Twitter Will Show Who Pays for Ads and How Much They Spend
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
While some high-quality publications (the New York Times, Economist, etc.) have seen some success in recent years, the overwhelming evidence is that the economics just don't work out among the general public.
Most people also underestimate the costs. IIRC, Google needs about $100/pa to supplant advertising revenue.
Yes, you may be willing to pay, so why aren't more services willing to take your money? Apart from the administrative hassle of such a program, the $100 (or whatever) are also an average. People willing to pay as much for an ad-free experience just happen to be at the top end of the value distribution for advertisers as well.
In other words: If you're willing to give me 2bucks, it's gonna cost you 5!
It doesn't seem worth it, to me. I need ad blockers anyway for other ad services and annoyances so I end up just avoiding their built-in ad-riddled apps and going through a browser for things like youtube. It's a poor experience but better than dealing with ads.
I understand the value prop for shipping crippleware apps in a low cost android phone, but they ship the same stuff on flagship $1k phones like the pixel. It's a bizarre choice.
It's frustrating how people complain about ad supported models while at the same time aren't willing to pay for it. So much entitlement. There's also the option of not consuming their resources.
What I did point out is that they're making a mockery out of their premium phone brand by shipping it with crippleware. Check back and see what that decision costs them in a decade.
Google is absurdly bad at product.
It’s been awhile since I’ve had the chance to measure the caliber of Twitter’s finance quants, but last I knew it was pretty fucking hard to get past the phone screen for that job. I enjoyed jousting with them.
Perhaps a "with adblocker" and "without adblocker"
The average facebook account nets them something like $2 a month in the US, or under a dollar a month in europe, that's a tiny amount.
When people realise how little their personal data and time is being sold for, perhaps there will be more of a backlash against advertising.
I wonder why USians are so much more valuable to advertisers than Europeans.
Also, there aren't much of any protections for consumers against false and deceptive advertising unless you have a million dollar legal team to take on the business's multi-million dollar legal team.
You won't see "promoted by [Koch|Soros], who spent $8.5m on ads this year", you'll see things promoted by "milualkee citizens for freedom, who spent $1500 this year". But the money will be coming from the same place.
If you give advertisers more space, they'll figure out a way to use it effectively. Even if the point of that space was to try and keep them honest.
In other words, it's a step in the right direction, good for twitter.
https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2014/the-all-new-t...
For advertisers it might be a different matter, it isn't that hard to figure out what your competitors spend on ads but I'm not sure it's in Twitter's interest to make it easier. Google seems to go a long way to obfuscate what is going on in your Adwords account.
If I know my political ads are most effective with Women, 45-65, who are Hispanic, and that's where I'm focusing my spend....
Is it fair for the opponent to have that information? If they give that level of detail for political ads, I hope they at least spare startup businesses who are still researching to find their ideal audience.
I'm parsing "fair" in the form of: imagine two societies, one where such information is private the other where it's public. Who outperforms?
Would the number of start-ups which cave because an incumbent snipes their marketing outweigh the number who could piggyback on an incumbent's revealed slicing? (The latter, by marketing to the same customers better or noticing who is being left out.) Will consumers see more advertising or less? If more, will they respond to the deluge by defaulting to the incumbent or trying new options more frequently?
I don't know. But we have an opportunity to find out. If this drives innovation, I'd say a case is to be made to open up these data across advertising platforms. Who knows. Maybe it's the tool to pry apart Facebook and Google's stranglehold.
In fact FB went much farther in that for example they let you go back 7 YEARS in a pages ad history and not just 7 days like Twitter does
I am not completely familiar with Facebook's ad platform. Does it really let anyone see, for example, which demographics Procter & Gamble is targeting with a particular Gilette ad? (Or its Gilette brand, generally?)
For political ads you can also go to a page and look up all the ad campaigns they are running, how much money was spend, who was target, what the ad creative was, etc
Pardon me, I meant that anyone should be able to see who anyone else is targeting. Currently, when Terrible Kale Bar® shows me an ad, I can see it's because I liked a post of my Portland friend's. But I can't look at Terrible Kale Bar®'s page and see a list of whom they're targeting.
Noticing who is being left out would be a start-up’s marketing strategy that can be sniped by the incumbent.
I agree with the overall sentiments however.
All advertising should be (by law, or at least industry standard) clearly marked and disclosed.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/trumps-...
It's similar logic in the security industry to the idea of security by obscurity alone.
It will be interesting to look at the effective CPM rates of various candidates on Twitter using this data. I'm hoping they don't just show how many people were shown the Tweet as an ad, but also those who saw it from organic distribution via retweet.
I think you'll find that outrageous, incendiary politicians pay a lot less per view than reasonable ones.
I wonder what the best way to combat large-scale astroturfing on a platform like twitter would be; My first thought would be a rep system akin to those of StackOverflow or HN, but I'm not sure how you would implement it such that there's not a large impact on legitimate new users - there's no system like upvotes Twitter could use to stratify.
So you, and your company's data, are the product that reddit monetizes.
Report them to the FTC because paid endorsements/reviews/etc are subject to disclosure [1].
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/ftc...
For the most part, people don’t look to social media to find content that helps them form their opinions; they look to it to reinforce already held opinions. It's an echo chamber.
That means astroturfing may lead to more divisiveness, as people seek out content that makes them more sure than ever that their opinion is the one and only correct one. But it does not “influence public opinion” since nobody is jumping to the other side of an issue based on astroturfing. It just makes the world a more hostile place.
Also, pushing things further to the extremes/reinforcing the belief that "Everyone I speak to agrees with me on <topic> so I should therefor stand up for it because it's right" isn't less bad than fooling someone who hasn't yet formed their opinion.