This is how Google will collapse (2017)
sfu.ca
sfu.ca
If you make ads annoying to the point where people can’t even do what they came to do, they will either stop coming or find a way around the annoyance.
And now Google is breaking its own search. Half of my most recent searches have been picked apart by Google, showing results for what I didn’t type and expecting me to click a small link to fix it. And, instead of “ending” when there are no more relevant results, they’re including “similar” results as if they match, and seemingly intermixed with exact matches. That breaks search, and it’s getting harder and harder to rely on.
They're cramming so many ads down the pipe I'm almost wondering if Bezos is cashing out
It literally discourages me from browsing and discovering other streams. I haven't watched an unsubscribed channel in month because of that
I never saw any ad since I have it and that works with every channel
I've heard that streamers get paid as if you would have seen an ad, anyone know this for sure? I heard it in a quite flimsy way so I'd love to get it confirmed if so
There's just no excuse when what I'm searching for is right, and a search engine thought I'd like something else. It's dumb af.
Quite natural for them to "eager spell-correct" your search query.
This is what you get when you search using an ad company's product. :(
When I search for a specific part number, I tend to get a similar more popular part where spell-correct makes zero sense to have anyway.
The thing is, you actually can combine both of those things. I've seen some youtubers do this quite well where an entire video is sponsored, but I still want to watch it because the essence of why I watch that particular youtuber is still there. I.e. it's not completely watered down.
One recent example of this done reasonably well that comes to mind is from Michael Reeves[0] and the entire video is a gigantic ad for an amazon show I have absolutely no interest in ever watching. But i still watched the entire video because it was still (mostly) a Michael Reeves video.
So imo ads can be done rather well, but you have to put in the effort and not slap a news site full of banners.
This article tells a flagging story but it needs an earnings ticker next to the timeline showing ad revenue growing and earnings growing.
Maybe they could make even more. Maybe they are just exploiting a captured market. But the article ignoring and not addressing this seems like the author just didn’t do their research.
The article is so full of nonsense, it's unbelievable.
> Google made almost all its money from ads.
Like it always did.
> It was a booming business — until it wasn’t.
It's still a booming business. Look at their quarterly reports.
> Here’s how things looked right before the most spectacular crash the technology industry had ever seen.
What crash?
> Google was a driving force in the technology industry ever since its disruptive entry in 1998.
No. Google was an internet search pioneer. It didn't drive the technology industry.
> Innovation costs money, and Google’s main stream of revenue had started to dry up.
Has this guy ever look at financial statements? Google had $46 billion in revenue the latest quarter. It had a net profit of more than $11 billion in the latest quarter. What is this guy talking about?
Edit: It's even worse than I expected. The article is a rehash of an article from April 2017.
https://hackernoon.com/how-google-collapsed-b6ffa82198ee
To show how incredibly wrong the predictions were, google's stock price more than doubled since the article was published and Google's market cap increased by more than $700 billion.
* Everyone hates ads. You can try to shove it down their throats anyway by being a monopoly, but eventually this won't work anymore, since there is too much competition that doesn't rely on ad revenue and too many companies trying to block ads.
* Google doesn't have a solid revenue stream besides ads. And it's unclear how they are gonna get one. At least not in the magnitude they need to survive.
* Google faces strong competition on all fronts and all of them, except perhaps Facebook, don't count ad revenue as primary source of income. This puts Google at a substantial disadvantage, amplified by the first point: EVERYONE freakin hates ads
Installing an ad blocker on desktop is easy, but about 90% of the planet still wouldn’t know how to do it.
Blocking ads on mobile is much harder and that’s where most of web traffic is coming from anyway.
Everyone hates ads, but everyone hates paying for content even more, and they don’t have the technical means to do anything about the ads. See where this is going?
Also, the claim that everyone hates ads is itself questionable. Everyone on HN hates ads, but Karen from Wisconsin or Rajit from Bangalore haven’t even so much as thought about it. They go on with their lives as they visit their favorite websites multiple times per hour, without realizing the atrocious UX and flagrant privacy violations they are being subjected to. Because the sites are free, and they provide value to them, and because they have other things to worry about.
Most of the developing world (i.e. the market share that is growing) can't afford Apple products. On Android it is absolutely trivial to block adds:
- Firefox + ublock
- Brave
You can argue that these are unknown or have different user experiences compared to Chrome but you cannot argue that "blocking ads on mobile is much harder".
"About half of the US population, and a quarter of the top EU markets have it much harder to block ads on their phones".
Clearly not the same scale as "the rest of the world", but also arguably the ad targets with the deepest pockets.
Regardless, you may easily be able to block ads on your Android today, but you're completely subject to the whims of Google tomorrow.
And the discussion is about the imminent downfall of Google. Oh the irony.
So the article was right that Goog is all ads, but those don’t seem to be drying up.
I expect that maybe ad views are dropping but they just turn up the prices to compensate. I don’t think we get usage numbers out of them, just that they bring in more revenue and make more profit.
Maybe they are just squeezing a shrinking customer base, like cable. But the article doesn’t cover that.
I'd pay more for ad-free access to Youtube than for a Netflix subscription. Maybe I'm suffering from the typical-mind fallacy, but because Netflix is a solid concern (current market cap, $214 billion), it looks to me like Youtube would continue to be a solid business if the hypothesized revolt by the common man and woman against ads materializes.
> * Everyone hates ads.
Yet ads are everywhere.
> since there is too much competition that doesn't rely on ad revenue
What competition? What is the challenge to google search, youtube, chrome, etc?
> and too many companies trying to block ads.
Is that a joke? Google's problem is too many companies want to buy ads. But ads are never going to disappear. Actually, ads are only going to increase on the internet. More video ads especially.
> * Google doesn't have a solid revenue stream besides ads.
If you're argument is ads are going to disappear, then I guess you have a point.
> EVERYONE freakin hates ads
Right. And the article said the same nonsense you are saying. But it said that in 2017 and guess what? Turns out the article was wrong.
You just have 1 point. Nobody likes ads. Duh. But if that mattered, google wouldn't even exist.
This would not show in statistics such as revenue, but would in terms of daily active users for example
I don't have an issue at all with them showing ads, but it has really gotten to another level recently. The frequency, duration, and the trend towards unskippable ads has been extremely sharp, at least for me. Their implementation is also fairly bad; in spots where my wifi is not great, I frequently have the video reset to an unwatchably low quality after an ad, and buffer for 10+ seconds, even though pre-ad, everything was working just fine. Their paid offering is probably OK, but slightly overpriced IMHO (e.g. when compared with NetFlix), especially for a family - and I would be more inclined to go with it, if it wasn't for their heavy-handed advertising of that, too.
With the lack of competitors, I suspect most people will stay; but there's definitely something to this.
Companies can coast on way past their prime and maybe Google ends up being CBS or something in 100 years (they were a big technology innovator in the early to mid 20th century). And IBM still has lots of customers even though they aren’t what they once were.
I remember using Novell [0] in the mid 90s and they stayed around until 2014 making money with 1000s of employees somehow.
So I guess there’s companies that stop being interested to me from a technology perspective and that’s a form “collapse” even though they’re still making gobs of cash and existing.
Maybe the author really means we’ve hit “Peak Google” and it’s all downhill from here. But I think it’s important that the peak of the Roman Empire was like 117AD but it took hundreds of years to really stop (maybe the peak was really 10AD under Augustus and maybe it still exists today, but you get my drift).
That said, I think one core difference to the parallels you drew is that Google is perhaps less diversified (in terms of revenue source) than those companies were, prior to their "pivots".
All, apart from Camel, alive and more or less relevant today.
Google will not collapse. It will become an IBM or a MS. Not the amazing super company it used to be, but still big enough to be around and influence our lives.
Also, while Microsoft bogged down and was not so hot or illustrious for a bit, in 2020 I would not even remotely compare the pull of working for MS with IBM. IBM is on Oracle’s level, MS has clawed back to nearly be on the same level as FAANG.
I could go on and I will...
Microsoft is an ML company, a cloud company, a professional services company, an AR company, a public _and_ private enterprise company. Microsoft has VSCode, AD, Office, they _own_ NPM, GitHub and LinkedIn...
If you really think IBM and Microsoft are an apples to apples comparison take a look at IBMs cloud and saas offerings, then look at Microsoft’s.
Google comparatively has Golang, Gsuite (you’ll lose access to it if you post to many emojis to YouTube though), a cell phone offering that exists to harvest your personal data, and a graveyard of end of lifed services burning customer goodwill. GCP is so bad at the cloud their bid wasn’t even competitive in the Jedi bids. At the end of the day Google is an Ads company. It can’t even compare to Microsoft, which is why its future is in question. Google is the only FAANG stock I wouldn’t want to hold long term.
I wouldn’t own FB out of principle, but if I’m trying to be objective, overall I think they’ve shown a better ability for breaking into new markets, like Virtual Reality, a variation on online shopping with Marketplace, better staying power with features that keep their users engaged like events, and while I disagree with their privacy practices, their willingness to aggressively sell data to whoever wants it (Cambridge Analytica) is something that’s going to make them a force for some time.
GCP have no special government cloud service, unlike Azure and AWS, but they're more advanced in some niches ( containers, ML).
Anecdotally i've never heard of anyone saying anything positive about Azure besides "it came with credits". Fundamentally it's an inferior platform due to less redundancy ( all AWS and GCP regions are composed of multiple zones, that's usually not the case with Azure, and as we saw a few months ago, even their whole auth is hosted in a single DC... Disgraceful)
Google could just as well end up as Hewlett Packard, depending on who takes care of finding ways to squeeze out revenue, restructuring and downsizing the operation to deliver shareholders what they paid for.
YouTube doesn’t do this and should be targeting the ads better based on video topic.
My guess is that it was purely IP based that time. That public IP and her FB account is now tainted forever.
Yes, this always happens to me.
When I'm not blocking ads I'm inundated with all sorts of ads targeting young women. This can only be because of IP address. I certainly never search for stuff like that but I'm sure my two daughters do.
> after a video or two the recommendations will be...
It was related because it was about influencing automated content discovery / recommendation algorithms.
I answered that he could use Firefox instead of chrome (I've already configured Firefox on his laptop account with ublock origin).
He was reluctant at first to use Firefox rather than chrome but it seems getting rid of ads was a compelling enough advantage that he did use it eventually.
Doesn't that make it, with respect to exchange rates, 33% more expensive effectively in the UK for the same subscription? I've noticed this happens with videogames too, where the prices are always the same numerical value regardless of currency.
First both Amazon and Google have B2B products and are not only B2C. Second users equally hate fake reviews and deceitful product descriptions, and they are a real danger to Amazon B2C operations. Finally Google is still among the "less worse" ad companies, although most of the public thinks it is the worst one.
The fastest way to get me to not use a product is to plaster the name "Google" on it.
Does anybody really like privacy invasion and advertising? This is baked into everything they do.
One of my biggest frustrations these days is actually the CMA tracking cookie notifications that come up on every web site wanting me to agree before continuing. They are more annoying than paywalls and as a general rule I never click I agree so they keep comming.
I'm not negligent with my privacy, but not vigilant to the point of blocking all emails from people with gmail addresses either. I guess I'm just more complacent and can't be bothered to expend the time and effort to protect my privacy to that degree anymore. Maybe once I get burned I'll feel differently but at this point in my life I have far more important things to worry about.
I sometimes joke that I need to go back to attending church regularly so I can learn how to act properly whilst an omniscient entity like big tech is watching my every action.
Besides they betrayed us and the quality has been declining since a decade ago and it is becoming clear to me that it probably isn't because they don't want to fix it but because they aren't able to anymore (at least not without a massive shift in priorities.)
Maybe the reason for shuttering Google+ and Reader wasn't strategic decisions but rather just that they realized they didn't hsve the competence to maintain it?