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Comment by ohazi | Hacker News Reader

> as every company from the Journal to the Times to Nordstrom would be screwed without ads.

The ad industry had the opportunity and the ability to address this problem, but (for short-term reasons) they decided not to. This is the long-term result. They did this to themselves, and now they deserve to suffer the consequences, up to and including a fiery death for the industry as a whole.

Nordstrom, etc. don't need to suffer as a result of this, they can simply observe the online ad industry and make a decision about when to stop using it -- perhaps in favor of something new and different, or perhaps not. Print ads still work just fine.

The Times, etc. charge for access, are happy to sign you up via web form, but then force you to call them if you want to cancel. As far as I'm concerned, they shouldn't be running online ads at all anymore. If ad blocking becoming prevalent hurts them, too fucking bad.

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Wasn't there some regular company who decided to delete all adsense/ad networks from their sites for a quarter and at the end of the quarter found no difference in ordering/sales, etc.

Online ads is snakeoil

Even better than this, large sites have found they actually made more from non-targeted ads [1]. Same for the NYT - revenue continued growing after turning off ad exchanges for European visitors [2].

There's also the question around whether the levels of fraud mean companies buying targeted ads are ever getting what they paid for [3] - Uber cut $120m of $150m ad spend without any impact on installs (which is what they were trying to drive)

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/03/stop_tracking_increas...

[2] https://digiday.com/media/gumgumtest-new-york-times-gdpr-cut...

[3] https://indica.medium.com/how-uber-discovered-that-80-of-its...

> Wasn't there some regular company who decided to delete all adsense/ad networks from their sites for a quarter and at the end of the quarter found no difference in ordering/sales, etc.

> Online ads is snakeoil

No doubt in my mind. I helped start a webshop in 2009 and got to see it first hand:

We used a service called Kelkoo and according to their dashboard almost every customer we had came through them.

We were suspicious so we cut them out for a couple of weeks.

Turned out sales hardly dropped at all.

We had good luck with Google ads back then but I don't for a second think Google doesn't happily fleece advertisers:

As I've said a number of times before I have been targeted for scammy dating site ads for a decade, more specifically from around the time I started dating my wife and until our youngest was about a year old.

Google knows fairly well I'm a conservative Christian who has had no problem getting a date the usual way, but has had no issues showing me these ads, probably because they pay most pr impression.

This was back when I felt I owed site owners to not enable adblock all the time so I tried a number of times to report the ads as irrelevant. Problem is, when I reported Polish girls as irrelevant, the next ads was for Ukrainian girls, then Thai girls, Chinese girls, Taiwanese girls, Filipino girls and I don't know what else until it went full circle and started on Polish girls again.

Not a bad word about people from those countries, but I was already married and Google know very well since I look for family holidays, toys and food ideas for families with kids.

Point is it seems that relevancy doesn't count anything now that advertisers pay for impressions instead of clicks.

>Google knows fairly well I'm a conservative Christian who has had no problem getting a date the usual way...

>...I was already married and Google know very well since I look for family holidays, toys and food ideas for families with kids.

It's interesting you describe Google as "knowing" information about you. Google may have the data, but a human did not read it to develop some understanding of who you are as person. They just ran it through some software based on the targeting criteria they have.

I would guess that advertisers didn't set their ads to exclude married men who are Christian with children, just because that's a very specific profile to care about--they might just set it to target men of any age and be done with it. Or it's possible that married, Christian men with children are one of the most profitable targets for scammy dating sites, and either the site creator or the targeting software are going after them specifically.

Or it's possible someone else in his close circle was using a computer on his network that was looking for things that would trigger those types of ads. Cable DSL routers usually only have 1 dynamic IP.

It's just as likely that nobody was bidding for his target demographic, so the bottom feeding dating sites that take the cheapest of the cheap ad slots bought the top 20% of his screen for millipenny CPCs.

I have given it a thought, but it doesn't make sense to me:

Nobody wanted to target a well paid dev with small kids and holiday plans except the cheapest of the cheap?

The explanations I find more likely is either

- my account got grouped up with a demographic 14 years ago when I worked in an environment that certainly did have those kinds of signals and that signal was too strong.

- scammy dating sites like expensive credit cards pay extremely well and Googled fudged their data to make me fit the criteria.

Lived with my wife and 5 kids, not many visitors, protected metwork. This went on for a decade even despite me trying to trigger other alternatives (search for WordPress hosting).

Thats part of the snake oil. The dating site spent X dollars on ads and the expect people to see them no matter what. Google wants to pretend they have something better than simple TV/Radio mass advertisement campaigns but they don't.

The idea of targeted/effective/meaningful ads and taking as much as you can in advertising dollars from a customer are fundamentally at odds with each other.

I convinced my company with some custom dashboards I made to show with some adjustable slider reports (first react project I think i did) that even with favorable metrics the cost/value ratio just wasn't there. They ended up stopping the spending and of course no change in sales. Saved the company a couple million a year.

Freakonomics two-parter on whether or not advertising works is worth listening to:

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-1/

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-2/

It was Uber in it's early days. I recall a blog post from their chief marketing officer(?) at the time.

The gist of it was - they accidentally disabled digital advertising for a few months and found that disabling it had no effect on the metrics they were tracking.

I’d imagine results like yours would vary wildly industry to industry.

For example, any old-people products would greatly benefit from the typical inability of the old to install ad-blockers in the first place (nothing against the old, of course).

Repeat the experiment over a decade.

I wouldn't be surprised if over the time span of a decade, companies which invested significantly into online ads would have gone out of business entirely, and those that didn't even use online ads would still be around.

As a conjecture, it's possible that online ads is anti-commerce - as in those who put money into it die. Over the last 10 years, it's very obvious that internet focused non-tech companies do very poorly in the long run.

> The Times, etc. charge for access, are happy to sign you up via web form, but then force you to call them if you want to cancel.

Check your state and local laws. It is illegal in California. If they have the means to provide signing up for service via online, they are required to provides the same way for cancellation under California law.

Change your address to California and you should see a section to cancel your subscription.

Advertising is a gross inefficiency on the economy. To achieve market balance you need to make sure consumers are aware of your product - back in the day this was rather difficult since there was no central repository of all knowledge. Now that we've got the internet though... this is unnecessary to achieve a healthy level of company growth.

However, if you want to cannibalize an industry's profit margins to squeeze in front of your competitors advertising in many forms will remain productive. I think we almost need a cartel-like system that says "Okay video card manufactures - enough with the advertising... nobody impulse buys video cards so each sale you gain through advertising is just coming from one of the other company's pockets (or your own)."

If we actually had powerful consumer-laborers (imagine if employers applied to you! Or there was an central labor marketplace and the market cleared! What a foreign world.) companies would have no money left over for ads as they were too busy competing on product quality with low margins.

> The ad industry had the opportunity and the ability to address this problem, but (for short-term reasons) they decided not to

No, they decided to become the security risk and monetize it. They are inexorably linked to the problem.

I'm pretty convinced the marginal value of ads to most companies is shit, but this is a rat race that chronic low aggregate demand has forced them to partake in.

Ads is why a kid in Africa can browse most of the web. The web is default open.

I’m not in an ad industry.

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