So who is actually seeing these ads? How can those numbers be going up?
I understand, intellectually, that not everyone thinks like me. But I don't fundamentally understand why people allow ads on their devices when they can prevent it. Then again, I don't understand a lot of behaviors people exhibit.
Also, the number of people using ad blockers must be extremely low. Even crazier, most people who I talk to about content blockers on iOS zone out of the conversation before I can even get to how easy it is. They do not even care that much about the ads or notice how annoying they are.
Then again, many or most people still watch live sports and old school TV channels, which are chock full of ads. I cannot even stand too obvious product placement, much less ad breaks. So while I will go out of my way to remove ads from my life, there are probably 9 others who will not spend a single second thinking about it.
Everybody is different. Back in the early 2000s when I used to watch TV, I actually enjoyed ads, because they tended to be more entertaining than the TV shows themselves (remember the Budweizer lizards and eTrade babies). Even when online ads because popular, when they were still contextual, I really did not mind. It was only when ads began to follow people around online that I put an end to it.
But I still watch live sports - only online, since I no longer have TV service. I get around ads on NFL games by having more than one game streaming on different tabs, then switch to the one that's not in an ad break.
Online, there are no ads during football (the real one), tennis and volleyball matches, so I have very little to complain about.
I don't pitch Signal, but when I do see it pitched those that are most successful pitch 1 directly useful feature as why you should install it.
Eg: Get Signal, our videos won't look like a fuzzy potato lens image
Remember, your reason should be a problem the person your pitching to has faced and would like to see fixed. If they are having trouble with a different issue, pitch that instead!
More auction participants mean higher bids.
Removing match types such as phrase, while automatically shifting phrase to broad modified helps increase their fill rate & number of participants per auction.
Eliminating second price proxy auctions in display ads (search likely soon to follow?) will likely yield measurable increases in CPC.
A few years back they went from up to 10 ads to 7 on most-- they have that dial to adjust if necessary.
Products like Google Shopping take up more and more space on the SERPs and are typically pay to play. They have higher CTR due to carousel images & once you click into that ecosystem, nearly every click yields ad revenue.
Chrome behavior with URLs is conditioning users to search for brands (versus typing in the full domain name), who then have to pay to defend their brand terms from brand poachers.
That's not really how auctions work. Raising the price floor would just exclude ads with CPCs below the floor from paying, and since they're already getting paid for the maximum CPC bid at the time anyways they would just make less revenue.
If they messed with quality score discounts in an exploitative way, the entire billion-dollar SEO industry watching it would notice and cry foul.
Bid floors will exclude ads from showing unless a certain ad rank is met. If users want to continue (or start) receiving impressions, they need to meet the adjusted threshold. This won't be as common on terms like "chicago movers", but when you get into the longtail and use an Alpha/Beta structure, it can be relatively common to get a "bids below threshold" for lower volume terms that have less (think <5) auction participants as shown in search insights & sampling the SERPs manually. When you get into these niche terms, you assume terms will be cheap due to lack of participants, but that isn't typically the case.
For the long-term growth is constrained by the sum of all campaign budgets, and those budgets are set by advertisers themselves.
What the company needs to do is to keep advertisers happy enough to have them increase the budgets, and also prevent the software engineers from breaking the system with bugs enough that the advertisers would walk away.
> don't fundamentally understand why people allow ads on their devices when they can prevent it
The market share of iOS also has increased a bit, and iOS does not allow ad blocking very easily. You have to configure some sorta DNS-based ad blocking, which is harder than the traditional desktop firefox/chrome adblockers to install.
Usage of computers has also shifted towards phone/tablet apps, away from desktop browsers... And ad-blocking in apps is hard to impossible compared to on desktops.
I'm not surprised people continue to see a lot of ads as we move from the web, where mature ad-blockers exist, to apps, where ad-blocking is harder and less mature.
Even very technical people usually don't bother with pi-hole and see ads in free android apps.
Oh, and also, there are occasionally cases of an ad-blocker removing itself somewhat, i.e. adblock plus used to be the go to recommendation for ad-blocking, but they started allowing google ads through in an update (https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads)... so maybe someone installed adblock plus because that's what they remembered from 10 years ago (and adblock plus has better SEO than ublock origin too), and thus still gets google ads now.
Are you considering installing a content blocker not easy? Or not ad blocking? Firefox Focus is free and a few taps away from the app store.
Seems easier to me than installing ublock origin on desktops. Which people can easily be misled into installing ublock, or adblocker, or any the other scammy ones that do not really block ads or do something else nefarious. It is harder for a non technical user to get fooled by an iOS content blocker.
If you google how to install an adblocker on iOS, you get garbage results which will mostly only work for safari, and will mostly not block google's ads ("acceptable ads").
If I google 'ios ad blocker' and install the apps in the order recommended, I think I'd have to go through ~10 garbage apps before I got to firefox focus.
... And I think for a lot of people, firefox focus isn't viable because they want their chrome bookmarks to sync etc.
When I said "DNS-based ad blocking, which is harder than the traditional desktop firefox/chrome adblockers to install.", I was mostly thinking of installing pi-hole since that's the reliable way to block stuff on iOS, since otherwise the matrix of content blockers is a total mess. I'll stand by pi-hole being too much for most people.
Similar issue on Android, you need a DNS based or VPN based solution to block ads in apps. Thats probably too technical for 99% of the market.
Is there a way?
(aside: what ads? why are you surfing so many sites with ads where they're a nuissance? I don't even notice them on the few sites I come across them/what I do see is manageable, no plugins or extensions needed ever)
Search is the key - so many listings intermixed with search results, and search is a major part of everyone's life. And whether people are clicking them or noticing them is another thing but alot of ad sales are on the page impressions alone, so that's not nothing based on billions of daily searches.
* Some % of people install adblockers, but that number doesn't grow that much.
* There are more people being reached by advertising than ever before. 7.7 billion people in the world & still only about half are online. So overall the number of users they're reaching is growing even if they lose some to adblockers.
* You currently have to install an adblocker per device or even application (unless you are in the minority putting it on your router at home). This means that adblock rates vary and a user installing an adblock somewhere doesn't mean that user is globally lost from advertising reaching them somehow.
* There are multiple modalities for ad networks (app, web pages, etc etc). Google is involved in all of them. Ad blocking has variable performance across those networks unless you really know what you're doing (e.g. in-app advertising is very hard to block on iOS).
* The price of ads can vary driving up revenues. Not all ads are priced equivalently so Google can drive value that way by making the ads more valuable to advertisers or making more expensive ads more appealing.
* Inflation will naturally increase total dollar amounts even if everything else remained constant.
2. We're still early internet, and people rely on the internet more and more (and therefore search more). E.g. in Covid, people are likely transitioning more of their life online, which is good for Google.
3. As companies and the broader economy do better, companies will invest more in growing themselves, often by buying more ads. Companies are doing very well right now (see stock market), so there are more ads being bought AND the price per ad will likely go up because there is more competition.
4. There is still plenty of untapped ad real estate for Google to monetize as well (searches that could generate ad revenue, and web pages that can surface better ads).
This combination is great for Google.
Advertising spend could be going up without more people seeing the ads. Since businesses compete for limited advertising space, they are likely to keep increasing the size of their bids for click.
Alphabet's revenue could be growing as a result of eroding the margins of other businesses, who are now forced to spend more money for the same amount of clicks.
I don't claim this to be the exact scenario that reflects reality, but it is a very plausible scenario nonetheless. A nice little lesson in why lots of things are zero-sum (even though we'd like to pretend they aren't)
2. Online advertising still have a room for better optimization in many ways. You'll be surprised on how primitive bidding systems are for a large fraction of advertisers. Better bidding means ads more likely to convert.
Also note that HN readers are extreme outliers compared to usual people who actually spend money on ads. My gut feeling is that perhaps >90% of people don't care much about whether it's ads or not if it seems relevant enough for them.
Google has built a nice perpetual money machine by creating a shadow copyright system where you don't need to own the rights to someone's name, you just need to have more money than them.
The reality is vast majority of people are fine with some ads.
Not to mention Ads are not just on the Web, but also In-App as well. In App Ads works way better than on the Web as it function more like TV ads. Especially as newer generation trends towards online media consumption vs old TV box. These are just Ads revenue shifting from TV to Youtube.
I dont think the Fundamental of Ads has changed much at all. It might have changed medium, but ads, from a marketing and product strategic perspective remains pretty much the same as in the 80s.
But then again, this is HN, defending Ads is contrarian.
Hacker News isn't representative of mainstream society. ~27% of Internet users block ads.[1]
> How can those numbers be going up?
People continue to shift various activities online. Against, HN isn't representative here -- most of us probably already do most things online. There's still a very large chunk of time watching broadcast television, reading printed (offline) media, etc.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/804008/ad-blocking-reach...
Most people wouldn't know where to start to install an ad blocker.
They don't even understand the concept, much less know that it even exists.