Google does little to reduce advertisers' costs
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They used to brag about how good they were at giving you the address of something specific you were searching for with an "I'm Feeling Lucky" button.
Linux nerds used to /like/ them. No really.
Nowadays they're fully compromised by both money and politics and make the old days of microsoft look good.
I see things like this :https://twitter.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/16737835968285696...
From a politician I don't particularly like or support fwiw and think "How dare they?"
Google are fully evil.
IRL, that kind of regulations exist all over the world but they don't tend to mandate no censorship, instead they mandate censorship in the name of national security.
Unfortunately, the national security aspect is not exactly baseless. It all started with the Arab Spring, when the more authoritarian countries realised that they don't have control over the communications as they used to and the less authoritarian countries realised that foreign powers can curate the content their population sees(through fake accounts or owning the platform).
Anyway, IMHO censorship should never be an option and to deal with issues of security we just need openness. That is, platforms with significant reach should be mandated to have open algorithm and verifiable data which can be investigated against faul play. For example, 3rd parties should be able to look into the recommendations and moderation actions of YouTube.
Sorry but it’s obvious you’ve never worked on this issue. It’s not easy.
The theory is that under an indirect third party effect free speech becomes effectively limited, if large companies censor people. As a result they can be compelled not to do so within reason. For example, if a social media platform bans you, you can sue them and they have to show that they have sufficient reason and that they gave you opportunity to appeal etc. If they fail, they have to unban you.
I’m not quite convinced you’ve worked on this issue before yourself. What is the solution you’ve been working on?
Anyone who has worked at f/m/a/g has worked on global application of local ideals and the user base each being enraged you don’t apply their local ideals globally.
“Obviously the first amendment” is a great example of this.
I’m well aware people get upset when companies outside of their culture don’t follow said culture to a tee. However, we are talking of a US company censoring US presidential candidates in a way directly contradictory to the laws they abide by. This is local ideals being applied to a local business, so excuse me if I’m a little less than sympathetic to the plight of Google dealing with an “enraged” foreign user base when they can’t even please a local one.
Additionally, if your account is supposedly no longer active, due to an anti-censorship protest, why are you replying? And in a way that tries to sideline the problem of mass censorship by moving the problem to “but the people complain otherwise, they want this”?
I’ve worked in this in search quality and android. At a leadership level. I don’t anymore. That’s all.
We don’t just think “hey the first amendment!” We think it terms of practical utility return for users and the company. While attempting to accommodate hyper fluid and often incoherent local requirements. That’s it. It’s not a grand conspiracy.
Looking forward to the unlimited hardcore porn era on daytime TV.
(obviously you're going to reply "well that should still be censored, it's just that people should be allowed to say the fourteen racist words and not the seven dirty words, because those are different categories of thing that I refuse to examine")
It's pretty heavily regulated on broadcast TV in the UK, to a silly extent; including hassling the much more liberal Dutch regulator https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-17297090 and censoring a TV station merely advertising a porn site https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0028/46891/o... (on the grounds that since it's a paid service it counts as "teleshopping" like QVC)
The UK makes periodic ineffectual attempts to censor it off the internet.
knock at the door
> Later! batin'.
but do whatever you want I guess
IMO most of the problem with restricting language information is that it can stop ideas from spreading, which is functionally very limiting for democracy from a distributed computational perspective.
Does the same problem apply to non-language information? Especially for things other than real events (e.g. police actions, a protest, etc).
It seems possibly much easier to draw the line within e.g. video depictions than it is within language information.
There is no such thing as absolute freedom, everything is a choice of how much authority one submits to and allows to control ones life. I hope it is a reasonable amount, because as it tilts too far one way or the other chaos ensues and death follows.
And to quickly cover your inaccuracies, because even spending this time is too much:
You described Anarchism. Anarchism doesn’t equal Libertarianism. Anarchists have no morals or base set of laws. Libertarians work from the founding documents of the USA and the basic premise of “don’t hurt others”.
The USA is not and has never been a democracy. We were a republic, that grew into a democratic republic. Thus we are not “the will of the people”. We are “the will of the elected officials chosen by the people”.
Let me examine them for you:
Freedom of expression is the right to express any opinion. Pornography is not an opinion, and therefore there is no free-speech right to it. Beliefs like "race X is inferior" are opinions, and therefore protected (though threats like "kill all X," and actions like discrimination, are not). The manner in which speech is expressed can be restricted—"your honor, I blew up the Twin Towers to express my belief that the US is the great Satan, it was free speech" won't fly in court. But these restrictions must be neutral to the content of the speech.
There is one additional restriction commonly considered to apply to free expression: the government is allowed to criminalize lying (saying something you know is untrue). Defamation, fraud, false advertising, etc can be regulated.
The US Supreme Court case Brandenburg v. Ohio (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio) is a good example of how the boundaries of free expression work.
> The Court held that the government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action". Specifically, the Court struck down Ohio's criminal syndicalism statute, because that statute broadly prohibited the mere advocacy of violence.
If I say "politician X deserves to be killed," that's protected speech because I'm expressing an opinion. If I say, "look, politician X is in the room with us, get him!" I am going beyond opinion, and the government can punish me for breaking the law.
The problem is that Big Money entered the Internet... Eternal September just with companies.
I'd say even an entity the size of Google gets dwarfed by the amount of people and money that is out to defeat them. You have everything from scammers looking to find victims for malware, unscrupulous people shilling penis enlargement and other questionably legal/useful/toxic "supplements", to Russian and Chinese propaganda aiming to destabilize our societies, and North Korean and Iranian hackers looking for funds for their nuclear programs.
IMHO the solution is to follow the money and punish bad actors instead of trying to hotfix the effects: get China, NK, Iran and Russia off of the public Internet, sanction Turkey and India until they close down their scam callcenters, and get the domestic helpers of all the criminals (e.g. money mules) arrested. It is completely inexcusable that people like Pierogi of Scammer Payback have to do the job instead of the police tackling all the cybercrime.
Remove the financial incentive for SEO spam and other cybercrime and watch the Internet get better on its own.
[1] https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/telefonbetrug-wie-die...
[2] https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/hohe-haftstrafen-fuer...
[3] https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/bande-von-callcenter-be...
"in those days" - is that they key to this argument though?
Has Google evolved to what the majority want? Ie. "stuff" rather than "information"
Are we, on HN, in an echo chamber? Curious people, on the fringes, still wanting information whilst our "normal" peers are just interested in breaking their previous weekly Amazon delivery record?
Maybe Google are serving their customer base. We're just not it anymore.
If you don't like that the private company has a strong presence in the market because of normal free market process, maybe we should be talking about that Anti-Monopoly thing we used to do.
YouTube additionally exposes it to millions of eyeballs for free.
Authoritative tools are oppressive by nature, it's just a matter of time before they get turned on you.
Youtube is actively hostile to the creators I watch, but that doesn't mean they should be legally compelled to broadcast any and all content that someone uploads. They are well within their right to control the narrative that exists on their private platform.
This is just like how elon is well within his right to control the narrative on Twitter now, and make it a safe haven for right wing trolls. I don't like that, but you won't see me advocating ending his right to freely run his business. That's authoritarian. Nobody puts a gun to my head to use twitter, so I don't use it.
There are multiple alternative video platforms out there, including small ones started by the edutainment youtubers and there is nothing preventing all the right wing youtubers from starting their own system. Hell, Nebula was literally using a white label private video distribution platform for a long time! All they have to do is sign a check and they can run their own youtube!
I'm so glad the gatekeepers for the only meaningful platforms where you can get ideas in front of people always have our best interests in mind and wouldn't ever censor ideas that are bad for the bottom line of payment processors.
Ignaz Semmelweis was persecuted in the medical community for his insane idea that doctors working in maternity wards should wash their hands and he later died in a pysch ward from his mental breakdown over it. If it happened today he would have been banned from YouTube too.
We're not post-science, in 2020 people were ridiculed and banned from social media for saying covid came from a lab and that's a pretty accepted theory now. I'm sick of only hearing popular opinions that are run by as brand-friendly from banks and payment processors. I want to hear from people who say things that aren't popular.
> I want to hear from people who say things that aren't popular.
Why, though? What have you gotten out of that experience? Are you an expert in epidemiology and immunology, to evaluate the studies yourself? You can't "decide for yourself" in the field of medical research. You need years of education and a career to even begin to operate in that arena. You need to rely on experts and the established methods and organizations to do the research and synthesize best practices. If you really want to contribute to the conversation about immunology and vaccine safety, you need to go get a medical degree and hop into the established field of research. If you can't do that (I sure can't!), then you need to trust real medical experts. Politicians on YouTube are not real medical experts.
RFK Jr isn't proselytizing some new, well-supported medical theory rejected by the establishment. He's just spouting complete nonsense that has been debunked to an absolutely ludicrous degree. Spreading this misinformation has a real, human cost. Vaccine refusal is directly responsible for tens of thousands of preventable deaths in the US annually[1,2]. Spreading medical misinformation has real, serious consequences. It is absolutely correct for platforms that care about public health to refuse to provide people like RFK Jr a megaphone.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_history_of_the...
As someone who has only recently become aware of rfk in any form other than people referring to him as a kook, I'm surprised by statements like these.
Maybe his positions in the past were more extreme? This is from a town hall tonight, I'm curious if this is the kind of complete nonsense that you mean:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KLxBwIupF88
The highlights seem to be that he and his kids are vaccinated, but that he wants to see childhood vaccines subjected to placebo controlled trials (and he claims with some substantiation that the existing ones have not had placebo controlled trials, though I can't validate that).
I don't know, it didn't seem all that whacky to me.
There are plenty of links to sources on his Wikipedia page, if you'd like more information.
I didn't catch this particular part of the live broadcast, but if it's anything like the rest of it, either the moderator or the audience asked him about it.
It seems like everyone associates him with vaccines, so it's a question that would obviously come up in the context of "how are you not a kook", and so he has to talk about it. I've seen him say explicitly in another interview that he's not running on vaccines, but if people ask him about it he'll respond.
I'd also really like to break up the big tech companies so no single company has so much power.
I'm actually OK with this.
YouTube is a private platform. You don't get to force them to host anything, same way as traditional broadcasters don't give voice to every nutcase out there.
Most would be outraged if NBC hosted talks about public health with shamans and science deniers. What's the issue with YouTube acting the same way?
The cries of “private platform” only go so far when you’re an effective monopoly on the space. Especially when you opaquely censor legal content, while keeping millions of illegal videos up with ads.
And to reiterate, the issue is blatant: defending an effective monopoly like YouTube, who has such a tight stranglehold on information, is incredibly dangerous. Even if you don’t disagree with them now, authoritarians rarely stop finding people to target.
https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/online-video--12/youtu...
Yes, I agree that harmful pseudoscience should not have any room in the mainstream. That is essentially what I suggested on the last sentence in my original comment.
> The cries of “private platform” only go so far when you’re an effective monopoly on the space.
YouTube is not a monopoly. A monopoly is not established when something is too popular, otherwise any dominant technology company would effectively be a monopoly, e.g. would Twitter be a monopoly in the microblogging space? Was Tesla a monopoly on EVs?
Being more popular than anyone else does not make them a monopoly.
It would be trivial for this guy to find another space, as he did when he published his BS on Twitter. Even more, it is trivial to open a website and spout all the pseudoscience there. He is playing the victim because it plays great among his followers.
I will worry about this when authoritative information about important topics gets removed from all platforms at the whim of one or two companies, buying and bullying a hundred others.
Lastly, that hypothetical 75% market share does not account for Facebook Video or TikTok. TikTok has ~90 million monthly active users, compared to ~230 million of YouTube, that alone invalidates the claim.
> Yes…
Well, at least you’re honest about supporting censorship of the “right” people.
> I will worry about this when authoritative information about important topics gets removed from all platforms at the whim of one or two companies
By then it’d already be too late. Though again I doubt you’d care even as long as the “right” people disappeared from your view. You don’t seem particularly worried about authoritarianism as long as the content you’ve been told is “harmful” has been “reviewed” and summarily removed.
I support that a media company is not forced to host content that is deemed against their ToS, especially when there are a myriad of publishers and alternatives out there.
Is that censorship? Has this guy been silenced? He is still in YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, plus he is given air time in places like FOX news. Him complaining about censorship is akin to a billionaire crying about the cost of living.
If we would consider this as "censorship", is porn being "censored" in YouTube? Is nazi content? And if so, should we force YouTube to host such things?
Either way, the naive libertarian notion that everything should be allowed unless it harms others, does not fit here either, for a myriad of reasons, starting with the fact that "harm" is poorly defined, and there is a case to be made about this guy being actively harmful to society as a whole. But again, that is too big of an idea to fit in the libertarian framework.
- LinkedIn,
- GitHub,
- OpenAI,
- And the 50% monopoly that O365 is,
The evil is that they can use AI to generate startups: They have both business plans and code. Imagine starting an O365 spreadsheet with Copilot and being suggested how much you should spend on ERP or HR or AWS, because so many startups fed the AI before yours. Imagine competing with startups who have this information. It’s extremely hard to avoid Microsoft products, such as Gh which is the reference over competitors.
Google is evil but I’d still trust them more because they seem fairly incompetent with AI (or even ads).
And the scary part with Microsoft is not how much share they have in each individual part, but that they have a big part of almost every field in computing.
Cloud servers, cloud storage, OS, search, AI, Video conf, team chat, web browser, office tools, PC hardware, Tablets, ERP, gaming HW, gaming SW, developer tools, developer frameworks, compilers, ad network, education, IT security and the list goes on.
And they cross sell and force you to use all the other crap if you already use one or two of it.
For people buying their own laptops, Macs in particular are really strong competitors, if not dominant depending on the region.
Afaik, it wasn't McDonnell Douglas/Boeing, where DoubleClick executives metastisized their culture in Google.
It's just... Google realized it's way more profitable to serve ads to the entire internet than do anything else.
Advertising is the black hole at the center of the Google galaxy, and over time all businesses bend towards profit centers.
And so absent strong leadership to the contrary, Google has slid inch by inch, small decision by small decision, closer to it.
People find it really easy to say money isn't the important thing when they are rich. But see that wealth challenged and their behavior changes very quickly (with some exceptions, of course).
Google may have had ideals, but they were still a company filled with directors and managers and employees who weren't rich (enough) yet. They weren't paid off from the initial rainfall of money. They were going to use all tools at their disposal. It is no surprise it happened, even if the founders weren't too concerned with money (which I don't believe).
What this meant culturally is that Google became a company where technical merit alone is what was rewarded. In my 15+ years of working for the company, not once did I touch a budget. The teams that did handle that sort of stuff were always made to plead their cases to engineering instead of it being the other way around.
idk, i've definitely heard from people with low employee ids that larry & sergy had the idea of ads from before day 1.
Perhaps they didn't realize how much money it would be but they didn't develop pagerank and spend years _wondering_ how it could be monetized.
I think somebody submitted a blog year ago to HN that goes into this. Maybe somebody from doubleclick side that turned down an offer from Larry?
I remember PG quipping words to the effect of "google searches are like scientology, what's true, is what's true for you" so the trend was clear even at that time (maybe 10-ish years ago?)
It’s kind of funny how impactful a decision that was for Google and it’s almost memory holed. Most people don’t even seem to remember it.
Google+ was when Google stated that the goal of products wasn’t to be a good product but to drive traffic to Google+.
I think this is a reality that neither Twitter mobs nor American exceptionalist conservatives want to admit. If you believe all people deserve healthcare, then that includes people you might like to punish by contacting their employer. And for free speech to actually be free, one of the consequences of that speech should not be to lose healthcare.
It’s also much easier to change job than change country.
Over Google the people don't have much of a say. (The country can create legislation to steer it in a direction etc.)
And then internationally ...
The entire current censorship issues are because of a small group of very organised people who want to enforce their worldview on the world. It's not views held by the majority, but companies still comply as they'd rather do that than fight.
But have a look at what happened to Bud light, they are in serious trouble because of one advertising deal. They changed their tune extremely quickly. This doesn't really happen with governments.
But that’s beside the point. Whether or not these corporations are pro or anti LGBT depends on which way the wind is blowing today. It’s not fundamental to their business, so they don’t deeply care about your opinions on the matter. Try talking about something more fundamental, like labor rights, and you’ll quickly see the difference.
Having your healthcare removed as a result of your publicly stated opinions is just one of many other possible negative outcomes that has not been prevented in America. I might go so far as to say that the US doesn’t have free speech so much as decriminalized speech.
(It’s not a perfect analogy in the sense that losing your job and healthcare isn’t identical to a fine, but it fits in reflecting the fact that prison isn’t the only punishment one can receive. Plus there are people financially situated such that the financial penalties of unpopular speech are immaterial. I’ll work on it.)
I spent a long time in the Danish public sector, and if you don’t know this, the EU public sector is a billion dollar industry in terms of selling cloud services, and Google was never really an option. Which is sort of silly when you look at the tech. They had Office365 before it was cool, but because they couldn’t/wouldn’t guarantee privacy concerns they were never really able to sell it outside of education. So Microsoft casually strolled along and now dominate the market completely. Google has firebase (I think it’s called) which is arguably one of the best backends for 95% or the applications that I’ve seen build in the Danish public sector, and it’s used for 0% of them because Google never understood that what Microsoft sells to IT departments in non-tech enterprise organisations isn’t tech, it’s support. When something goes wrong with Azure, your CTO can tell the organisation that they are getting hourly updates on the situation directly from Redmond. When something goes wrong with Google Cloud, your CTO can use the same chat-bot you and I can, despite the multi-million budget difference. I think the most interesting part was how Amazon entered the market with a Google mentality, but then when AWS kept loosing to Azure they figured out why and are now even more compliant to what EU enterprise wants than even Microsoft. I mean, Azure still can’t completely live up to every aspect of the GDPR in terms of who services Azure global, AWS has been compliant since around 2020. I still remember how around 2018-2019 we went from taking with whatever Amazon support you and I probably talk to, to having a sales representative call us and get us hooked up with all sorts of compliance officers. Mean while Google sort of got even worse.
I mean, Google actually managed to do really well in education. At least here in Denmark, but “big Google” once again got in the way. This wasn’t for lack of trying by Google education, they have this really great team of people, and I can’t imagine how frustrating it must be for them to have “big Google” stomp on all their decade long efforts by not giving things like Chromebooks and Google education better privacy tools for kids.
I think it’s the same story for search. Search is a business for them and over the years the MBAs have focused too much on profits and too little on products. Fair enough, things like social media has made things harder. I mean, the reason you and I type “Reddit” in to our google searches isn’t only because Google got played by SEO, it’s also because people started putting their thoughts into social media instead of running blog wheels and using smaller forums.
I hope Google pulls around. I don’t think they are more evil than Microsoft. As an enterprise worker I love Microsoft, they sell you support and they listen to your business needs, and all those privacy invasive tools they are pushing these days are disabled in enterprise. But they aren’t doing it because they are “good” they are doing it because that is how you sell licenses. I do think their cloud dominance may get challenged as Azure pricing a keep rising and alternative options get cheaper, but who’s going to compete with Microsoft on Office365? But as a personal user, have you used the basic windows 11? It literally has commercials in your operating system, and since Windows 10 they have been “pre-installing” stuff like Minecraft and whatever that popular mobile game they own is called. And that is in their paid product, at least google search doesn’t charge you money on top of their advertising.
As an anecdote I think it was also interesting to see how Apple became very enterprise “unfriendly”. They owned education before google swooped in, and one of the primary reasons Apple lost initially was because they wouldn’t let IT departments “enroll” (sorry I’m not sure what “owning” the device and OS is called in Operations terms) their devices, which meant schools couldn’t block students from doing what they wanted. That’s since been fixed, but Apple is still what I’d call enterprise “unfriendly”. That works for Apple though, they obviously have a business strategy that’s doing well. But Google doesn’t similarly have one now that the floor is sort of falling out from under a lot of these “pay with your privacy” services.
No, they don’t.
Facebook and Google are way worse than MS ever was, and sadly MS seems hell bent on joining their club with Windows 10+. By default Windows now spy on the user and shoves algorithmically manipulated "news" (propaganda) down their throat on the former start menu.
The conditions for that outcome are getting ripe, with the near elimination of cash and the control of official digital identity the main change drivers.
Ye. Neither cash nor ID is something we need "big tech" to solve. IDs being a problem in the first place is a US and third world problem anyways. Just like Uber solved a US only problem (medallion monopoly and shortage).
Granted, it's partly my fault for letting a loved one be that computer un-savvy, but that kind of ad should have been detected and blocked before it was ever served.
Gave me a chuckle. Left hand - Right Hand.
I wish the FTC would prohibit buying ads for brand names.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2018/11/...
Please correct me if I misinterpreted the findings though.
Yes, this kind of advertising is a stupid zero-sum game, but our society in general, and free markets in particular have a lot of stupid zero-sum games. I see no reason why this one should be illegal.
And when I search for Google Pixel, I get a banner with 7 pictures and a shopping link and another link to buy a Pixel.
Of course, by default I have an Ad blocker on iOS and I don’t see any ads
People keep wanting law to work like math, and it just doesn’t. Context matters.
It's PURE google protection racket money paid by jkl corp so it gets the traffic of people who want to visit jkl corp.
Mafia as business model is one of the many evils that google does and is.
Why do you think google moved the ads from the side where they were clearly marked and obviously not search results to the top of the search results and made it much harder to tell "this link is actually an ad"? I mean obviously for money but why do you think it made them money? What do you think of google's plans to offer deep discounts to advertisers for traffic from keyword searches for their brand or corporate identity? Reasonable?
I don't believe that and i'm not sure how anyone does tbh.
You want your traffic? Pay /us/ for the privilege.
Congratulations on discovering how advertising works.
Did the phone company put your calls through to your competitor if you paid them to do that or would they be in big trouble for doing so. It's not "advertising" it's getting between you and your customers and tolling the infrastructure to the highest bidder.
The phone company was regulated very heavily as a utility just like google isn't.
Perhaps this is the answer for how to treat google? Regulate them heavily and ensure they show the same thing to everyone?
Interesting suggestion you're making.
Please provide some evidence of Google systematically violating its policy here https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/6020955?hl=en
Google have deliberately made ads much harder to distinguish from results. They have done so for money and it has been successful. No policy of theirs changes this, excuses this nor makes it go away nor makes it less relevant. I care as much about google's "policy" on google's clear misbehaviour as I do about mafia citing their "code" in a criminal trial. You should try assuming people lie for money when there are no consequences until shown to be otherwise.
Try all the standard, accepted and common google ad techniques on yellow pages ads and see how far you get. I'm betting on that being nowhere and usually because it is illegal.
What can or can’t be done in yellow pages is irrelevant. I also can’t click on things in yellow pages, does that mean presenting links should be illegal?
What they want is for the majority of punters using google to search for the url for xyz corp to click the ad for that url rather than that same url the search result. This is why they changed the ads to look like search result and put them above. It's incredibly lucrative. It's exactly what MBA types talk about monetisation of the infrastructure to "toll the way." And the rest of us refer to as "protection money." That was and remains the claim. It's pretty solid.
But good on you for sticking up for google so hard, it's unfashionable to take the side of the gazillion dollar behmoth with all the market power and it needs to be respected that you're trying.
If G bought Bing or DuckDuckGo or any of the alternative search engines that appear as choices in people’s browsers, and not just that but did so under a threat of violence, you’d be right to call it a mafia. If it threatened to kneecap Apple executives to be the default search engine on their devices instead of paying Apple billions yearly for the privilege you’d be right to call it a mafia. Otherwise they don’t extort anyone any more than any property owner asking to be paid for use of their property.
There’s a lot of shady shit that Google does, but it’s childish and silly to expect a trillion plus company to be some embodiment of a non-capitalist utopia embedded in a capitalist society, and call them mafia if they fall short of that ideal.
I might be shilling for Google, but your great hope is the government? Haven’t those people been known to employ deadly force at home and overseas in all kinds of disgusting ways?
Despite my best efforts I can’t follow your overstretched analogy. How does Google redirect anything by putting ads on top of search results?
Even then, what counts as an ad that competes with Microsoft? Can ubuntu advertise their Windows alternative? Can an authorized reseller advertise themselves as the best place to buy a copy?
This problem sounds almost impossible to me, and the cure almost sounds worse than the disease.
But I think it would be crazy to prohibit competitive advertising in the first place.
https://www.wired.com/story/apple-vs-apples-trademark-battle...
The Wired article makes it seem like Apple is going after someone here, but they’re ‘just’ filing for a trademark.
Whether you agree or disagree with the tactics, what they’re doing isn’t what you claim they’re doing.
Apple is not suing anyone; it has asked for a re-ruling from the Swiss trademark authorities. As far as I have been able to see, this is based on the ownership of the Apple Corps trademark, and the Swiss fruit association is making unnecessary noise that has been amplified by the credulous because anything about Apple (Designed in California) makes for more clicks.
Putting up a "Nintendo Switch" ad on the "Steam Deck" search term, and vice versa, is wrong. Even more so when big companies camp on the trademarks of smaller startups.
I'm angry because this has happened to me.
They do. Your own brand name has a higher Quality Score against your own ads thus lower CPC.
What's the endgame? Companies can only reduce ad expenses if they have monopolies or agreements among themselves.
Especially for products -- Worst case is when I looked earlier there is STILL MALWARE on Bing for searches like "google chrome".
This is especially true for brand adverts where the customer would have reached the site organically but you have to outbid a rival because they're trying to bid on your brand keywords. It's a "Google tax" for having a popular brand name. It really sucks.
When my business was new in 2003, and Google Ads too, we had a competitor bid on our name as a search term. We were outraged and found that Google had a page on, I think abusive search terms or something? But to action anything you had to write a letter to Mountain View. So we did that, citing deceptive practices or some pseudo-legal rubbish. And they actioned it! For years afterwards we saw no ads on our little UK company's name.
"According to a study, 40 percent of small business owners stated that their Google Ads campaign yielded no leads. Whereas, an additional 33% of business owners noted that these campaigns produced very few leads."
I've worked at large companies and every single one of them saw negative returns on their campaigns.
It's a big wealth transfer mechanism.
There are also small tricks about writing copy to make it economical. Social media sites have the retention mechanics built for you so I'm not surprised they convert better. Just my 2 cents as a guy who does marketing for some spare pocket change.
(I've worked with 50+ company ad accounts and any large business will have profitable campaigns at x level spend)
What we have today is intentional, they have the system to prevent this but they choose to no longer use it. It might be that your own ad with your own brand in it is way cheaper than the competitors ads with your brand in them. Maybe they just want some money from you even when the user searched for your brand specifically. Maybe they want to train users to always click on ads (hard no to when the ad is exactlly what you searched for)
google is in the business of dashboards. as long as they can show that their spending does "something", advertisers are good
But people still do it, presumably on the "nobody got fired for buying IBM" theory.
Source?
It’s always extremely funny to read engineers on hacker news to make claims about ads, with no understanding of how the business work. And the underlying assumption that companies throw away billions of dollars away, with no results to show for it.
Yeah marketing serious stats chops, never seen it yet. Show us the flipping data if you want to make the case for something otherwise the /only/ option is to update your prior with bayes.
xyz corp & co spends billions on it = must work. Reasonable.
every small co. I've heard of loses money at it- looks bad.
Businesses built on brand advertising, chanel, coca cola, etc don't use google at all. Why not? Looks bad.
Modern, internet marketing maestros who have built major brand names on the internet did not pay google a cent. Tesla - rivals mercedes with no ads at all, Trump maga etc. (no I don't like them not that it's relevant). - Looks bad.
Google, advertising to /internet/ /users/ don't use google to do it, they have tv ads! Because google advertising works so effectively?
I dunno, I guess it could work. It could work badly but fashionably for large cos? It could be a group-think crock.
The last 2 shouldn't be as plausible as they are though. Why has google let them be that plausible if their stuff works and they can produce the numbers? Or maybe they, I dunno, can't?
So there it is, the slam-dunk case of nothing.
You can easily test branding dollars with things like brand lift studies, but I’ll skip over branding.
The majority of small business and good chunks of large companies ad spend is spent on performance marketing. These campaigns have strictly enforced goals of return on ad spend (or sometimes net profit return on ad spend). When a new client starts running big budgets they run incremental alit y tests with their internal data science team, a neutral third party vendor (paid regardless of the outcome), and with the platform their spending money on. Each team shares their analysis but brands usually just ignore the platforms numbers. The advertiser can determine in their own, with legit statistical analysis, whether purchases would’ve occurred even if they hadn’t seen an ad.
I don’t work on one of those teams, but I think it’s basically you spend 80% if your budget like normal on 80% of users. Then on 20% of users you use the same targeting but serve 1 single blank ad. Then you compare how the test and control groups make purchases, and how much of a lift in purchases the advertising drives. They also compare the user buckets before even doing the test to ensure users are evenly split so each group was making the same amount of purchases on average before the campaign begins. They remove outliers, etc.
It’s not a bunch of rich old established men in a room high giving themselves, it’s data scientists who don’t at all trust the guys spending their money. So they test the shit out of it over and over.
All of the raw data can be seen by the advertiser, and they track each individual impression, click, etc. that data can also be filtered through vendors to identify potential fraud, brand safety, etc.
I’ve had more than a couple client run an incrementality test and then stop spending on the platform because the results were too low. But I’ve had many many more be happy with their own internal analysis and increase budgets, then run another test at that budget level. I have clients who only pay us if we spend $1 and they get $2 in incremental revenue from users who their data science team would not have purchased without the ad. Those teams don’t care if they spend money, and they even get bonused on increasing incremental revenue so they constantly test new vendors and move spend to whoever performs the best.
Which non-internet company is on record claiming they see better returns from google ads on racist blogs than on say, tv ads for example? Must be a few, surely. Where?
What brand ever advertised on google? Pick a good one. I want to see the campaign.
I've had this discussion before and it's usually at this point of wanting any data or examples that it sort of melts away like morning fog in the sun or gets needlessly nasty. Hopefully this time will be better. It's not like I'm trying to push something here.
I’m explaining how an entire industry works and you’ve just closed your eyes and said everyone is lying. It doesn’t make sense to assume everyone in an entire industry is lying - then that industry would be dope for disruption as any brand not spending marketing dollars would be hugely more profitable than competitors. Show me a startup that doesn’t have an advertising team/agency.
Google publishing success stories maybe? Anything.
Conversation works better if you don't claim people said things they didn't say. I guess we're going the second route? Seems a shame.
But sure for disruption we have Tesla - brand strength to rival Mercedes. Ad spend $0. We have Trump, became president. I strongly doubt google ads were the key part of his presidency push. Both of those marketing campaigns were pretty disruptive.
Never seen a google internet ad for the google pixel. Seen plenty of tv ads. That seems like an interesting data point? Lots of tv ads for chrome in my sport among the gambling ads too.
Meanwhile I'm still waiting for you to respond to my original request of source of your bold claim:
> For most businesses today, Google ads are not cost-effective.
I'm looking for data as evidence of the claim made by google that paying them is worthwhile which I don't see much of.
So yeah you can update your prior with "people pay for it so it must be good" It has some weight. I mentioned something pretty similar right up top when I went through the anecdotal evidence we have.
People paid for lobotomy and gave this guy:
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1949/moniz/facts/
a nobel prize for it where he announced there were never any negative side-effects or outcomes(!). To as room full of serious and successful scientists. Meh.
Group think really does happen. We find out if it has when there is direct evidence, which we don't yet have here, which continues to be a shame. When it comes up I'm always hopeful someone will say "Yes we do!" and link some good data.
All the major ad networks let you run all sorts of comparisons and experiments for ad ROI. If ROI was routinely negative, the billion-dollar budgets would have long been pulled back by beancounters and cost-cutters in the buying firms, especially when they have the excuse of a recession to do so.
Yes, occasionally you get 'I run a boutique business and I find that <X advertising system has horrible ROI>' blog posts on HN. Maybe they are structuring their ad campaigns wrong. Maybe their business shouldn't be advertised at all. Maybe they are using the wrong channel (Search, display, social) to advertise with. It's a pain in the ass to figure this out if you're a small business.
But larger businesses with serious ad devote a lot of effort to figuring this out - and will reshuffle their marketing budgets to the high ROI channels.
Is that true? I've been in this game for quite a while now and the cast majority of business have ROI positive ads. I haven't kept record but would think 8/10 businesses type ratio.
And if they buy both sets of ads, then they just have to pay for all of those leads?
And if they do that, then what are you doing with your marketing dollars?
No you won't. For power users who use ad blockers or can recognize ads, maybe you will. For the majority of users those are lost clicks.
(Also those are the easiest money Google can make.)
"I think Google Ads should be simpler to use (dumb it down), should be more transparent with its costs and bids, and should offer more options to control ad appearance"
Firstly, more options won't simplify most likely.
Secondly google has been 'simplifying' for a long time, to their advantage. Increasingly Google push people down the performance/CPA path saying our smart systems will get you the best results 'believe us we're Google' but it's mostly not true. The best results are often from a manual as possible campaign and they make this an ever harder option to take. There needs to be far better regulation here.
Marketing is one of those skills where art meets science. If you let the algorithms take over they'll often look good at a base metric but as soon as you dig around you find you're sacrificing wider goals or mostly getting sales you would have anyway, or paying crazy amounts to finish off the budget type etc.
Google is a great advertising platform, but adding your money, limited controls and trusting google systems to work it out is a horrible way, and something I see all too often. I suspect it's largely because you can spend an < an hour setting the easy way, or spend a day or more setting up a well researched and manual way, but on both client/agency side people don't want to spend the time/money getting foundations right, or simply have the time or aptitude.
I say the best thing is for some regulator body to go over the system changes over the years and ask why features plus analytics were removed, hidden or changed and put rules about these controls and ongoing changes to live up to the level playing field tenent of good capitalism. Maybe it is happening somewhere but I haven't seen it, and it is long overdue.
Auctions may vary-- most of my managed spend (mid 8 figures, so not huge) has been in high CPC (think $5-25) verticals like home services, movers, insurance, mortgage and mattresses (insane period from 2015-2018). I have set things up manually, let Google AEs setup the "recommended" bid strategies (and even run longer than their suggested timeframe) and utilized known agencies, and the manual bidding (always accompanied by aggressive negatives, high AP/IS goals) always won by large (30%+ lower CPA with higher volume) amounts. Performance may be drastically different in ecommerce niches where everyone is using automated strategies, as well as other factors like number of auction participants, participant budgets, sophistication and even objectives (executive spite is a valid reason-- hence Google's target outrank share strategy). Anyone who has done PLAs/shopping ads will be incredibly cynical due to their targeting methodology of being all inclusive with the onus of exclusions on the advertiser when the majority of errant spend is in the longtail-- good luck talking to 99% of marketers about tokenization, stemming and lemmatization for identifying negative matching strategies.
So yes, automated bidding can work better than just YOLO'ing some broad match campaigns, but most people shouting their praises, that I have encountered, are parroting their ad rep's talking points. Any competent performance marketer (not many) will be able to outperform automated bidding strategies, but things like scale (why bother saving 20% on 5k spend?), principal/agent problem, or workload (or being lazy, relying on salespeople to do their job) will also have an impact.
On mobile the first ad almost fills the whole screen so I'm not going to waste time scrolling further.
Ads should be free (but limited in the way they distract us). The most important reason is that we want the market to reward the best product, not the one with the biggest advertising budget.
We must stop the vicious cycle of producers having to pay higher and higher prices to get attention (which is what Google loves).
And we certainly don't want ads everywhere because we don't want to drive up global consumption unnecessarily.
Businesses survived before advertising was as crazy as it is today, so we can tune it down a _lot_ before bad things start happening to businesses in general.
X costs you 100. A person tells you they'll sell you a service to allow you to buy X for 90. How much would you pay for that service? You'd pay up to 10, which the person then pockets. That happens because the person has to competition, so knowing that X costs 100 and you're getting it for 90, they'll charge you 10.
That's google. They don't have competition in search.