Ads are no one-for-all revenue solution | Hacker News Reader

Ads are no one-for-all revenue solution

spotbloq.blogspot.de

22 pointsComNik11 comments

I think you're greatly underestimating the value of Google's content network, and display advertising in general. While the majority of Google's ad revenue still comes from search, Google's display advertising is sizable, and growing quickly. In fact, it's the fastest growing advertising segment for Google, having doubled last quarter to a $5B annual business from $2.5B annual business just a year ago. The crazy thing about this is that while Google “owns” the vast majority of web search advertising, they still only control less than 10% of the webs display advertising. Source:http://adage.com/article/digital/search-drives-google-displa...

Remember, Google's content and display advertising technology is only in its nascent stages relative to its Search technology. Display advertising technology is a little trickier than search advertising, as search advertising by nature of its use of keywords has targeting built into itself. Good display advertisement targeting requires the conflux of accurate user data, accurate interpretation of web content, and the understanding of advertisers goals. In some regards, it seems Facebook has a much better system to meet these needs, or at least, the potential for a better system.

On top of that, you also have to keep in mind the almost exponential growth we’re seeing in mobile platform usage. I would posit that social applications are going to make much better platforms for mobile advertising than mobile search. Just anecdotally, consider the amount of time that you and your peers spend searching on your mobile phones or tablets versus the amount of time you spend say on Facebook or social new aggregators. I would assume your social apps usage is much higher. Also, now consider from the user experience perspective how poorly advertising on mobile search would be. The times you’re searching on a mobile device is generally more often out of immediate needs, and if a user is getting an advertisement in such a rushed condition, especially with limited screen real estate, it’ll make for a much greater inconvenience than being interrupted by an advertisement while browsing a social app.

I think the problem with my point is, that the scale at which Google and all these companies operate can compensate a lot of flaws in the business models.

And I dont really wan't to say that their Business Models are flawed, but you have to admit that Google really has advertising figured out.

I could not think of a better example, but the focus of my concern are the companies being built at this very moment, which seem to take advertising as a solution to all their financial problems, if only they can get enough users.

Mobile is an interesting factor. I think this will be won by the company with the best hyperlocal offering. Because this is in line with the whole idea of mobile - being somewhere other than your home. Neither display, nor search ads are really suited for mobile, who cares about some tax-management software when they're sitting on a train.

Time will show who that'll be.

Thank your for your comment (:

That's a pretty short view on Facebook's role in users' lives. Facebook definitely has some challenges ahead, but advances in NLP and sentiment analysis could be a boon for them. What happens when Facebook is able to use their data set to extract implicit information about search subjects.

For example, I recently engaged in a discussion on Facebook with a friend who is considering a career change. He had some questions about Linux system administration career choices. Right now, that conversation is opaque to the systems at Facebook. It has no meaning beyond the strings that are stored on disk somewhere. What happens as NLP and sentiment analysis advance to the point that they're able to extract real ideas from conversational threads? Multiply that by 845 million active users.

In that scenario, Facebook is sitting on a gold mine of monumental proportions. It's almost unimagineable the amount of data Facebook has. What questions could be answered using that data? I can think of more than a few inventive purposes for this data.

The fly in the ointment may end up being consumer privacy concerns. If the government passes the right/wrong (depending on your view) legislation, it could destroy Facebook or Google. Google didn't roll Google+ to have their own social network, they rolled it for similar reasons as they did Google Voice. They want the data.

I know it's common echo chamber fodder, but big data is the future.

Yes, this is exactly what I wan't. I'd love facebook to use their data to the fullest, and I'd love to pay for such a search engine (mainly so, that they dont need to sell my data). I hope this happens, and I hope they make alot of money from that, keeping my feed/timeline/stream focused on my friends.

In 5 years Facebook will have a comprehensive search solution integrated with Facebook to compete with Google and they will also have a Google Adsense style ad network that uses the data they know about you to better target display ads.

Yes, I thought about that. Maybe even something like Aardvark in big, who knows.

And if they are able to execute search as well as connecting people, they will and should become as or even more successful as Google.

But I'm hoping for more innovative business models, even though that is unlikely.

The revenues are directly correlated to the click through rates for display ads which are much more akin to what facebook is offering.

Separate out Google's search revenue and display revenue and you'll see there's a big differentiation there.

This is true, but this is also my point. Google makes so much money because theire business of search is perfectly aligned with ads (there is almost no difference between a search result and an ad-result). Google's display ads are not as 'successful', because I'm reading a blog or doing something else than searching when I get into contact with AdSense. There is a huge difference between my friend's status update and an ad (maybe Timeline can change this).

I heard Google Plus's Vic Gundotra say the same thing at SXSW. There is definitely a time and a place for ads, and while you're viewing intimate social content might not be that time.

However... recently I've been seeing facebook ads where they are simply reshowing old status updates from my friends where they have linked/liked products, and pages. I'm not sure that reminding me of things my friends have liked and linked to isn't a more meaningful advertising experience. It's certainly not sufficient to support Facebook, but it feels like a new, possibly more valuable, kind of ad.

I've been saying this for a while. I got my idea from pg, who said that Yahoo never realized that search traffic is the most valuable.

People with a problem pay for a solution. People looking for free entertainment generally don't.

Plural apostrophe's are no one-for-all punctuation solution.

Just sayin'.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com