The fundamental problem here isn't even AI. Its just the new lowest bidder for barely coherent SEO.
I still have my popcorn ready for when the advertising bubble pops. There is no way web ads are worth what companies are paying for them now.
I still have my popcorn ready for when the advertising bubble pops. There is no way web ads are worth what companies are paying for them now.
Ad spend, impressions, clickthroughs, and conversions are all heavily instrumented and tracked, the idea that there's a two-decades-long blind spot bubble strikes me as extremely farfetched.
Everyone knows there's a lot of fraud, its generally baked into the price at this point, and is why some sorts of ads are far cheaper than others, but (almost)[0] everyone also tracks their bottom line for returns.
[0] brand campaigns are different than direct response here, but that's an even older thing that predates the internet entirely so is unlikely to implode.
Definitely but I’d argue that they’re even more heavily gamed. The information asymmetry between the platform and the ad buyers is just too large. The incentive to misrepresent is basically limitless. Truly tracking effectiveness requires a degree of privacy invasion that even the platforms can no longer get away with.
Spamming more of cheaper ads for the same price does not count as ads getting better in my book. If anything, to me it indicates the opposite: if ads were getting better, campaigns would be getting smaller, shorter, cheaper.
I can't find any information about this in particular because I don't know the term to search for. Does anyone if this is true or how to find out more about this underground network?
No longer do they need to hire an army of cheap copywriters in some third world country to produce their spam. Anyone can run a spam farm nearly for free, and crowding the market is inevitably going to be driving down the profitability for everyone in the business as clicks and impressions are diluted. As is the trend with AI in general, it's really hard to build an effective moat.
We have now improved the A.I. to seem almost convincing, and sufficiently degraded the N.I.[1] such that convincing people takes much less effort.
[1] Natural Intelligence
Sadly, it seems that they are worth slightly more than what people are paying for them. I don't know who of the 5 billion online are motivated by these ads, but there are enough of them and they have enough money to make the system viable.
I have a friend who runs a local business entirely via Google ads, when he has space capacity he increases his ads spend and his capacity is used, when he has tight capacity he cuts back on his spend. He has a consumer facing business.
I don’t see an obvious catalyst for that in the short-term.
The status quo is that nobody knows how effective their ads are. The only people with the data necessary to even begin to analyze the effectiveness of ads are the ad-serving companies, who have a strongly vested interest in making them appear as miraculously effective as possible.
I mean if I Google a brand store the first result is usually and ad for the store and the next the store. If they measure the revenue from adclickers they hugely overestimate the value of the ad since the clickers where going there in the first place.
It is probably a complicit SC between Google and marketing folks. They are pimping their PowerPoints.