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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

Are we in an advertising bubble?

I mean it's difficult to quantify advertising. Most retailers can't depend on just click through rates. If you see a ad for Vans, you might not purchase it online, but like traditional ads, it could make you think about it when you're near a shoe store.

And most normal (non tech/IT people) don't run ad blockers. But at some point there's got to be a low of diminishing return. People are earning less, and in some ways buying more to distract themselves .. yet like any industry, you simply cannot have infinite growth.

What exactly will an advertising bubble bust look like? Or would we not see it directly, as it would be more of an effect of fewer goods being sold due to something else that kills jobs and stifles wages?

How will a dot com break in the 2010s/20s be different from the one in 2001?

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I really hope so. Excepting the fact that it'll probably be bad for the economy as a whole, I can't wait for it to pop and for most ads to be eliminated from my life. It's miserable to be surrounded by constant reminders about a million corporations trying to persuade me I need to give them money.

And it seems like advertising is yet another industry (alongside payment processors, legal services, and real estate) that have managed to 'insert themselves' in the middle of all other commerce, skimming vastly outsized portions of profit off of the entire economy, by being intrinsically 'needed' to do business.

It seems to me that all of these things should be driven by competition to infinitesimal profit margins, because everyone needs them and there should be a big payoff in undercutting each other to take everyone else's business. In practice that's not true at all, which I think means that 'everyone else' severely lacks high-level bargaining power to force these industries down to reasonable cuts.

I fantasize about a scandal in which it emerges that click-through rates all lies and advertising barely actually works and the whole industry goes belly-up as a result.

... okay that's enough cynicism for today.

A market correction is not bad for the market. Think of it like the symptoms of a cold - your body is fighting an infection, so you'll feel unwell for a while, but ultimately you'll be healthier for it.

This is one of the many reasons that interfering in an economy to prevent "recessions" is a bad idea. It prolongs the problem and worsens the inevitable side effects.

Yeah except that "feeling unwell" is code for a ton of human misery as people lose jobs, lose healthcare, go broke, some even die. And it's disproportionately the working class that feels the effect of recessions.

"Market corrections" might be less of a tragedy if societies like the USA could muster the moral courage to pick up the slack for the market and make people's lives not literally depend on it.

All a market for is to determine the price of a resource, so that people can choose where to spend their money.

Looking after people who can't look after themselves - be it for reasons of market correction, injury or infirmity - is an entirely orthogonal concern.

In other words yes, I agree with you - but think that picking up the slack is the job of charity, and shouldn't involve interference with the market just because it's giving you prices you don't like.

I feel like it's hard to say that it's orthogonal when people not being able to look after themselves is pretty highly correlated to these people losing jobs.

The market exists for us, we don't exist for the market. If distortions are all that's needed to make sure we have the society we want, then that's great! Nothing inherently just about a market.

Gravity makes things fall, but it doesn't mean that we let everything crash to the ground because we don't want to mess with the laws of physics.

> The market exists for us, we don't exist for the market

And we are also the folks who create the market - deliberately or not. Its our collective decisions which results in corrections. We need a safety net for the people - the jobs however, are lost for the rest of eternity.

I think, again, you're agreeing with me.

There's no need to let people suffer because the market has judged their labour now to be worthless. That's what charitable support is for.

But arguing that we shouldn't let the market deem someone's labour worthless is like arguing that we shouldn't let physics determine g to be 9.8ms2.

It is 9.8ms2, just like the value of a skilled buggy whip maker is now $0/hr.

The question in both cases is, now what do we do about it? Presumably, we give to charity to support the buggy whip makers, and we build our buildings such that gravity doesn't cause them to come crashing down.

> In other words yes, I agree with you - but think that picking up the slack is the job of charity, and shouldn't involve interference with the market just because it's giving you prices you don't like.

This is fundamentally the reason I (cynically) cannot trust charities (especially religious charities) long-term. The charity machinery requires people to be poor and miserable. Poor and miserable people are the products a charity sells (to donors)! We are the product. A charity is a band-aid. It cannot be as long-term infrastructure.

I agree that we should not prop up failing industries for fear of layoffs. That's just kicking the can down the road. However, I strongly believe a charity has no place in a functioning society.

I don't understand your position here.

If you're opposed to charity but also opposed to market manipulation, how do you propose to support people who can't support themselves?

The only alternative is forcing people to do it.

> The only alternative is forcing people to do it.

Yes, this is a pretty common position: govt charity funded by taxes is precisely forced charity, which many people are in favor of (myself included).

Forced charity is an oxymoron. What you're talking about is socialism, which is not charity (at least, when practised at a scale above that of a family or voluntary commune).

> Forced charity is an oxymoron

Yes, I know. I thought my meaning was obvious, but I'll be clearer: "Forcing" people to provide an alternative to charity is simply called "taxation" (to the extent that taxes are spent on things whose benefits are not distributed in proportion to taxation).

My point was that I don't understand your claim that you don't follow the GP comment's point, since you're surely aware that taxation and gov't spending are well within the Overton Window.

I'm thinking a general increase in income tax (won't happen though sadly enough).

Tell that to Larry Page (in regards to having a cold); not trying to be snide, just never been a fan of the "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" argument

Adjustment is probably a better word to use here - correction implies that the previous state of a naturally fluctuating system was "right".

Nobody worth their salt cares about click-through rates. As long as people get positive return on ad spend, they'll buy advertising. It just works. When people stop making money using advertising, they'll stop using it.

The fact that all your other examples are heavily legally encumbered should be a hint that your explanation is missing something. Ads aren't just valueless middleman enterprises for those purchasing them: they provide concrete competitive advantage. Their existence is negative-sum, for sure, but they're still individually rational decisions, in a local sense.

It's simply a collective action problem, in which there's a global equilibrium that is effectively unreachable (outside of legislation, which has its own complications in the case of advertising because of 1A protections).

In what sense are you claiming advertising is negative sum? Who is meant to come out behind? The business buying advertising is ahead, the ad company is ahead and the consumer has something they decided they wanted. I see a lot of ads that are a mild waste of time because what they are selling isn't something that I'm buying, but that isn't negative sum. They are usually present in the context of free or subsidiesed services.

Advertising isn't a crazy form of mind control where people are hypnotised into handing over money. Sure that might happen, but the vast majority of people I've met don't know they have a problem until it is pointed out to them.

For example, in '07 I didn't find out about smartphones by word of mouth. I found out because Apple put a lot of effort into some very effective marketing. And there is pretty good evidence that the advertising industry is one facet of a larger apparatus developed to make sure that messages make it to the local word-of-mouth circles.

Run an ad-blocker, use Netflix/Prime and don't have cable, work from home if you really hate billboards or whatever.

I see so little advertising these days that I don't care at all anymore.

I don't think so... If this is roughly right[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/273288/advertising-spend...

Then ad spending has increased by a little over 6%/yr.. In comparison, the worldbank says world gdp rose 2.5% + 2% inflation = 4.5%... so 1.5% higher than the average industry. That doesn't sound like a bubble to me.

If google is growing faster than 6%... then that would mean its just taking market share from traditional advertising. I would expect that, since TV and radio are losing their share of time to online sources.

0. This is a worldwide number.. since google is a multinational, so this is probably the most appropriate number IMO

Ad spending tends to revert to the mean. I recall a professor talking about how it’s a leading indicator for economic problems. Spending increases have diminishing returns, and and tend to pop with the rest of the economy.

In theory the share of the economy devoted to advertising should grow as the economy grows and becomes more complex. The more choices consumers have, and the more their base desires are already satisfied, the harder you have to work to convince them to buy your product. The harder you have to work, the bigger the rents that firms who already have control over peoples' attention can charge.

Similarly, the share of the economy devoted to the legal profession grows in proportion to the number of externalities in the economy (= the chance that some third party unrelated to your transactions will be wronged by your actions), and the share of the economy devoted to finance grows in proportion to the rate of change in the economy (the role of the financial industry is to destroy obsolete industries and redirect that capital into new, more modern ones; demand for its services is proportional to the number of opportunities there are to destroy incumbent industries with new technologies). The gains are at the expense of primary producers (natural resource extraction and manufacturing, and to a lesser extent retail, which is a complement of manufacturing). All of these effects fit observed recent history well.

There's no reason that this is a bubble except for the fact that once the rentier classes - government, finance, advertising, legal, real estate - have consumed the bulk of the economy, those previously employed in the destroyed industries tend to revolt, politically. In other words, the bubble ends with the destruction of society. Note that the usual outcome here is that the new rentier classes end up deploying their capital to hire outside allies and kill all of the people rising up against them, so I still wouldn't want to be on the side whose industries and skillsets have been destroyed. Historically, what tends to happen is that the whole society ends up marginalized, and some other world power who stayed out of the fighting ends up on top. (See eg. the French Revolution, where the peasants succeeded in killing the nobles...and then followed a century of wars and alternating dictatorships & republics, and when the dust settled, France had been eclipsed successively by Germany, England, and the U.S.)

I literally just came to this thread wondering if this revenue number was related to the stock market bubble in general, especially since Facebook’s stock does not seem to be impacted...at all...by the recent negative press / shifting focus of the company.

I also want to add that the huge focus on marketing and advertising in general really comes from a shift in the business that occurred in the 1970’s at the major business schools. At the time, there was a feeling that the US was overproducing products that weren’t needed, and the only solution was to more innovatively inform customers of what they needed, since cutting back on production would hurt the job market. One thing this led to was very specific marketing segmentation, among others. For instance, all older Americans used to be classified as 65+ in most marketing programs, maybe with race and gender added on as well. Obviously that was a very general category that now has been split into dozens of subcategories.

Anyway it seems like their plan wound up working out to well with the numbers we’re seeing out of Google and FB...

>>Are we in an advertising bubble?

I think the very real fear is that we haven't even begun to scratch the surface of how we market to humans, and the bubble has not yet to even begin.

Yes, we are in an AdTech bubble where companies attempt to say that their advertisements are more targeted and actually reach people when they aren't.

Facebook has had a bunch of issues where their metrics either are inaccurate or don't make sense. Google has cornered advertisment on what people intend to search but probably can't grow much bigger unless they go beyond the United States (the problem is that they are probably already saturated in the top 20 economies). This leaves Video advertisement and that is either getting increasingly harder to monetize or you have to make your own content which basically means you become Netflix, Amazon, Crunchyroll or Youtube (which Google already has). Not to mention the amount of clickfraud that is already happening.

So what will happen when this ends is that we will see a bunch of AI promises that can't be fulfilled not occur and a drop in AI investment. Also, any small startup in AdTech will either rise to the occasion or die trying.

Can you call it a bubble if revenue is high? I have always thought of bubbles as being about valuation. If revenue is high, I'd call it a boom.

If you think of ads (paid media: a portion of the marketing budget) as an investment that a business makes in hopes of boosting revenues enough to counteract the increased costs, then you can consider advertising an investment.

And the risk here is that we're seeing companies post strong revenue growth, and they attribute some percentage of that success to ad spend, when in reality their revenue growth may be completely decoupled from how many impressions or conversions they're seeing from ads.

That brings up an important question here - how many companies are still measuring the ROI of their advertising via "impressions". Because when you purely measure ad performance as a function of increased conversions (which is just another word for someone signing up for your newsletter, or buying one of your products, or subscribing to your service, etc) then you can get a clear picture of how that ad spend is flowing into your revenue. But when companies just spend $20 million a year hoping to get tons of impressions from pricey Super Bowl ads, they can't trace that ad spend back to revenue.

So the risk here of a bubble is mainly - are companies spending more on ads than they really should be to secure more sales? And will companies realize they could be spending half as much on awareness campaigns and get the same results? If they do, then you can expect ad spend to go down and the internet (which is largely funded by its success as an advertising channel) can expect to contract.

It's not so much about boosting sales as much as maintaining it. If Nike stops paying Google, Adidas will be more than happy to have the first result of Googling "Nike" be the Adidas store.

Google's revenue is high. Are the advertisers' revenues high? I'm not so sure about that. Are they getting good returns on their investment in advertising? I don't know (presumably, they currently think they are).

Even if they are, will they continue to do so as humans learn to better ignore the newer forms of advertising? They might be in, not exactly a bubble, but a... temporarily working technique, maybe?

>Most retailers can't depend on just click through rates. If you see a ad for Vans, you might not purchase it online, but like traditional ads, it could make you think about it when you're near a shoe store.

GOOG has already largely solved this problem via in store / online-offline attribution of ad clicks. (https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/6361305?hl=en)

honestly an advertising bubble is terrifying to me. most of the major tech companies revenue is generated from advertising and so are many many many other tech companies and then a huge number of companies which AREN'T advertising make their money selling to advertising companies.

If the bottom drops out of advertising we will have mass death of tech companies

We will also have a massive VC funding freeze as they aren't going to want to fund companies that don't have a non advertising framework for revenue and neither I nor anyone I think really understands how to fund most b2c tech companies outside of advertising (yes there are some solutions but they are so much less effective than advertising)

So yeah I find this pretty terrifying. It will probably be way worse than the 2001 bubble because the amount of the economy that depends on tech advertising now is much much greater than the amount of money invested in tech in 2001

> most of the major tech companies revenue is generated from advertising

Uh, no.

Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, Intel, Qualcomm, Netflix, Amazon, IBM, Texas Instruments, nVidia, Tesla, SpaceX, Uber, Airbnb, PayPal, Priceline, Broadcom, HP, Dell, VMWare, Symantec, Intuit, Adobe, Salesforce, Tencent, Didi, SAP, Amadeus, Workday, Micron, HP, Foxconn, Huawei, Samsung, Sony, Panasonic, Taiwan Semiconductor, Hitachi. And on and on the list goes.

VS: Google, Facebook, Alibaba, Baidu, Twitter, Snapchat.

So tech I meant colloquially to mean software tech. The overwhelming number of companies you listed there are hardware companies which would also suffer significantly considering the amount of hardware good/fb/etc... Use. Amazon would also be hurt considering they are getting massive revenue from software companies. Also companies like Adobe would be massively hurt (say bye to their marketing analytics platform) and the fact that significant creatives use their products for advertising.

Companies like Oracle and Salesforce I would bet derive a significant chunk of revenue selling advertising and marketing analytics services as well.

Regardless of pedantry olad cratering would be a huge huge huge fucking deal for many people who work in software (at least).

A massive VC funding freeze to support advertising companies would be a good thing in my opinion.

Otoh ad companies will just become even more scummy. I am not sure how that is even possible, but there is probably a start-up trying to figure out how

This interesting blog post argues in the affirmative: http://idlewords.com/2015/11/the_advertising_bubble.htm

With big brand type stuff, I'm getting the impression that alot of ad spend is not ROI calculated. Businesses just kinda say, okay we're gonna spend X% of our revenue on ads and that's that. So, ad blockers won't influence that. I remember hearing on NPR how they went to some business that had been spending millions every year on advertising for countless years, it had always been that way so no one questioned it and then they proved that all their ad spending had 0 impact on their product - the managers were floored.

> Are we in an advertising bubble?

Unlikely.

Online still has a fairly small share of overall advertising dollars.

User behavior continues to shift from traditional advertising venues (e.g., TV) to digital.

Spend continues to lag that shift as well.

In other words, if anything, expect it to increase.

Most of this comes from Meeker's annual Internet report:

http://www.kpcb.com/internet-trends

I think the NYT articles on fake followers (and the decrease in followers after their article about it) and the buzzfeed article about newsweek purchasing fake traffic may be signs that the bubble is showing some fragility.

Probably a lot of those ads are for ICOs

Most ads I see are for some large $ purchase that I have just made and won't be making again for years, or ever.

The economist agrees with you.

https://www.economist.com/news/business/21735029-stockmarket...

"Imagine if advertising spending really did rise to 1.8% of GDP in America by 2027. Most firms’ costs would have to rise, cutting total corporate profits (excluding those of ad platforms) from about 6.5% to 5.7% of GDP, the kind of drop normally associated with a recession. Alternatively, imagine if the firms in the S&P 500 index (excluding ad platforms) bore all the additional cost of the advertising boom. Their combined return on capital would drop from the present 10% to 8%, at or just below their cost of capital. America Inc would go from being the world’s greatest profit machine to flirting with Japanese-style financial-zombie status"

It also says this though:

American advertising revenues will rise from 1% of GDP today, to as much as 1.8% of GDP by 2027—a massive jump. Since 1980 the average has been 1.3%

So here we are at 1%.. and the historical average is 1.3%... Can you be in a bubble, if it's currently below the historical average?

If anything, I would say this is evidence that we are NOT in a bubble.

The rest of that article is just speculation, based on growth that we may or may not see.

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