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Google is dead. Where do we go now?

circusscientist.com

331–340 of 873 posts

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

#331

I recently took someone to go and watch a hockey game. Been a little while but I personally played as a goalie myself. The person kept making the comment that she couldn't see/find the puck and it made it frustrating to watch. As a goalie, not being able to see the puck is pretty normal (especially with big bodies trying to screen you). What I told her was that what matters a lot more than where the puck is, is where…

>Look where everyone is looking and you'll find your answer there. It may not be in the same form as Google adwords, but the game is the same. Leveraging attention.

The chill that ran down my spine when I realized that you and TFA think that the part people care about is Google as an ad platform, and not as a way to access websites.

Jesus fucking Christ, things are bleak.

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

#333

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.

Wouldn't the K shape only affect targeting of affluent users that are desirable to luxury brands?

Think through the net margins of the bottom of the K left to them. And then the spend against their own K economy on the business side.

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

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone who was on Livejournal before G+ “invented” “Circles” had absolutely no problem with locking posts to “friends” (people they followed) or various “friends groups” that were subsets of their friends. It was fucking hilarious to see everyone say it was too hard on G+. Just two dropdowns right there on the new post page next to the main text field. Super simple. Creating and editing the groups was a pretty simp…

I still mourn G+. It was clearly put together by somebody who thought first and foremost about privacy. It made deciding who to share what with the central, most visible part of how it worked. And that's probably part of why it failed. Was it hard to choose? Nope. But I guarantee you that if Facebook added a little "hey, are you sure you want to share this post publicly with the whole world under your real name? Yes/…

The biggest boneheaded decision from my perspective was their taking over the + prefix in Google search (to filter for results that have this term verbatim). That just positioned G+ as my enemy and I had a strong desire for it to die. Unfortunately, they didn't bring back the prefix even after it died. Quotes around a term do something similar, but I am still angry.

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

#335

Push advertising sucks, but we can make pull much better by giving the user more control. Imagine a protocol to publish commercial offers for any given fragment of content addressable by URI. It would describe the details of some product or service and a set of proposed terms. We could surf the web looking for relevant content and publishing related offers. Various repositories would subscribe or not. A browser (exte…

>user more control

As others said, most users don't care or don't want to see them.

This leaves the people that care being the ones who are providing the ads, and they will game the system with bots and other methods of bad acting that will make the system useless.

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

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If only Discord weren't so incredibly bloated and full of stupid features aimed at 14-year-old gamers.

Or just not a buggy piece of crap. It’s more stable than it used to be, but I still run into random problems here and there. Much more often than with any other piece of software I use regularly, but I suppose most are becoming web apps anyways…

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

#338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the things I hope will come from the Trough of Disillusionment in cloud computing will be families running redundant file servers hosting the family photos instead of doing everything on IG. Your three tech savvy family members should all have redundant copies of the photos of memaw’s wedding and Uncle Jim when he was 2 and looked exactly like your cousin’s second kid. I don’t need to see those. Your stalker e…

Too bad all of the RAM and NAND flash are going to be unaffordable for the next few years at least.

Once you include internet latency hard drive latency isn’t that much worse. It won’t help but it won’t stop it.

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

#339
post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 availabi…

Wow so 10,000-100,000x spend difference. That is a wide K.

Do you think there’s any hope for SMB? Eg I’ve seen some companies tout AI advertising optimization for SMB but when I looked into one for investment the numbers weren’t very compelling.

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

#340

Is there such a thing as a good ad? I've always blocked them on all platforms. Looking at instagram where I don't block anything, most of what it suggests to me are soft porn or soft scams (generic chinese dropships marketed as a unique innovation).

I mean, you mean "I've always tried to block 'obvious' ads in the places I expect obvious ads to be".

The thing is the world of ads is far larger and more complicated than that. Just think of product placement in movies? That is an ad, have you stopped watching most movies?

What about content that is a thinly veiled ad? What about a set of bots that follows everything you post on line, and when it's little AI core figures out you are looking for something makes a suggestion under a post where you're asking questions?

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