads by definition have to be things users don't want.
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Google is offering a service, namely a way to connect your customers to your website. Arguably, on brand ads are just a way to pay for that service.
Funny. In any other industry hijacking a business's name and trademark for payment would be considered facilitating fraud. But in marketing, it's somehow fair game?
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> The main problem here is that if Williams Sonoma was not advertising on that search term, Lodge and Food52 etc etc would, and then those companies would be above the Williams Sonoma organic placements. This is what is known as "on brand" Search ads. I like to call these effectively the "Google Tax" because publishers/retailers are forced to pay Google for the traffic they would have already received had the ad not…
It's not a tax, it's a protection racket. You wouldn't like it if someone looking for Williams Sonoma saw results for Sur La Table, would you? Pay up.
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An ad directing shoppers to your competitors who pay them is not a protection racket, no more than a travel agency directing travelers to businesses that they have a relationship with. It's the entire business model of aggregators and intermediaries and middle men, which compose roughly half the world's working population.
You tell a cab driver to take you to Morton's Meats and instead they take you to Shelly's Steaks (who pays them a kickback each time they do this), and then charge you for that detour to earn their kickback when you demand they take you to Morton's like you asked in the first place. Is this appropriate behavior by the taxi driver? Would a regular person consider this deserving of punishment? Is Google's search result…
If the cab ride was free sure, but you are explicitly paying for a cab to take you to your intended route.
HUGE difference.