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Comment by olau | Hacker News Reader

Online store sells great products. But nobody knows about them.

Online store buys ads on Google to tell people about their products. People click the ads, and buy the products so the store can scale up and lower their per unit cost. Everyone are happy.

Now fast forward a decade. Google drop their "do no evil" motto and jack up ad prices. Online store now pays 10 times as much for their ads and have to raise prices to cover the costs. Google shareholders are happy, everyone else loses - it doesn't matter if they click ads or not, the prices are higher for everyone.

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>Now fast forward a decade. Google drop their "do no evil" motto and jack up ad prices. Online store now pays 10 times as much for their ads and have to raise prices to cover the costs.

This is just not true and not how Google's ads work.

Google has a bidding system. You don't have to pay their prices if your ads aren't profitable. You can pull out. You can go somewhere else. You can try other forms of marketing. You can make a better product, better landing page, better messaging so you can convert more users per click.

Your company is essentially competing with other companies for the click. If the price 10x, it's because other companies are willing to pay 10x more. If other companies are willing to pay more for the ads, then your product/business/marketing isn't as good as theirs.

> If other companies are willing to pay more for the ads, then your product/business/marketing isn't as good as theirs

Or maybe you just don't have as much venture capital to burn.

Do we really want to live in a world that overwhelmingly rewards whoever is prepared to spend the most on publicity?

(How's Citizens United been working out?)

>Or maybe you just don't have as much venture capital to burn.

What does this have to do with the post you're replying to? I would suggest starting a new HN post if you want to talk about VC cash.

Don’t worry. There’s a hack to get around paying for publicity and that’s to be an obnoxious troll. You can get rich on social media by being deliberately offensive.

> You can go somewhere else.

Yeah, right.

Come on Facebook is right there. Google is a $200bn ad company, Facebook is a $130bn ad company. You don't even have to change your marketing strategy at all, both companies will happily swallow all your dollars to make ads.

You can make a case that replacing Google with a bunch of bespoke ad vectors isn't a real alternative because they don't have Google's reach but Facebook does.

Email marketing, content marketing, FB, Apstore, Bing, DuckDuckGo, print marketing, TV marketing, magazine marketing, viral marketing, etc.

The EU regulators are addressing Google's display advertising and exchange business, but your comment is about their search ads.

Google drop their "do no evil" motto and jack up ad prices.

Raising prices is evil? Does this hypothetical online store never raise prices?

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