Very much a way to mitigate the FTC's requirements on making advertising more distinct than organic results. It is an unpopular opinion but I believe Google is dying. They have been for a long time. The cancer is that nothing other than search ads generates the revenue and margins they need and the margins on search ads are now down 90% from where they were in 2010. Personally I'm long on Microsoft/Bing as a candidat…
For the record, I don’t think this is FTC compliant. It also reeks of the kind of this that regulators would adjust their laws for. Google is playing with a situation where regulators may write very explicit rules that say exactly how much labeling their ads need. A 50%-75% chop in outgoing paid clicks would be material to their earnings. They’ve been in a situation for a decade where a large chunk of their most valuable demographic had no idea they’ve been clicking on ads. That isn’t a metric they should be getting more greedy on.
Regulators could just set up a test where, if a large enough percent of users don’t know they’ve clicked on an ad, paid disclosure has to be more explicit.
The low hanging revenue fruit for Google at this point is very sparse. Financially incentivized executives are scrambling to do questionable things to hit bonuses that probably shouldn’t be attainable. Kind of like Boeing.
