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Comment by julianpye | Hacker News Reader

Google is all about searching for results and Facebook is all about demography and thus brands.

So Facebook is taking a lot of advertising budget to establish brands that used to be for print and television.

Simple example: Diapers. By the time you have a baby, Facebook knows that you as a couple are expecting and you will see ads establishing relevant brands. You would never see those ads on Google, because at that time you're not searching for them. This used to be the business of television advertising. So you know the brand Pampers long before you ever think of buying a pack of them.

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Can you elaborate on why you think Google wouldn't know before FB?

Many (most?) people don't go posting anything about pregnancy before for ~3 months traditionally, and odds are you are going to be searching for symptoms when you first notice something is wrong health-wise.

When a doctor or test confirms you are pregnant, I'd be willing to bet that users are immediately pulling up their favorite search engine to figure out next steps vs. blabbing about it to their BFFs on FB.

Now, if you are basing it purely off of carpet bombing people targeting off of demographics, yes, FB probably has more solid data there as it is self-reported and not inferred. But you sure as heck won't get self-reported pregnancy info earlier than Google will know you are interested in it.

If anything, I'd argue Amazon would have that data in a similar timeframe if people start looking up pregnancy books.

This also entirely discounts the notion that there is 3rd party data sets at play which both Google and FB leverage to enrich their data.

All of this is not to say your point on the brand advertising is incorrect--I actually agree with that as the "feed" has become the new television. But definitely do not agree on the specific example cited.

The odds are very good that people start discussing things like pregnancy in Messenger at the same time they start googling symptoms. Public posts aren't all FB has available.

That's actually a great point that I forgot about. It is scary to think about how they are mining personal conversations like that, particularly about something so sensitive.

Could easily lead to a situation like when Target outed a girl as pregnant to her father [1].

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targe...

You are correct, though it's worth noting that advertising spend as a % of (American) GDP has been constant for a long, long time [0]. FB and Google are probably still competing for money that was previously spent on TV/Radio/Periodicals, but still, everyone's competing for a slice of the same pie.

[0] http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-03-03/advertisings...

I'll give another perspective: In my industry at least, Google has become incredibly expensive due to a few unicorns spending ridiculous amounts of money just to put competitors out of the game (because they have the money for that, even if it doesn't make sense from a unit economics point of view, and Google is cool with it). By contrast, Facebook remains very effective for the same kind of goals, at least for the moment. I get the feeling this isn't unique to my industry so yeah, I'd venture to say there is a lot money shifting platforms.

That's a contradiction. If some companies are "spending ridiculous amounts of money" on Google, that's evidence of increased revenue for Google. It's not hard to believe that both Google and Facebook are growing.

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