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Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"

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Re: Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ad attribution is extremely difficult across any ad medium, especially while respecting user privacy. You may see an online ad two weeks ago and buy the product today, how do you attribute that?

You use promotional codes for attribution, then you have complete knowledge. So it's extremely easy, and a solved problem. No need for analytics, no need to infringe on privacy.

If you can figure out the attribution, I'd say you've infringed on privacy.

You know what the buyer was looking at

Re: Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ad attribution is extremely difficult across any ad medium, especially while respecting user privacy. You may see an online ad two weeks ago and buy the product today, how do you attribute that?

You use promotional codes for attribution, then you have complete knowledge. So it's extremely easy, and a solved problem. No need for analytics, no need to infringe on privacy.

I watch a youtube video and the youtuber shills me some product along with a promo code. A week later I decide to buy the product, but I don't remember what video had the ad or what the promo code was so I just don't bother with it. How are you going to attribute this sale to the youtuber?

Re: Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"

#83

Google is a 1.5 trillion dollar advertising company. There simply isn't enough content in the world to monetize to keep Google growing YoY. All companies reach this point. Some glide to a natural equilibrium point (McDonalds, Subway), some cook the books and implode spectacularly (Enron), some oversteer in the other direction and fall down in chunky movements (Meta).

Yeah, Google's only hope is basically pouring money into AI in the hopes that they'll come up with another Google. Can't say it seems likely.

Or, crazy idea, they can accept they have absolute boatloads of money and are making tons more, and that this is enough.

Re: Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is a concept from polling called a "random sample"... It's like taking a sample of a swimming pool, to check the chlorine levels. And maybe the edge of the pool closest to the person taking the sample is the deep end where mostly adults swim, but if they walked a bit further and took the sample from the shallow side with the babies and toddlers they'd find out the water is actually 50% piss with more than trac…

Strawman. Parent was talking about [(Cl^(-1))] If you care about excrement content, that should be another study. Bottom line: Representative sample https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(statistics)

Yes, I am-- very-- well aware of what a representative sample means, and made my comment specifically with that knowledge in mind when I responded.

Re: Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"

#85
post #31

Well, no one can complain that the right wing is being censored: RussiaToday.com Pravda.ru WND.com Zerohedge.com Breitbart.com Newsmax.com Whatfinger.com TheBlaze.com TheFederalist.com Hannity.com Half of those guys were kicked off Fox News.

At least one of the authors of this article is a political activist with an axe to grind.

The original report is more informative and worth the read.

Re: Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"

#86
I briefly worked at a company that monetized videos with advertisements. The company would basically bundle many sites and get them video ads that the small sites wouldn’t otherwise get.

The company used GVP to provide ads to the site owners. Many of the sites were straight up serving pirated content monetized directly with gvp.

The way this was “allowed” was that the company would receive a DMCA request for the pirated content and we’d have to take it down… within 5 days. So we would wait 5 days and take it down.

In that delta, everyone made money. For the 5 days everyone made enough to stay in business and still “comply with the law”. Most of the company’s operating capital was sourced through this takedown period. 100’s of thousands a month.

It actually made the content more valuable because it introduced scarcity. The content was mostly Indian cricket matches and the only way to watch them online was pirated in this manner.

So justify it however you want, gvp and google ads in general are totally trash. Oh and we had frequent issues with advertising metrics being wrong between 5-25%. When I inquired… that’s just how they do it. It’s an “estimate.

Re: Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"

#87

The internet feels like a desolate waste ground to me at the moment. I give up pretty quickly these days "surfing the web", as I just get fed up with the constant never ending search results filled with blogspam, news sites that constantly pester you with modal dialogs from the microsecond you land on them, every site begging you for money, your email address or moaning at you because you're running an adblocker. Or…

You got 11 pages of apples - you did well ;)

I'm told I got 8,760,000,000 "results" but only get to see 1 page of 45 links (some being ads). The "more" page shows only 8 recipes, another "more" another 8 recipes, then my only choice is "less"!

Of 9 billion results, I can see only 60.

Google is broken. I thought it would happen, but I did think they would last longer than this.

Re: Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"

#88
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relevant that this is an opinion piece, not a study.

It's not an opinion piece or a study, it's a pretty straightforward application of the law of diminishing returns. It doesn't matter if you're talking about fraud or uptime or test scores, the cost of a 100% success rate is almost never worth the extra effort it takes to get there.

The law of diminishing returns is not natural law - it is just an observation of something that happens in practice but not always. E.g., people often choose to spend time and treasure treating an incurable cancer or send the Coast Guard to search for five people in a submersible.

Patio11's soundbite as often shared puts the cart before the horse.

He says that the "optimal amount of fraud is non-zero" as if allowing some fraud is necessary for society to function. But what he actually means is that since not all fraud is prosecuted and prevented, allowing some fraud is just the price we pay for actually getting things done.

Take the analogy of food processing. It is accepted that some small percentage of ground coffee will be insect or rodent remains and their feces. It's not like making ground coffee requires animal remains and feces.

I read Patio11's soundbite to mean that ground coffee requires animal remains and feces.

Re: Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"

#89
post #54
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relevant that this is an opinion piece, not a study.

Do you think the tradeoffs discussed in that article are unproven?

The tradeoffs are not unproven but the soundbite suggests that the tradeoffs are a necessary precondition. That's the crux of my issue with the soundbite.

Re: Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That seems pretty broken to me for the biggest search engine on the internet. Not really. There isn't much value to be gained in ranking and sorting a bigger top N of the 8.5 billion results. It is better to encourage people to refine their queries to something less general.

I'm sorry, I don't like to argue on HN, but this is a really silly thing to say. For instance, search for: "how voltage affects metal in a frozen liquids" About 15,100,000 results (0.41 seconds), but you can't get past page 10. Page 10 of about 92 results (0.44 seconds) And on page 10 is a result with this as it's description: "lyrics to let it go. wolf pup for sale. the taste of chicago 2015 hours. crash landing aut…

The amount of results is probably made up at this point.
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