431–440 of 510 posts
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> That is why we aggressively use ad blockers and go to great lengths to avoid the status quo. And so you're paying for the content you're reading as well?
Nope, if they are so unscrupulously willing to employ dark patterns, I can get pretty competitive :-)
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Yeah. The problem with splitting up Google is that Google products, taken in isolation, are themselves keys to preventing other monopolies. Split off Android to swim on its own and we get an iPhone monopoly. Split off Workspace and we go back to the days of MSOffice's monopoly. Splitting out Chrome essentially kills the World Wide Web as an application platform as no one else wants to support it. Cloud would probably…
This is like looking at a farm overrun by weeds but doing nothing using the pretext that just removing one of them isn't going to fix the problem.
You walked right into that one, sorry.
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Thankfully HN is finally at a stage people can come out and talk about Ad tech without being harassed or attacked. Could you explain more on this. What do you think makes Google Ad or DoubleClick so special? And >What matters is how much they are earning compared to the next best alternative. Correct me if I am wrong, you are suggesting even if publisher only earns 30% of the revenue they still earn more than on othe…
I am on the purchasing side. Google is very efficient when delivering traffic especially their Max Performance product. Probably the cheapest of all platforms. So they are serving relevant ads to users who engage with the ads. This is win for me and I assume also a win for publishers who get revenue due to higher engagement. Also users should benefit because they are getting relevant ads. Linear tv is notorious for n…
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Ad-supported does not mean "tacking your every movement and collecting all your private data across the entirety of the internet throughout your entire adult life, and selling that data to the highest bidder"
Usual the news publishers don't sell user data because they have so little of it. However external data providers are used to retarget specific audience segments on said publisher's users. If you want to sell ad impressions at reasonable rates, you'll need to provide audience segment targeting, otherwise the ad performance will be too low for brands to continue buying it at previous rates.
In a comment elsewhere in the discussion: accuracy of targeting is worse than random sampling https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43719816
2. Ads have existed for as long as commerce existed. Google became a trillion dollar ad behemoth before it started collected everyone's data by simply offering contextual ads.
Literally nothing in the ads business requires you to collect and sell so much of user data that it would even make Stasi pause and re-think.
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Usual the news publishers don't sell user data because they have so little of it. However external data providers are used to retarget specific audience segments on said publisher's users. If you want to sell ad impressions at reasonable rates, you'll need to provide audience segment targeting, otherwise the ad performance will be too low for brands to continue buying it at previous rates.
1. Those extraordinary claims need some extraordinary evidence In a comment elsewhere in the discussion: accuracy of targeting is worse than random sampling https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43719816 2. Ads have existed for as long as commerce existed. Google became a trillion dollar ad behemoth before it started collected everyone's data by simply offering contextual ads. Literally nothing in the ads business req…
I could provide a long answer but the gist of it is that the study is flawed. Among the reasons, they don't differentiate desktop and mobile traffic which is a massive measurement problem. They also use Nielsen DAR which is in itself a heuristic method of determining what age and gender a user is and thus is not a great pick as an oracle.
The study also does not mention click and bounce rates which are good proxies for targeting success.
Beyond the performance, the marketing and sales aspect of targeted advertising is also a strong selling point, no matter the performance.
> Ads have existed for as long as commerce existed. Google became a trillion dollar ad behemoth before it started collected everyone's data by simply offering contextual ads.
No, it didn't.
> Literally nothing in the ads business requires you to collect and sell so much of user data that it would even make Stasi pause and re-think.
It does because contextual advertisement does not provide enough volumes and lower performance (lower click rate, higher bounce rates, lower conversion rates).
Example: If 1/100 people read hockey-related content and out of those people, 1/100 pages read is about hockey, it means that you're reaching about 1/10000 page views.
Now if you do implement user tracking, you're available inventory is 1/100 page views.
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I choose option three in the false dichotomy: Render it illegal to attempt to force me to see ads.
You can always pay for service. Kagi, YouTube Premium, Reddit Premium, Spotify Premium, ProtonMail etc. Platforms needs money to run.
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If you're arguing we should split Chrome development from Google then I'm 100% with you there.
Sure, but I'm arguing Apple shouldn't be allowed to sell "default browser" status on iOS. Show the customer a randomized list and let them choose. Google will probably still dominate, but it won't be because they paid to.
Context is important.
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Their business apps division is probably a billion dollar business. Their cloud generates a couple of billions in profit each year. Besides that, I don't think giving away anything for free justifies any activity. If we're trying to compare to Microsoft, remember that Internet Explorer was free, and modern day Microsoft literally owns Github.
Revenue is not really a consideration when talking about _illegal_ monopolies. That is an incorrect way to view this. It's about anti-competitive practices. That's what the laws are about (and the reason for their existence). Google is not anti-competitive. At no point am I forced or even "guided" into doing business with Google, at any stage, in any department. There are 8 billion other ad-networks out there, and th…
DoubleClick for Publishers placed restrictions on how publishers could work with non-Google ad exchanges and tilted things in favor of Google's exchange. Third-party exchanges weren't given information about the specific impression before bidding and an advertiser bid submitted on AdX could win even if there was a higher bid submitted on a third-party exchange. DFP also banned publishers from setting higher price floors for AdX than for third-party exchanges, but allowed setting higher price floors for third-party exchanges than for AdX.
In response to Google's unfair ad auctions, publishers eventually started using "header bidding", a technique for getting real-time competitive bidding from multiple ad exchanges. However, Google still controlled the largest ad-buying platform, DV360. DV360 was the top buyer on every third-party ad exchange in addition to AdX. Google modified DV360 to automatically lower bids submitted to third-party ad exchanges such that they were always below an advertiser's maximum budget. When the publisher ad server received the bid, it would use it as the floor price to solicit more bids on AdX. DV360 would then bid the publisher's maximum budget via AdX, taking the win away from the third-party exchange.
The decision also goes into why ad networks are not a substitute for the combination of publisher ad servers and ad exchanges: "Although ad networks are another tool for connecting advertisers to publishers, the sophisticated publishers who receive the majority of open-web display advertising revenue do not view ad networks as substitutes for ad exchanges because ad networks offer very limited control and are unable to place bids from disparate demand sources in competition with each other." The government never claims that Google has monopoly power in the publisher-facing ad network market (i.e. AdSense).
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Xfinity is Comcast which I don't think has much connection to the Baby Bells or their reconsolidation. Unfortunately the the cost of running cable to the broad US suburbs is a pretty big natural barrier to competition. https://i.redd.it/7v0zi94tms181.jpg
Too bad we can't treat laying cable as a public utility, then multiple companies could use the same infrastructure to compete. Instead we ended up paying for dark fiber with companies having no incentive to use it.
This is necessary now, but it should have been done years back. Nowadays, many companies backed up by investors with very deep pockets are doing this in all markets: start to buy middle-man companies in a space, it does not matter which one, dominate the market thanks to monopolistic power. Screw the clients making them pay too much, screw the providers paying them too little. Go for the next market. Google does this…
Laws, otoh, are not magic. Making a law doesn’t solve the problem. Laws require people with guns to go enforce them. The government has no incentive to use force against the people lining their pockets, and so laws tend to be enforced primarily on the poor and the working class. Only when the majority of the votes of the public could be swayed will government attack the donor class.