Comment by jthegiant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jthegiant | Hacker News Reader

Advertising industry insider here: I am seeing a lot of misinformation in this thread. Advertisers have been using (installs / In-app purchasing / shopping cart tracking) to calculate ROAS (ROI) for YEARS. And the modern targeting is actually pretty good in general.

Only big brand advertisers (like Clorox/PG/etc) evaluate ad spend on the impression/click level. This is not the norm (unless you want to lose your shirt to bots/fraud). We have made it a long way from the blunt-instrument advertising of past years. Full disclosure: there may indeed be a 'changing-of-the-guard' happening with regard to brand advertisers waking up to the available tech, but that is a different story..

Overall, this is a non-story. Many corporations were slapped with a massive bill after the passage of Trump's tax cuts. Not just Google. So with that liability, of course PROFIT dropped. But the REVENUE is what you want to look at for these 'bubble' discussions (and that is strong), so nothing to see here...

>Many corporations were slapped with a massive bill after the passage of Trump's tax cuts.

That only happened to companies who weren't booking deferred tax liabilities this entire time. Apple on the other hand has been conservative about their accounting, so the $38B tax they're paying has already been accounted for.

Apple's profitability has been understated for years because of that (or you could say everyone else has been overstating their profitability).

Out of curiosity, where do you see the future of ads going as free ad-driven services, such as Facebook, start to approach market saturation?

Increasing revenue further would mean that product would need to increase ads, or somehow increase ad efficiency, but either case seems likely to deteriorate the user experience which could end up counter productive for all involved, at least in the long run.

I'm certainly oversimplifying things, but it seems like ad driven models have a very clear ceiling. Or is the endgame to simply to continue increasing costs to advertisers?

Facebook is going all in on conversion optimization — "increasing ad efficiency" as you put it. They've gotten really good at it, and I think there's a whole lot of room for it to get much better. This is especially true for direct response ads, and you can bet most of the revenue will come from growth in DR.

I just read that as Facebook will track even more private parts of your life and enagage in darker patterns to make you click on their ads.

There's still plenty of room for improvement in the attribution side of things.

Can you explain why a tax cut would lead to a huge bill?

They decided to finally pay their (lower) taxes to move them into U.S banks instead of illegally holding the funds offshore

1. It was not illegal for them to keep the money offshore 2. They had to pay 1 time tax on money held offshore. once it is paid they still don't need to bring it back just it won't cost them anything to bring back.

They were already, largely, in US banks. The offshore status was entirely an accounting status, and there was nothing illegal about it. It was tax avoidance, not evasion.

Illegal? In what sense?

In the sense that if I were god emperor I would have made a law against it.

The corporate tax rate was cut, but it was also expanded to include foreign income. Companies with offshore holdings that never had income tax paid had to pay a one-off tax bill on that.

Google paid $9.9B in this one-off tax payment, which is larger than their entire margin for the quarter.

If their offshore holdings are profits made offshore, then shouldn't those profits be taxed offshore? Is this what Trump really did, taxed offshore before EU does it, so the EU taxes will be much lower?

If their offshore holdings are profits made offshore, then shouldn't those profits be taxed offshore?

Typically, the profits are held in tax havens, with low or zero tax. So effectively they are not being taxed already, due to loopholes in the tax code.

The tax bill changed many things.

It reduced many tax rates and it sort of eliminated corporate taxes on income earned outside the country. It added a corporate alternative minimum tax on global income that will mostly apply when income is taxed below 10% in the country where it is earned. It also added a one time tax on any earnings held overseas from prior tax years.

The one time tax is hitting companies that were holding earnings overseas. The corporate AMT will hit companies with very low global taxes.

Earnings earned where? Surely it's ok to keep earnings earned overseas, overseas?

Outside the country.

Yes.

Until 2017, As a US corporation, earnings earned overseas were taxable in the US, but the taxes were only assessed if the earnings were brought into the US (repatriated).

Since 2018, as a US corporation, earnings earned overseas are not taxable in the US in the general tax (20%ish); they are taxable in the alternative minimum tax (10%ish), but there is a credit for taxes paid overseas.

As a transition, in the 2018 tax year, any prior earnings earned overseas and not previously repatriated are subject to a one time transition tax.

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