Comment by rexreed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rexreed | Hacker News Reader

From the first review I see on the Amazon page (I'm not linking, so I don't to pass traffic but it's very easy to find via search).

Top review on the page that I see is 2 stars:

> I don't buy it

Reviewed in the United States on December 28, 2020 Verified Purchase The basic premise of this book:

- digital advertising markets are like financial markets - since advertising is way overpriced there will be a bust soon - the bust will bring the internet down because that’s how the internet is financed

Well I don’t buy it.

For a start, Direct Marketers do know the value of what they’re buying. Their advertising sends people to dedicated landing pages where they can be tracked through the site and measured if they convert. Thats getting harder to do, but despite whatever amount of fraud or manipulation may be going on in the ad space, it’s still roughly possible.

Direct Marketers these days are not just web shop owners but many other kinds of data-driven business. I’ve personally run profitable websites with digital ads as the exclusive source of customers. And don't tell me that Booking.com (one of Google's biggest advertisers) or others like them don’t have a very detailed idea of what their advertising is achieving.

Then there are indeed Brand Advertisers. Mostly, they don’t have more than a vague idea what they get from their advertising, and nor have they ever. They pay way above the worth because they can’t deduce the proper value. There’s the biggest problem in advertising, but it’s not a new one and if this book had asked the more fundamental question, “does brand advertising even work?”, it could have made more of a contribution.

Oh, and it’s a mistake to conflate display advertising with search advertising. It’s faulty reasoning to criticise display advertising by showing a problem with search advertising (page 79) and then to rubbish search advertising by picking only search BRAND advertising, a small and special case.

For sure there are things that need to be fixed in the digital advertising arena. Right now there are major government investigations into Facebook and Google and if there is anything to be done about their monopolies (there is) then the internet will stumble on somehow and businesses will continue to advertise, as they must, in whatever outlets bring them the eyeballs they seek.

> Their advertising sends people to dedicated landing pages where they can be tracked through the site and measured if they convert.

But how much of this is selection bias and how much of it is really having an impact? This reminds me of https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-h...

>Economists at Facebook conducted 15 experiments that showed the enormous impact of selection effects. A large retailer launched a Facebook campaign. Initially it was assumed that the retailer’s ad would only have to be shown 1,490 times before one person actually bought something. But the experiment revealed that many of those people would have shopped there anyway; only one in 14,300 found the webshop because of the ad. In other words, the selection effects were almost 10 times stronger than the advertising effect alone!

Sure you can measure clicks and how many convert, but that does not necessarily measure the effect of the ad. I think most of the time the true effect of an advertisement is usually unknown (what is the difference in outcome of using the ad vs not using the ad?) and I suspect that in a large number of cases the impact of advertising is significantly overestimated. Perhaps people won't find out until they are forced to cut back on ad spending then they might realize that it isn't as important as they thought.

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

I read the book about 2/3 through, then felt I'd gotten the idea. I would second a lot of these criticisms of the author's specific understanding of digital ad markets.

My broader problem with the book was that it seemed to use up most of its space rooting around for a good formulation of the comparison contained in the title: that digital ad markets offer an opaque and sometimes fraudulent form of value, in much the same way as the real estate market hit by the 2008-2009 mortgage security crisis.

It was almost as if the author wasn't fully convinced of his own analogy, like he needed to keep looping back to it to add a few more points to really nail it down. All the while, what the reader cares about is why this analogy is important, not that it can be made!

The book could have been much more effective on these counts, I think, if it had been shorter and better edited.

>since advertising is way overpriced there will be a bust soon

Is there any evidence for this? Seems pretty unlikely that advertising is overpriced due to the liquidity of the model. Marketing teams are typically very mindful of the costs and carefully review the ROI of each advertising channel. If there's a negative ROI it is generally quick and easy to decrease your bid for an adword or target audience.

Another top review says (after giving it 1 star):

> Meandering, confused, and overall a waste of time, 'Subprime Attention Crisis' kicks up a big fuss but never lands the knockout blow it thinks it does.

Comparisons with the 2008 financial crisis are overblown. This is essentially a personal blog post blown up in size, and reveals nothing that isn't already widely appreciated. In the midst of this, Hwang also manages to demonize paywalls without offering an alternative to, well, pay for the internet. And no, 1930's law simply doesn't apply.

As an insider, I take issue with the gloss applied over the many people who are working to improve the ad industry. There are many companies that work for the betterment of ad tech. Citing 'explosive' blog posts on Ad Age or Digiday to the opposite effect is misleading — these reports are frequently created by competing companies shilling their own products.

Overall, the adage "nothing is as good or bad as it seems," is relevant to this. But the sweaty, Hawaiian-shirt wearing author got a little ahead of himself. Still, the cover is well done...

Keep in mind I was quoting the whole review, that last bit about hawaiian-shirt is not my comment, it's in the review for anyone who might be offended.

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