Internal slides on the work of the Google "Ads Quality" team
twitter.com
twitter.com
It's a neglected story that "Ad Quality" is an important issue in other markets, particularly, Television. Apologists for the ad industry repeat, without a pause, that advertisers crave a young audience, but look at the ads on TV since 2000 and you'd think "I want to die before I get old" and it comes from the American condition of election campaigns, prescription drugs, lawsuits and financial services for a few whales being on a different planet than anything else in terms of dollars at stake.
From time to time they have woken up, realized it drives away viewers, and put a little effort into "Ad Quality" but it has been too little too late.
We are gonna see a lot of such threads/articles/substacks/videos in the near term. Already saw what happened with the Wired article. It's a combination of engagement farming, creating content that gets clicks, and misunderstanding/misrepresenting what is there in the exhibits which would lead to a lot of rumors and false narratives.
A question I thought of while reading the thread was: If this was so important and crystal clear as in the thread author wrote, why did DOJ not use it directly in the trial? (We would have known given there are bloggers who are covering the trial on a day to day basis)
so twitter threads are login-walled :/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poop_emoji
Was introduced to be use in the "download our mobile app for a 'better' experience" popovers on sites like Reddit and Twitter.
Did you know?
"App" is a contraction of ...
* It’s a large deck, pretty old
* It’s important to note the deck is from the current antitrust trial and not something else. Google’s lawyers have done a ton to try to keep important evidence out of public view. This deck they were OK with the public seeing, and so that’s a part of the story.
One thing of note is that these slides looked old (dated). The "Google" logo on the slides is pre Sept 2015 (https://www.theverge.com/2015/9/1/9239769/new-google-logo-an...), when they moved to the new typeface. Internal marketing moved pretty quickly to update all slide templates to use the new logo, so that tells me this slide deck is likely at least 8 years old.
Meaning, the information on these slides may not apply anymore. The value-proposition for Chrome may have changed since then, especially with Chromebooks being in the mix.
The prevalence of ad blocking has grown significantly since 2015. If anything, these slides apply even more than they did when first created. The specifics might have changed but the situations they’re trying to address to preserve and maximize the revenue model for search have only expanded.
The slides provide evidence for places auction rigging can happen, and that’s exactly what Google did recently with Jedi Blue
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue
> The value-proposition for Chrome may have changed since then, especially with Chromebooks being in the mix.
Pretty sure that argument is irrelevant given that Google pays over $25B per year to be the search default
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/27/23934961/google-antitrus...
> Chrome exists to serve Google search, and if it cannot do that because it is regulated to be set by the user, the value of users using Chrome goes to almost zero (for me).
1) Using a non-chrome browser to access gmail? At least once a week get a popup telling me the experience is better in Chrome and I should switch.
2) Not logged into google in safari on my phone. During a routine google search, telling me with a modal to login to improve the search experience.
Its exhausting and I started backing away from google because of it. Ok, tell me once or maybe tell me every few months thats fine...but every week the same darn message. Too much.
I don’t use Google for anything I can avoid and I get nagged for it all the time. It’s exhausting and the amount of data that most websites seem to be freely sharing with Google just through analytics and those annoying sign on prompts is absurd.
Why is no public interest lobbying to stop this intrusion of privacy?
The google meet app seems to include an entire gmail client for no reason and seems to show it rather than go back to your calendar / mail.
Mail loads a web view, rather than the app (say slack) or even safari. Which means half in email links go nowhere, because I’m not logged in / able to access the destination via the web view.
And they always want to continue linking my personal and business account within the same app, and then messing up which one should be trying to access. No matter how many times I remove my personal, it always reappears. Often via a “authorise access” pop up while logging in via a different device. Surely it’s a security issue to run 2FA via a device that has actively logged out and removed the account from it.
I’m looking forward to them being broken up. It’s becomes too hostile.
They've somehow got a problem on both ends of the spectrum.
- uninstalled all google apps from my iphone
- cleared icloud for google apps
- reboot
- install a google app I've never installed before (say one of the 70 different chat apps)
- somehow I'm logged in
this is a huge privacy loophole
That's why this exists: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search...
I'm sure the Chrome people see the ads people as a wallet for their development as much as the ad people see the Chrome people as a vessel for their ads.
In the end the ads people bring in the money so they'll probably get their way, but last time this case came up on the front page there was an example of the quick search feature testing well with users (clearly originating from thr Chrome team) clashing with ad delivery, and only after the ad people raised an issue did Google turn back the changes. This suggests to me that the ad people have some influence on the decisions the Chrome team makes, but the two teams clearly have very different goals in mind.
Yes, they have different goals, but you're downplaying the amount of influence from ads that this incident suggests—when the org was forced to choose between keeping a feature that was shown to serve users or scrapping it to make the ads team happy, they scrapped it.
In the end it matters very little what the Chrome team would prefer if the corporation consistently overrules them.
I did not know this existed.
There's something a bit sad about it.
Hawk is a verb: to sell on the street. Ex: He hawks goods on the corner.
Hock is a noun: debt or pawn. Ex: He got his watch out of hock.
Thanks nathancahill and Merriam-Webster!
https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-10/417378.pdf
Disclaimer: I work at Google, but not on ads and have no insights into the deck.
If only Google had set file retention for slides to 24 hours like they do chat.
That sounds like it should be illegal. Would it be illegal? (I'm not a lawyer).
In the days when everything was on paper, keeping everything around was expensive. Do you really need that memo from 10 years ago? How would you even archive and store it? Deleting it makes sense, but you need to be sure you aren't hiding criminal activity. Or at least don't have the intent to hide criminal activity.
So companies have rules like "delete everything after a year"--there is no intent to cover up a crime. But as soon as you become involved in legal proceeding, you have to start saving stuff.
It gets complicated fast, but that is the basic rule.
The screenshots, with the ads being clearly visible, surrounded by yellow boxes, and not taking too much screen real estate, are quite striking compared to the Search Result page now days (which feels a lot more blurry and sneaky).
At the same time, we now get mandatory ads on Youtube, and personally, I was quite chocked by how low quality these can be. Best case, it's your traditional sugary food ads, worst case, it's propaganda or border line scam promo.
Maybe Youtube always was that bad for the ~2/3 of people not using ad-blockers and I was blind to it.
However, with the recent layoffs, the end of free money, the slow death of Twitter/X and the push for more monetization (ads on Youtube, API monetization on Reddit, etc), it feels we are reaching the end of an era.
Though redacted, having a list of all exhibits may make for some good reading.
[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18552824/united-states-...
easy or evil perhaps?