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Comment by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | Hacker News Reader

Interesting to compare the top ads when sorting "Amount spent: high to low" and "Number of times shown: high to low". Political ads from 4 years ago appear to have been shown many more times for much less cost. This year's ads seem considerably more expensive while also reaching a smaller audience.

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The politicians are having to bid against Temu this year and by god do they spend a lot on ads.

It's kinda crazy. We are in Germany, so no US ads. But even 8€ eCPM floor still makes temu show up.

The only Temu ad I've ever seen was during the Super Bowl. I'm guessing I'm in the wrong demographic?

I'm talking banner ads. I block almost everything everywhere, except my work. My boss (who doesn't block anything and accepts all tracking everywhere) doesn't get their ads. So I think they just have a scattershot approach.

I guess it's a testament to my daily driver (Brave browser) that I had to Google "what is temu."

Genuinely curious: do you actually include "what is" in your searches, or was that paraphrasing?

I would, this would hint google's classifier that I want a tl;dr and not temu's website.

Yes, when looking for the definition of an unknown term

with AI powered searches now it’s best to give it the full question instead of trying to use a keyword search

Boy do I wish for a governments ban and cultural shift on the mindless resource contention consumerism that makes people buy useless plastic bullshit. Our planet is doomed, we're just lucky the Earth is so big.

Ad impressions were artificially cheap during Covid as people spent more time on their devices. There was such an increase in prices post-Covid that it caused a bust in e-commerce companies. This was also partially caused by Apple privacy changes.

Sounds like Google is making good money on this then

Gold rush shovels

Competition might be part of that too: more money chasing the same number of eyeballs as the election season ramped up (for that matter, probably chasing a smaller number of eyeballs, as critical segments of swing voters became more clear)

Google switched from running an actual auction to making you bid the most they think you're willing to pay.

Inflation is part of that.

Nah, I think this one is just greed.

what caused this sudden change in greed? Were these actors not greedy before 2019?

Covid was a catalyst for bigger changes to go potentially unchallenged and opportunity for extra greed. 1 company dared do a thing and no one batted eye. Then 2nd. Domino's of greed and fake excuse on supposed inflation. But it was just domino's of greed

boiling the frog slowly. if you start out being more expensive than traditional media, they won't use you.

same thing with streaming. start out cheaper/more convenient/more comprehensive than traditional media - and an enormous market to grow into, so your shareholders are happy even with a reasonable price. wait a few years until you have saturated the market, and now the only way to achieve the holy growth is to raise the prices indefinitely.

https://imgur.com/presenting-recent-findings-by-fucking-magn...

now look at the same plot for Netflix: https://flixed.io/netflix-price-hikes

can you spot any difference? Look closely!

While rates were low they could offset nickel and diming consumers by handing them cheap cash in the form of inflated wages to work lame jobs. Now rates are high, jobs cut, less consumer nickel and diming as consumers are tapped out

For the time being it’s back to the old way of screwing the public by over charging government for consulting work

The greed was always there.

The pandemic provided an unprecedentedly easy excuse for implementing that greed.

First of all, the above comment says “part” and that’s incontrovertibly true.

Second of all, by what mechanism is this greed and from whom? You do know this is an auction, right? In that case, are the greedy actors the other auction bidders, trying to also spend more money?

More targeted, perhaps. “Meh, whoever” has always been cheaper per view than targeted.

I think you're right. I've been comparing these two directly:

2020: https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR123656109299...

2024: https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR104621681140...

Looks like it's primarily the "location" demographic that is actually different. Neither ad excludes any demographics for Age or Gender but the 2024 includes specific locations for advertisements. So maybe fewer people in Europe and elsewhere seeing American political ads, which I'd assume is preferred by the advertisers. I can see how that would compound to this effect; fewer valuable targets and more value per target.

(Another thing I notice is the ad run length. The 2020 ads ran for a single day (with over 10M views!) and the 2024 ads have been running for weeks or months. Not sure if that's relevant to the expenditure but it's interesting to note.)

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