Everything advertised on social media is overpriced junk
pluralistic.net
pluralistic.net
He harps on an "anti-woke" razor company that tries to market themselves as an alternative to Gillette and Harry's — the big point is "they spend 800k/month on marketing, so it drives up the cost of the razors". Does he know how much Gillette spends (saved you a search: 600M/year)? How do they fund that I wonder?
He cites a study that says contextual ads and targeted ads perform at about the same efficiency. Why is this remotely interesting? Ads are a liquid market. If one channel was much better than another, it would be arbitraged away.
His stated thesis is this:
> Targeted advertising is incredibly expensive, and incredibly lucrative – for the ad-tech platforms that sit between creative workers and media companies on one side, and audiences on the other
It couldn't be more wrong. Ads are incredibly cheap. It's why you see so many of them. It's why little companies targeting narrow niches can afford to buy them.
Since targeted ads got so cheap, tiny little businesses could buy super targeted social media ads for less money than they could selling their products wholesale at a store. Net result is that they can flood social media with targeted ads for some geoarbitraged thing that tiny startup found on AliExpress decided to sell DTC, and end run around consumer wholesaling and all rigamarole involved there.
The barrier to entry for that is super low. All you really need to be good at then is matchmaking some real niche product you found on Alibaba to a real niche consumer need.
Net result: lower prices, greater net profit for the company, tons of new entries to the game of social media enabled DTC.
Also, the article links to a study which found DTC to be 10% more expensive than traditional retail.
Umm, I bought a no-name (but Gillette-compatible!) razor last week while travelling due to having left my usual kit at home.
Having used the no-name one for a week, I can no longer see any reason to pay the extra for a razor brand ever again.
Granted, I haven't looked at prices in a long time. I am mostly assuming not insane costs.
I'm not sure what "insane" would mean in this contect, but replacement blades for the no-name Gillette clone I bought are half the price of original Gillette ones.
My week using the former showed that, for me at least, the performance of the latter really doesn't justify its price. YMMV.
It's likely that even small companies are selling enough that these costs amortise to near zero.
I also cannot tell the difference between that and just buying safety razor blades, though there is a huge advantage (for me) in the pivoting head.
This is a gem of a phrase. I'm going to use 'geoarbitrage' from now on.
I live in a place full of this sort of nonsense, such as resold Clevo ODM notebooks, overly-cheap 'desktop projectors', overly-cheap TVs, water purifiers, and even air-conditioners. Oh, and the 'advertisers' are typically skimpily-dressed young women barely in university.
I simply refuse to buy anything that isn't European, Korean, Taiwanese, or Japanese for home appliances and electronics.
Brands like Miele, Bosch, Samsung, LG, Sony, Brother, Nikon, Philips, Smeg, Liebherr... They're usually up to 2-3x as expensive as the equivalent on AliExpress, but the quality and service is unbeatable.
That being said, personally dislike American brands but only because they usually advertise and use USC units, which make them hard to wrangle in a purely SI country.
Jeremy’s volume is probably a Gillette’s rounding error. A better question is what is their CAC and CLV - and Gillette’s are probably much better.
Before jeremy's there were other similar businesses with the same business model that weren't anti woke but advertised heavily online - dollar shave club, harry's, etc. They both have the same business model as Jeremy's. Dollar shave club was acquired by Unilever for $1 Billion and Harry's was acquired by Schick for $1.37 Billion. After being acquired both companies seem to have stopped advertising online anywhere near as heavily as they did before. I think Harry's started as a sort of charity buy one give one sort of company so it also had a social aspect to its promotion.
It's clearly a space where there's room for competition and the possibility of getting acquired by a giant company who doesn't want to compete with you. If you have a built in audience of "anti woke" who will buy whatever dailywire sells them, you short circuit a lot of your risk and can focus on growth. The targeted ads at people more likely to be interested is just that, looking for growth. It doesn't mean its a bad business.
Alphabet, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu, Bytedance, Yandex each have more than 1% of digital ad spend marketshare, and none of them have 50% of total marketshare. They compete in many areas too.
I think there are credible Indian competitors growing too.
These companies have margins >>20% whereas the advertisers barely break even.
How is oil & gas relevant to digital ads?
Social media making $$$ whereas the companies buying Ads barely breaking even is not equal to an “open efficient and free market” as the initial thread suggested.
I'm not really sure why your trying to compare oil & gas with digital ads, it doesn't make any sense. You can't extrapolate conclusions based on the market dynamics of one to the other.
Here is another oil&gas comparison: OPEC countries aren’t distorting the market in their favor, because oil is just a fraction of the total energy market (e.g., nuclear, wind, solar,…)
1/1 is a fraction. What fraction is oil of the total energy market?
Spoiler alert: it's because they are being sold garbage impressions while being shown "analytics" that make the lay person believe it's their content, or ad, or targeting, or whatever... and not the fact that the platform just pooled all the valuable impressions outside the auction and gave them to a preferred customer who never touched the auction system to begin with.
Being a small time app developer and seller of random things. I can't afford these new CPMs, $15 - $50 is a LONG shot compared to 2019 and paying $3-5 CPM.
Mind you I've spent close to $400k between Fb/Snapchat/Tiktok.
What do I do now that these companies have shut me out? Anything I build I can't see a path forward on acquiring customers without say buying email lists or hitting SMS lists. I feel very unfairly screwed.
I've had success with two strategies:
1) Maintaining a semi-popular Open Source project adjacent to my app. The website of the open source project mentions my paid app. It's free advertising that noone can outbid.
2) Word-of-mouth: My app is recommended by users to others. It's also free advertising, you just need to make a nice product...
Could be rewritten as 'U mad bro? Y no buy muh razors & own the libs'.
Meanwhile, targeted ads deployed at a large scale with flexible pricing models made it possible for not-so-reputable outfits to get their name in front of millions of people's eyes. While only huge companies with a good track record could get past the ad vetting team of a newspaper or TV channel, anybody and their dog can start a Facebook ad campaign for almost no money and then keep paying as the number of impressions scales up. If on one hand this democratized prestigious ad spots that used to be available exclusively to brands everyone already knows, on the other hand it also allowed random dropshipper nobodies to establish a presence as a "niche shop" of some sort and then end up selling you rebranded Chinese no-name products you might as well have bought directly from AliExpress for half the price with free shipping (or straight up scamming you).
As much as the HN bubble likes to see a level playing field where all companies are treated equally, I think it's good to have gatekeepers in the advertising industry. But, I get it, the tech giants are all about quantity-over-quality and Facebook's ad revenue would drop to basically nothing (by their standards) if they started vetting each ad campaign manually, so here we are.
I remember some brands lowering the quality of their product long before all of these random Chinese copycats sprung up.
Maybe this is why they were able to get a foothold because people like myself began to think that some cheap copies were actually better than the genuine article.
My pet grievance being branded footwear which has mostly become cheap garbage with a premium price tag.
I desperately want to spend more money on a product that will stand the test of time but it’s so hard to find them at times.
Sure there will always be a majority of shoppers who want the cheapest thing as fast as they can get it and they won’t mind if they have to buy 3 of them every year, but I think the market is going to start supporting a more artisanal approach for consumer goods as the pendulum swings the other way over the next decade (although current global finance which I won’t pretend to understand might make this a little trickier…)
Often those products do exist, but you need to become an “expert in X” to find them.
Oh… you want to buy a high quality leather [whatever], better start learning about leather grades, leather tanneries, stitching thread, stitching types… so it doesn’t blow out in a year.
Except we can’t all become experts in all products, and many companies are perfectly happy to build a brand on quality and then slowly erode that quality to increase margins.
Or you rely on media and, in countries where that's available, stuff like the government-backed, independent "Stiftung Warentest" in Germany ("foundation for testing products").
Want really good and consistent quality vegetable tanned leather made in Poland? Then she said that there is basically one place (they produce it from over 110 years, and they are quite low in Google searches). Want chrome tanned leather with a lot of colors that are consistent and ALWAYS the same as on sampler? Also only one place.
I was later learning normal sewing with her mother. When asked about good quality cotton (or other natural) materials in small quantities she basically say: "well, it will be quite hard and when I want really good materials I order them straight from Italy, available only in wholesale quantities from few manufacturers that I veted over last 40 years". She later said that in textile industry you can't really trust anybody, because they can send you few batches of great quality and then suddenly lower quality and will be telling straight to your face that "quality was always like that"...
I actually wonder if this will drive at least higher end consumers more towards the pre-Internet shopping word or mouth or personal experience approach to finding good products. For a while there the Internet allowed you to more easily discover and sort through new products and brands with a reasonable level of confidence so your horizons could broaden beyond products your friends and family recommended. Now the zone is so flooded with crap that the Internet seems less useful than it was 10 years ago for that task, which may lead to a reversion to more pre-Internet approaches to products, even if you might still buy it online.
The real untapped market could be a curated version of Amazon, with reviews you could trust and a high proportion of the products being legitimate brands you could rely on.
Till now it worked really nice for me.
When you can find older stuff or well-reasoned opinions on Reddit, it's a goldmine. But sadly that doesn't justify the pricing Reddit's owners surely want to see in the IPO so it'll likely get crowded out by short-term profitable long-term garbage priorities.
I’m stealing that!
Some years from now (probably less than more) people will realise and start using cryptographic identities and cryptographic attestations for all internet comms - provable purchase, provable delivery by mailing service, provable single person identity etc. - (zero knowledge!) provable everything.
I mean why nobody wrote a blog post about it yet - it has "AI" and "Blockchain" in the title and for once it actually does make sense.
You can bundle up "fake news solution" into it as well if needed.
Misleading, dishonest marketing and bribed reviewers make it impossible for a consumer to know that a high quality product is indeed high quality without trying it before (which is often impractical)
Whatever you do to differentiate yourself will be copied by 728934712 Chinese brands which will flood the search results of whatever marketplace you're selling on, at all price points (even though they're the same product for the most part).
Faced with no reliable way to find the high quality needle in the haystack people just opt to buy the cheapest one, that way even if you know you're getting trash, at least it's cheap trash.
The only way that used to work to sell quality products was to create a brand and slowly build up trust by consistently selling high quality stuff but in the current "value extraction above anything else" climate, apparently that isn't profitable enough anymore, so pointy haired MBA types will happily destroy that quality for a few bucks.
Sure there’s probably a better options out there, but avoiding junk is more important than getting the absolute best product at the absolutely cheapest price.
Most things marketed to businesses are still high quality. But you do lose features or design elements.
Facebook makes well over 20 billion dollars in net profits annually. They could easily invest a couple billion dollars into moderating better advertising and content, but since "user happiness" and "cost externalized to society" (e.g. people injured by bad products, cost of buying a new gadget because the old one barely lasted a year, costs of viral "challenges") is harder to quantify than "amount of dollars in profit", they all don't.
This is why government regulation is needed: to hold companies accountable for externalized costs.
Eg. I went to look at dishwashers at Costco, and the thinest of the metal used amazed me. You could bend things with two fingers. I shopped around, and bought some Samsung model, looks space age, but its pretty terrible at actually washing dishes. The marked for Dishwashers optimized for profit, and appearance of being functional. But at this point, I'm pretty convinced a GE dishwasher from the 70s was better.
Likewise with toilets. Low flow toilets are mostly terrible and do a terrible job at flushing. Literally the only thing they're designed to do. If you have to flush 2-3 times with a low flow and maybe even involve a plunger, are we really ahead?
An easy way to get rid of that is to go to the hardware store and get a jug of muriatic acid. Then research the hell out of how to use it safely before you even think of opening it. Then pour a bunch in your toilet.
Bought a pair of running shoes from Skechers early last year, had to throw away this year because the soles got worn out and I kept getting injured on one foot because I was stepping unevenly.
I bought Skechers because I had once had a pair of sneakers that lasted me the entire 5y of college. No such luck now.
No reason, just greed.
Having the external hard rubber last longer than that is just unnecessary weight.
You may just be in better shape than you were in college. Distance stacks up fast and running faster wears shoes out faster.
sauce: I run marathons and go through about 6 pairs of running shoes per year
This is probably not the best for my feet, but when I bust a hole where my big toe goes I feel less bad because I spent $10 and not $100.
Primarily, there has been an extraction of excess profit on consumer goods rather than investment in more efficient production or better products. I have suspicions that this is because of the relative ease of growing a profitable (but easily copied) manufacturing business out of China over the last 20 years, but it really doesn't matter why.
The other example of this is Oil Majors who have very little incentive to invest in new oil production or refining (even though it may be needed for the next decade), and instead take all excess profits to pay out as stock buybacks or dividends. They are in the profit taking stage of the business not the growth and investment stage.
Skechers is building a sprawling set of office buildings in the expensive town of Manhattan Beach, CA. That money has to come from somewhere.
And shoes are an odd one. They have never lasted a long time. Ever. Only shoes that will last, are the ones you don't use often. You can kind of make this work with a rotation of shoes. Having recovery between wearing helps. They are still very much a consumable.
Shoes: I can't tell which brands are which anymore and it certainly looks like they're all made in one factory. I can't find a pair of comfortable day-to-day walking shoes. I have to make the best of what's available which means dealing with the discomfort and pain through trial and error.
For shoes, I don't know what to tell you. They have always been consumable. And often uncomfortable. Such that I honestly think the catch is we get more sensitive as we get older. Certainly moving more weight.
Shoes: A month ago I tried on ten pairs of shoes by six or so brands and felt little difference among them. The only difference was price: ~$60 low end, $130 high end. And these were nothing fancy, just shoes intended for daily use by non-athletes. None were good but I had to pick since my current pair were in tatters. I went with the $60 pair and am futzing with different insoles to get something usable. Maybe there is a magic $300 pair that will do the job.
Four miles is clearly me making up a rough number. My assertion is more that many of us do not have great walking posture or ergonomics. Note I am not saying it is our fault, per se. Just that walking and techniques that lead to long term comfort are surprisingly ignored by most of us. And this has far more impact on things than your shoes will.
Related questions, can you still squat with flat feet? Do you keep your back straight when picking up things? Not just lifting heavy things. When picking a dropped pen off the floor, what do you do?
And obviously, it could very well be in your specific case it is the quality of shoe. I've seen a surprising number of folks where it just isn't. :(
The bad experience with shoes has remained constant the past 10+ years through periods of good conditioning and not so good conditioning. I think my ergonomics are pretty good adjusting for age.
Unfortunately I can't go back and remeasure material and construction quality from years gone by. My perception is that the shoe uppers are now all stiffer and less flexible than years gone by and the the sole materials are hard and have no give. I've gone to multiple shoe stores looking but have come up empty.
Whatever they're not spending on their shoes, they're not spending the money on building design either since the buildings aren't much to look at.
The standard of false advertising should not be: "There is at least one interpretation that is true." it should be: "Almost every member of the target audience will come to a correct understanding." If a company gets into a lawsuit and their lawyer defends the ad by saying, "Technically speaking, ..." they should lose. If a company can not accurately explain the nuances of the limitations of their product in a short time segment then they can just err on the side of caution instead of implying untrue statements.
This would absolutely devastate the bullshit advertising and branding that is used to prop up garbage products and make it easier to segment high quality products because it would be much harder for low quality competitors to make misleading me too statements without running afoul of false advertising.
For a while now when ever a thing in my daily life needs replacement (or I have a need for a new thing) I spend a good amount of time researching those products to find the often hidden gem buy it for life alternative. Wirecutter, Consumer reports, sometimes delving deep into hobbyist territory to find out what the true eccentrics are using and valuing. I'll do this with everything from new sponges, pots and pans, gym bags, audio equipment, umbrellas, luggage, boots, whatever. Although often times yes these options have a higher upfront cost, sometimes the better product costs the same or only marginally more, its just not as well advertised..
I think its probably some sick consumerist enjoyment, but I really do love investing in BIFL products. You have to replace them far less frequently, the experience of using a well made product is often far superior, and I get a lot of satisfaction out of taking care of and maintaining things rather than treating everything as disposable. Especially the seemingly menial things you use and interact with on a daily basis I love the feeling of upgrading my "kit".
I'm not saying that an $80 indestructible stainless steel dish rack changed my life, but after a long day - cleaning up after dinner, being able to fit my entire kitchen into a super sturdy rack that doesn't topple over, and is banked to drain into my sink instead of spilling onto my counter top and then onto the floor every single night really makes a difference.
Gustbuster Umbrella
Zojila Rohan Dish Drainer
GIR Spatulas/tools: https://gir.co/
Emile Henry Salt Pig
WMF De Luxe Spice/Pepper Mill
OXO makes a ton of fantastic kitchen and household products that I use. Dish Brushes, Cutting boards, toilet scrub brush, measuring cups, ice trays, vacuum sealed containers etc.)
Kai 5210 8 inch Scissors
Suwada Nail Nipper Classic (Nail Clippers)
Nest Easy Breather Pillows
Lilysilk 25 momme terse Silk Pillow Cases
Zojirushi Neurofuzzy Rice Cooker
Inomata Japanese Rice Washing Bowl
SimpleHuman Rectangular Step Can Trash Can
Vitamix 5200 Blender
Breville Toaster Oven/Air Fryer
Breville Loose Leaf Tea Maker
Lodge Cast Iron Pans
AllClad D3 Stainless Steel Pans
Iron Master Adjustable Dumbbells and Kettlebells
Happy Hacking Pro 2 Mechanical Keyboard
CST/x-keys L-Trac Trackball Mouse
Uplift Commercial V2 Standing Desk
Herman Miller Aeron Desk Chair
iFixit Pro Toolkit
RSL Speedwoofer 10S Subwoofer
TravelPro Platinum Elite Luggage
KingKong Gym/Duffel Bags
I’ve found this one to be incredibly hit or miss in the last several years. I completely ignore their recommendations now and only find value in reading the “how we picked” part.
> stuff that's pushed to you via targeted ads costs an average of 10 percent more,
> and it significantly more likely to come from a vendor with a poor rating
> from the Better Business Bureau.
The real story is social media marketing is ineffective, not that the products are trash.
Its kind of like what's advertised in spam.
You'd need to evidence that claim a lot before you could write a compelling post about it. I'd totally be down for a detailed post that goes into the numbers and comparative effectiveness of different ad spends though. That could be quite interesting for understanding the direction of the web going forward. If Social media marketing is useless then large segments of the current web and current economy is going to end abruptly.
What frustrates me more is absence of quality of reviews of products that I think of buying. Usualy there are bunch of generic reviews that was clearly writen for money (cold be called ad) or without deep knowledge or using that product at all. Youtubers usually repeat same phrases and numbers that says absolutely nothing about quality or usability of promoted product.
Did the keyboard review site skip the most important test? ;)
I have a book with me a lot of the time but I find it difficult to concentrate on reading (or anything, for that matter) when I'm not somewhere quiet.
Visiting NYC is a visual gorefest to me now. Honestly I would pay a decent price for AR glasses with billboard blocking built in.
When you buy a product that's been advertised, you also have to pay for the ad that was served to you. Ban ads!
That's not very helpful as advice because basically everything is advertised.
As an anecdotal experience that supports this: I’ve ordered products from Instagram ads exactly twice, with the same experience in each case: a higher quality, lower price alternative was available elsewhere. And, in both cases, the products shipped from overseas and took weeks to arrive.
As someone who is as immune to advertising as one gets, I find your post intriguing, and I feel like asking what is probably a naive question: can’t you just not buy the stuff? Where does that break down?
Not that I can't understand, but that's terrible neglect. Saying no is difficult but it's the parents' duty, same as many other difficult things.
Personally I also sometimes make the "mistake" of letting my kid pick a toy, snack, t-shirt, and forgetting that she'll pick cheap colorful junk every single time.
If that's the expected outcome, it's already lost.
...and forgetting that she'll pick cheap colorful junk every single time.
Still better than expensive colorless junk :)
Exactly, be on-call, have 20 minutes to get home to deal with an alert, while at the same time trying to get a toddler to comply, it's not exactly the ideal situation for making sane choices.
I am insanely impressed by anyone who regardless of how their day have been can stick to a rule of always making the correct choices and never giving in. I haven't personally meet anyone like that yet.
Hmm, I'm not sure anyone said it was easy to say "no" to your kids. What they're instead saying is that it's often your duty as a parent.
Shopping addiction. There's a lot of info about that. Happens both in general, people that buys tons of assorted junk, and in niche hobbies like wristwatches, garments, shoes, perfumes, cars or car models.
Over time the market adapted to a two tier system, low quality and low prices or high quality, and high prices (sometimes high prices and low quality). The entire middle tier disappeared, to even if I wanted a slightly higher quality steak or shirt, I can't buy it, because it doesn't exists, and I'm priced out of the high quality tier.
This is why Meta stock has been such a great investment since 2012 iPO and will continue to be, same for Alphabet. Multiply this by thousands of companies. Insane earnings, and very high profit margins. Very consistent too. No shortage of brands, advertisers. CPCs (cost per clicks) are super-expensive and increase with inflation too, and especially for mobile US users, which is the most desired demographic. You cannot think of a better company when it comes to printing money.
They wouldn't have this problem if they sold quality products.
1 Four Seasons Hotels
2 Terra Kaffe - had to google them, $1300 Espresso Machine
3 iPhone case, according to ad reviewed by Wirecutter and MacWorld
4 Monos Carry-On Suitcase that looked like any other suitcase
5 ClubMed
6 Philips Sonicare toothbrush
7 Volvo XC90 Hybrid
8 WSJ subscription
9 LaunchDarkly - feature flags SaaS
10 Sotheby's Finest Scotch auctions
I guess 3 and 4 could be an overhyped junk, but not everything.
1 the barbie movie
2 join the us military (I'm australian, and probably too old)
3 KFC
4 jb hifi. This definitely doesn't fit the narrative, this ad offers Apple hardware for less than the Apple store, something they've been threatened over before
5 nrma. A classic case of advertising to someone who has already purchased everything they sell
6 something entirely in a language I can't read. Well done Facebook.
7 vote for some Texas politician if you love God( Australian....)
8 something in Arabic
9 a presumably hacked account where a Persian rug gallery promotes an onlyfans account
10 nrma again
Nothing on this list strikes me as overpriced or otherwise supporting this narrative, but damn the targeting is terrible and I'd hate to be paying for this stuff to get shown to me
Unlikely—breaking the laws would likely just become a business cost, and make everything even more expensive for everyone.
The answer is by adopting different behavior on our end. Add blockers avoiding services litterer in ads (its why i no longer use Instagram, google search, etc)
This tactic has not succeeded even once since written records began. Did snake oil salesmen disappear because we ran out of gullible people?
Give me one example when this approach succeeded, without any corresponding legislation
I think he's describing when the market dethrones an entrenched player without legislation. This happens quite often. Cable companies come to mind. Kodak, Novell, Sun Microsystems, etc.
Like he said, regulation today serves the wealthiest companies, because startups, the ones that do the dethroning, have extra costs that are more difficult to afford. I believe it fits in the Barrier to Entry category.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/barrierstoentry.asp
If you want real regulation, you need to look to the anti-trust laws, but our current politicians don't have the stomach for that. Today's regulation really tends to serve the already entrenched, because the entrenched usually write the regulation.
When a business gets replaced by a conpetitor, that's a diffetent mechanism
Email spam filtering?
Web notification spam is much reduced since browsers made it a modal?
A good example here is cheating standards. It's in the interests of pretty much every car company to cheat on mileage standards, safety standards, emissions standards, etc. But very few cheat and then pay the fines. Why? Because the regulators know how to size a fine to make them pay attention. Volkswagen got hit with a $2.8 billion fine for the emissions scandal, and total costs to them were estimated as over $30 billion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
The solution is to make the fine a percentage of global turnover, not a static fee. That way the "cost of business" will be big enough to put the fear of law even to the largest corporation.
By and large, it happens everywhere. You can try to blame capitalism, but that feels like a trap. My view is that "high quality" is largely an illusion. And you start changing your view of it as you get older.
I disagree. I'd argue your view of it is changing because you can't find high quality stuff anymore, but it used to exist.
My parents have an immersion blender that is nearly indestructible. It has been working for almost 30 years now and the damn thing never dies.
Nowadays if you go to any blender from any brand on Amazon the first comment you see is "I used it to blend some ice and it broke on the first day".
My view is seeing my friends and family fall into the trap that one quality thing will last forever. It has never worked that way. All things need maintenance. And all things that last do so in the ship of Theseus style.
Now, do we also have a problem of fully disposable things? Probably. Single vendor items will be worse at this. But I'm not convinced from evidence that it is actually worse today. So many of the "made to last" things were not used for their lifetime. Such that that is its own form of waste.
No it's not. For example, you are paying $7 million for a Superbowl ad and assuming 100 million viewers, you are getting 14 impressions for a dollar for your old spice after shave lotion. You could have gotten 100 impressions per dollar from people who actually shave had you used YouTube ads. So, targeting is and will always be cheaper... so you're over-paying for products which use non-targeted ads.
IMO, the cat is mostly out of the bag at this point. I don't think there will ever be regulation meaningful enough to "untarget" advertising to the degree that privacy advocates might hope. At best you'll be able to regulate some of the more egregious abuses, like phone apps surreptitiously listening to conversations to pick up keywords for advertising, or installed apps sending your phone's location data while in the background. It's simply too easy to track usage data these days to expect advertisers to not fingerprint visitors, especially when almost all visitors to major websites are logged into Google and Facebook.
Regulation will continue to be mostly toothless like GDPR, which as far as I can tell has been a largely bureaucratic way to extract extra money from Google/Meta/Amazon in the EU by fining them for unclear cookie consent banners and privacy statements. Which, to be clear, is a good thing, but extremely ineffective at doing anything about the actual invasive tracking they do.
> a largely bureaucratic way to extract extra money from Google/Meta/Amazon in the EU
This can not be overstated. The EU should concentrate on creating things of value of their own, like privacy first services, not constantly prioritizing leeching off innovation and progress in other countries.
Speaking as a concerned European here, with plenty of criticism of the way the potential for liberating human knowledge and interaction using the fantastic technology at our disposal has largely been corrupted by FAANG et al and ad tech.
Case in point: the cryptocurrency scams that littered Facebook as late as a few months ago (I don't think they have ceased but I was kicked out then, maybe because I habitually reported these scams to no effect - except being bombarded with even more of them ...).
The problem is that’s hard for everyone downstream. I used to sell stuff on Amazon and EBay from surplus auctions as a side hustle. Initially you could run a sustainable business with 20-30% gross margins. When I got out, you needed 60-70% margins.
So you really need to be selling a lifetime customer with value beyond the first sale, sell some bullshit story, or junk/scam/stolen product high margins.
That’s why drugstores get looted… people sell toothpaste on Amazon.
I've been very happy with some purchases from companies I found out about on Facebook. Cognitive Surplus, for example. Love their stuff. Is 10% of their price due to their choice of advertizing platform? Shrug.
Having said that, a lot of it IS overpriced junk, or outright scams. I had some cool-looking shoes show up on my feed for "50% off" a price that was more than twice the amazon.com price. I bought an espresso machine from a facebook ad that turned out to be an elaborate scam. I'm only really objecting to the use of the word "everything" here -- that makes this title false.
More about this, please!
I clicked the link and went to the website, which at the time went to sarisell.com , a professional-looking storefront (they move to a new domain and update the ad every week or two). I thought there was a pretty good chance it was a scam since this is an $800 machine supposedly selling for $300, but I figured I would be reimbursed if it was, so gave it a go. Here's the elaborate part: they took my money and sent me a delivery tracking link at sodopro.com which appeared to be a delivery service like DHL. The link went to a map that showed the product travelling very slowly from Europe, and it would change every few days. Eventually the location disappeared and the status just stayed at "on the way" or something. I filed a claim with my credit card and got the charge removed.
At least after a few days of effort Walmart did refund me and said they were investigating the vendor.
Not far into the piece, we get: > The point is that Jeremy's has to spend $800K/month to reach its customers, which means that it either has to accept $800K less in profits, or make it up by charging more and/or skimping on quality.
...what? Acquiring new customers for a business via advertising means less profits or lower quality? How does that follow?
I own an ecommerce business, and Facebook/Instagram ads are my main avenue of new customer acquisition (though to be clear I'm not in the ballpark of $800k/year). My products are somewhat seasonal, so I can only really profitably advertise from about April-September. The rest of the time, I'm just continuing to sell to existing customers.
During the April-September window, I make much more money, because I am selling to my existing customers and also selling to new customers via profitable advertising. The quality of my product does not decline during the time that I am advertising. My prices don't change during that period, either.
My company makes decidedly more money because I'm able to advertise. It doesn't cost me to lose profits; it causes me to gain them. Yes, if you look at my books, you'll see that advertising is a big red number, but if that's where you end your analysis, you just don't have a basic concept of how advertising works.
For all of the author's complains about "enshittification" (cute the first time, but beaten equine carcass style by the end) of products, this kind of targeted advertising is an enormous boon for small businesses that sell good products. I can't afford a TV ad campaign, and even if I could, I couldn't measure it enough for it to be useful, given that I'm trying to keep things tight and well-understood financially.
He complains about "ad-tech intermediaries scooping up 50% or more of every advertising dollar," but there is a reason for that! They are delivering a service that is valuable for businesses in an immediate and measurable way. The amount of market share the ad-tech companies get is proportional to the quality of the service they provide to advertisers relative to other media.
Now to be clear, I agree with much of what the author takes issue with in terms of data collection and the like. There are lots of privacy issues with Facebook, Google, etc. that should be taken seriously, and people should clearly understand what it is they're sharing and how it's used. But even with that in mind, the author is conflating his frustration with adtech and concern about privacy issues with the idea that they aren't delivering tremendous value to small businesses like mine, and that's just incorrect.
I assume Jeremy’s is a blatant attempt to mimic Harry’s and Dollar Shave Club which were known for acceptable (less so with Harry’s) products and disrupted the existing offering to where Dollar Shave Club got a billion dollar buyout from Unilever. Harry’s went for $1.37B to Schick.
So, in other words, the venue that is being paid to present the advertisement makes money.
The advertiser makes money, too.
What's your point?
1. LLBean. Running aparell, shoes, bedcovers. 2. Apple. I still have 2012 mac books that work well after a few repairs. M1s are good. 3. Peugot pepper mill. 4. American Apparel T Shirts. 5. FoamByMail top line Luxe maximum firmness foam mattress(Queen) costing a few hundred $ (after trial and errors and $$$$ down the drain on scammy mattresses before) 6. MS One note. 7. A grandfathered T-Mobile plan that gives me upto 6 lines for 120$ max(but I use 2 lines for 90$) and 6 GB of high speed data per line. 8. Camelback hydration backpacks. 9. Watering cones from Blumat (Have lasted 8+ years of use through 1-2 weeks of vacation) https://www.blumat.com/en 10. Benq 1080p projector(~1 hour a week of watch time since 2014), we don't use a tv.
I list these because they have lasted me a lifetime time and the most use and/or money saved over time.
There is a bunch of old stuff like watches and stereo systems my mom has from Japan that are still good and working from the 1970's and 80s