Google shouldn't exist at its scale, nor should Apple, Microsoft, nVidia, ...
You're suggesting that if Google was smaller then that would make this site more appealing to advertisers? That having more advertising companies would make this site more valuable?
On the other hand there are several large supermarket chains where I live, and while I have a small artisinal cheese making hobby, so far my interactions with any of them to put it on their shelves have been equally soulless.
Perhaps in this context the issue is not monopoly, but rather that I have nothing of value to offer them.
If your relationship to a company is so worthless that they can't spend 5 minutes of an employee's day talking to you, then what value could they possibly be providing you?
It's the site owner providing Google with value (that they want Google to pay for).
It's not incumbent for companies to interact with every person who thinks they _should_ be a supplier to said company. I get people cold calling me every day wanting to be my supplier. I absolutely ignore most of that.
In this case Google's algorithm did not ignore the potential supplier. It evaluated the site and sent a reply saying basically "thanks, but no thanks".
Now, I understand your gripe - an algorithm did this, not a human. But this has been the Google way since long before they were a fifth of this size. So it's not like a competitor changes Google's way of doing business.
And Google's way is not a secret. If you don't like it, then don't have a business relationship with them (as a supplier or customer.)
Lots of ads don't care very much what site they are on, even if the purpose of the site is somehow unknowable.
But google knows the traffic it sends there. And it's able to show ads alongside those search results. Why can't it put similar ads on the page?
And apparently adding the dumb text unlocked ads, so there's the value being put to work. The old site has the same value, google just refused to recognize it.
> how that value might be unlocked?
Uhh, put ads on the site and the ads will get valuable views.
I don't know what you're asking here.
Or are you asking how competition between advertising networks would help? You wouldn't see several big networks in healthy competition all having the same bad requirements that a superpower can get away with.
I think Google (probably rightly) sees no value in this site from an advertising point of view. I think if there were 5 advertising aggregators they'd say the same.
You're suggesting Google is leaving money on the table, not just for this site, but a lot of others like it. I'm suggesting that if this category of site had value to an advertising aggregator, someone would be leveraging it (and that someone eould likely be Google.)
What makes you say these things? Google isn't walking away from a deal here. They are simply imposing their own rules knowing that the publisher has very little choice but to comply. Google probably knows that the enshitified version of the site makes them more money, but that doesn't mean a cleaner site has no value. It's just not maximising advertising income at the cost of user experience.
If there were several ad networks competing for this kind of business then each of them would have less power to impose their rules. Their margins would be far lower. Advertisers would pay less and/or sites would be making more money. And sites might have a choice to prioritise user experience over maximising ad revenue.
but the problem is that there are no "2,3,4,5' options - there's only one. And it has no incentive for "good people" to leverage
But let's imagine you're CEO of option 2. What do you think you might do differently which would make this site, in its original form, appealing to advertise on?
Having multiple ad companies doesn't sound like an improvement when the advertising space on offer doesn't seem to be good for advertising.
Or to put it another way, do you feel this space does have value, but Google is leaving that value on the table? If so, why hasn't some other company taken advantage of this value?
That, in itself, is not actually a win. There would need to be traffic, clicks on ads, and so on to be a win.
There's no evidence (either way, it's simply not mentioned) if the site actually makes any revenue from the ads that are now on it. Perhaps the automated Adsense algorithm was correct "the original site isn't a good ad site" - and the mistake is that it can't see what "seems" to be true to us, which is that the new site is no better.
That said, Google is not actually a monopolist in online advertising. There's also Facebook, Amazon and a couple of smaller ones like X and Microsoft. The problem is that the big ones appear to have cleanly divvied up the space without stepping on each others' toes much.
For instance, Amazon does compete with Google for advertisers' money, but it has very little effect on the choice a website like Apportionment Calculator has as they can't sell their site on Amazon.
Similarly, I'm not sure how much of a competition Facebook Audience Network actually is for AdSense. I think it's mostly interesting for sites that have a significant Facebook/Instagram presence. Again, not much of a choice for small web apps like Apportionment Calculator.
But that's not the real complaint here. The real complaint is that Google did not consider the original site to be "ad supplier worthy".
As you say, there are other advertising players - but if none of them see value (in the original site) then maybe that's telling us something?
No, that was not the complaint. The complaint is that Google demanded changes that made the site worse for users. These changes are clearly meant to optimise ad revenue.
Google is in a position of power that allows them to make these demands. More competition between ad networks would reduce the power of each individual ad network and give publishers more negotiating power.
>As you say, there are other advertising players - but if none of them see value (in the original site) then maybe that's telling us something?
As I understand it, no other ad networks have even seen the site. Amazon and Facebook are clearly unsuitable. Microsoft may have been worth a shot. For this type of site I think Google has a nearly complete monopoly.
This is why big companies like this end up with governments defending them, they aren't too big to fail, they are too big for others to let them fail.
To an extent every business must generalise and specialise in various configurations as they get going and differentiate themselves, but at the point where Apple is building its own silicon which it then puts in its own hardware on which you can install software from their app store, regulators should be able to clearly say "if you're going to make chips, you have to let other people buy them too" and "if you're going to have an app store you have to let other people have an app store too" and so on.
That's not feasible for a very small business, but it's not as if you can apply a "market cap" point at which it becomes feasible. You can however pretty easily tell when a company has a "wholesale" division and a "retail" division and is essentially selling to themselves in the same way as another company might sell to them. It's always challenging codifying that stuff into law but we have a pretty long history of doing so, I don't think it would be an insurmountable regulatory challenge.
Your solution sounds great but in practice it's simplistic.
Instead, for things deemed worth having as law, we try to set the rules at levels that as many people as possible find as reasonable as possible (albeit in an imperfect way because there's indeed no way to get universal agreement on anything, and because not everyone acts in good faith when choosing, and because money influences politics too much, and all the other reasons why democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others).
Hell, even legal age of consent is arbitrary (please don't argue this -- if it's not it won't vary across developed countries).
The absolute majority of legal lines we drew are arbitrary.
This is bullshit. 18 is when consequences start, because that’s when you’re treated as an adult by the legal system.
Do they? I thought it was ignored everywhere.
Corporations are necessary for specialisation, e.g. even knowing what your legal liability is, having someone to enforce health and safety rules, being able to run a production line rather than having one person spend about a year making a single car.
We can't get most of the interesting things we see in developed economies just by sole traders hiring someone directly for each thing without a corporate structure, partly because that too is a specialisation, and partly because that's way too fragile (every such thing either has a bus number of 1, or it's a mediocre reinvention of a corporation).
The corporation cares not about humanity or the rule of law, but yet we treat it as a person.
I would challenge you that these "miracles" of the corporation will doom is all.
Physically disassembled in its entirety by a paperclip maximiser.
> the rich are richer than ever off of the hard work of the poor.
And the poor are, too.
The natural state of our species: https://youtube.com/@primitivetechnology9550?si=xUTMUkTdB3oT...
> The corporation cares not about humanity or the rule of law, but yet we treat it as a person.
A legal fiction, but not exactly identical.
Countries too, "L'État, c'est moi" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'%C3%89tat%252C_c'est_moi
> I would challenge you that these "miracles" of the corporation will doom is all.
Could be. There's a reason we don't see aliens in the sky.
A the same time the "miracle" of collective action that you want to get rid of — because everything corporations do wrong is also done by other kinds of co-operations — isn't really just corporations, it's everything that makes us primates.
That's why you need to be more precise than "just ban them all", why the simple and obvious solution is wrong.
You can join the US military at 17, why this arbitrary number, why not 16, why not 20?
If the parent has lots of experience with African economies then the value might be a distillation of the latter complicated ensemble of functions into something very meaningful.
But that's a normal startup problem. What makes it impossibility to beat google is that they control so many other parts:
- they know everything about the visitor. What they've searched for on google, which videoes they watch on YouTube, which websites you visit through their ads or browser, where you normally shop through Maps, who you keep in contact with through Gmail, which apps you use on your Android. Etc. Etc. There is no way you can place more relevant ads than them.
Secondly, if someone were ti to switch from AdSense to your startup, they might suddenly find themselves with their traffic having tanked. Why would google search send them to their site, when they can send the visitor to a site where google also makes money..
What does this mean?
In terms of GDP, the median African country is Benin, with a GDP of about $20 billion. Maybe you want mean instead. The average GDP across the 51 countries in Africa is $56 billion.
Do you think that, um, Chipotle with its market cap of $88 billion should be broken up? What about Costco? Its market cap is over $300 billion, and it has quarterly revenue of about $60 billion -- if it were a country in Africa, its annual revenue would rank in the top 5 in terms of GDP.
The aggregate GDP of all of Africa is about $2.9 trillion. Literally only Microsoft exceeds that today.
Are you just picking companies with a market cap above $2 trillion? What about $1 trillion? $500 billion? Alphabet's market cap at the end of 2016 was $540 billion. Has Google's influence over the internet increased meaningfully since then?
(I don't necessarily disagree with your thesis; I'm just trying to understand your benchmark.)
In the end the problem is capitalism, the idea that investors (people merely looking to turn money into more money) should be considered the only owners of companies.
That forces this eternal growth model on us that enshittifies everything.
Not sure if this was an intentional pun or you are more right than you realize...
If you figure out a system where that happens reliably, you've basically solved civilization.
Every google stock owner gets 1 share per share of google stock.
(perhaps thumbing the nose a bit too much, but the general idea...)
Automatic breakup based on stock price is a terrible idea. (Market capitalization is total value of stock in a publicly traded company.)
It absolutely is the root of all problems, but people, consciously or not, will deny it and try to justify how it is necessary or how accumulated capital is not the issue.
Beware of that while reading the responses.
Beware that you're a hypocrite and don't realize it so you will argue that you aren't, but it's proof that you are.
It's super obnoxious when someone says that.
But the comment you're replying to does not say that.