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We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot

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Re: We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot

#581

Post by gomox »

lobocinza wrote: post #526
gomox wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI starts from excellent UX and needs to prove that they can monetize all those empty pixels. They will no doubt succeed. Google starts from horrid UX where every advertiseable pixel has been squeezed dry. Only way to go is down.

You're confounding your subjective personal experience with the whole. Google can eat the cake and have it. They already are profitable, they already have scale, they already have market penetration, Google is already installed in 72% of mobile devices, they have cost efficiency due to TPUs, they probably have the best data, at least for serving ads. OpenAI has no chance in outcompeting Google, not in ad-based revenu…

Importantly: OpenAI doesn't need to outcompete Google, it just needs to show it can bleed.

As to the rest of Google's dominant position, it's an advantage for sure, but every leading vendor whose products turned to shit went the way of the dodo one way or another.

And it's important to mention that this includes GAds, not just the loss leader (Search). They have been so good at squeezing advertisers dry that ROI is barely there in many categories.

Re: We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot

#582

Post by valenceelectron »

jorvi wrote: post #575
tdrz wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find galaxus.com (European store) far better than any other store, American or otherwise.

- 7 day (or even longer) delivery time - only free shipping >€50 - much more limited selection of items - can't say much about their return / warranty process but I doubt it's as lenient as Amazon's Pretty much the opposite of "far better".

That assessment highly depends on your region I assume. They are far from 7 day shipping for me. In fact, it's the same 2-3 days as Amazon for non-Prime customers here. Speaking of non-Prime, free shipping is also at 50€.

The limited selection is certainly true but mainly it misses drop shipping stuff and what's essentially a mirror of aliexpress with a huge markup. I don't really miss those. In fact, it requires a considerable amount of time to navigate through those offers on Amazon, so not having them is a plus in my book.

Re: We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot

#583

Post by mxmilkiib »

utopiah wrote: post #565
svieira wrote: post #386

The particularly worrying thing here is that they're now going to be gathering training data for a conversational model on _how to influence people effectively even when they already know they are being influenced_. Even more than RLFH already does. "We had to build the Torment Nexus so our children could eat" is not a good reason to build the Torment Nexus. The fact that they are not committing to not doing this tel…

Yes... but that's Google from the moment they started monetizing. When it was a research project at Stanford in 1996 it was genuinely about making the World information accessible. The day in 2000 when they decided to sell advertisement is exactly when this process started, not just now in 2026. Since that day they transformed from a knowledge management project to an advertising company that used knowledge managemen…

something something about liberalism always ending up siding with economic advantage over social justice/liberation

Re: We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot

#584

Post by demurgos »

HWR_14 wrote: post #369
account42 wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd expect the notice to be on the same screen where the ad or ad-like content is shown if the regulation intends to actually make a difference.

So you expect the movie to pause for a disclaimer?

It could also be a pop-up or a clear icon in a corner without disrupting the movie. It does not have to be baked into the video stream as long as it's displayed. I'm not sure what country you're in but some programs on TV or YouTube use this system and it's fine. No need to pause with flashing lights.

Re: We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot

#585

Post by commandersaki »

gsky wrote: post #30

Most ads i see on YouTube are outright scams. Google and Meta are so evil.

Google loves cashing on malvertising. Google loves posting up ads that surface on top of the mac homebrew website containing a facade with their own malicious own curl | sh malware.

Ads are so helpful!

Re: We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot

#586

Post by xuhu »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #495
jdw64 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe breaking into the ad business starts with learning how to lie to yourself.

Can you imagine wanting to go into advertising? Surely it must be a last resort, or they were tricked into it, like going to work for Facebook or Google to do important bleeding edge work. The 'advertising' part only makes sense if it seeped in small degrees at a time.

It's legal and it pays well. That is all.

Re: We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot

#587

Post by janalsncm »

miki123211 wrote: post #540
majormajor wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite example of why advertising/marketing is important but not overwhelming/unstoppable is in the hit-based industries: If the industry had a "make a superstar" button or a "make a blockbuster movie" button they could just keep mashing, they'd be mashing it constantly. You wouldn't see franchises go from top-of-the-world to decline like Marvel or Fast and Furious. You wouldn't see expensive new bombs or failur…

I think marketing is one factor for success, quality is another, but an under-appreciated third one is just getting more shots on goal until one finally succeeds. I think this is one of the most under-appreciated explanations of why American-style capitalism succeeded where soviet-style communism failed. In theory, communism is more economically efficient, as you don't have multiple companies duplicating work and re-…

In general, markets are a really elegant solution to the allocation of goods. It’s really difficult to plan out how steel should be allocated or how many pairs of shoes we should make this year.

Even worse, many Soviet factories were incentivized to lie about the quantity of goods produced or sacrifice quality to meet quotas. So as a first order, approximation, markets are really nice solution to this.

Of course there are many known market failures, which can disrupt such a fragile system if not addressed. For example, monopolies and information asymmetries.

Some people also believe that part of the failures of the planned economy was a limitation of the technology at the time. Without computers, it wasn’t that easy to track the outputs of factories to enforce quality. Those people argue that a modern day planned economy might look a little bit more like Amazon does internally. Maybe still not a great place to live though.

Re: We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot

#588

Post by reactordev »

latexr wrote: post #230
bayindirh wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what bothers me a lot. For the people who doesn't know how it's made or want to believe, it's a miracle. For me, it's a resource wasting text generator. I'll not lie, I don't use OpenAI, Mistral or Anthropic's models, even for coding. I prefer to read my API docs and cry once. I used Gemini, five or six times in total. Twice I asked a couple of very specific things, and it unearthed them. Since they were not…

Something I’ve also seen multiple times is an LLM giving wrong information, I tell it it’s not right, then it tells me I’m “absolutely right” and it provides the exact same answer and tells me that one will work.

Oh Gemini, how no one uses you enough…

Re: We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot

#589

Post by Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe »

kay_o wrote: post #571
Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well. If you were a for profit company and were offered to get the most effective ads ever at the cost of 0.1% of advertisement containing falsehoods about your product, would you take it? What about if you know your competitors are taking the offer?

You would need to ensure the legal death penalty will significantly outperform the conversion rate.

Yes but the penalty is on google, not on the company buying the ad.

Re: We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot

#590

Post by sedawkgrep »

reaperducer wrote: post #157
sedawkgrep wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since when have we considered ads something helpful? Their purpose isn’t to be helpful. They're there to sell you something, and nothing more. Any semblance of helpfulness is misinterpretation and merely coincidental.

Since when have we considered ads something helpful? Their purpose isn’t to be helpful. They're there to sell you something, and nothing more. Any semblance of helpfulness is misinterpretation and merely coincidental. Pithy, dismissive, reductionist, and wrong. Yes, most of the bottom-feeding ads you see these days are along the lines of your description. But those are not the only ads, not the only method of adverti…

> Pithy, dismissive, reductionist, and wrong.

No, it's not.

I completely unplugged from broadcast TV simply because I can no longer stand to be bombarded with FUD, manufactured lifestyles, propaganda, etc., that provides absolutely no useful information about a product, or really anything other than reminding me that X company's Y product exists.

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