The Google ad exchange favored its own platforms, limiting the ability of other exchanges to compete fairly in bidding for ad inventory. https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
In limiting the number of bidders, Google inflated the prices for ad inventory. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-26/closing-arguments-giv...
Google engaged in bid rigging where competitors agree on who will win a bid, again to inflate prices. https://www.justice.gov/atr/preventing-and-detecting-bid-rig...
Google entered market allocation agreements to create an unfair playing field. https://www.winston.com/en/insights-news/avoiding-antitrust-...
This part doesn't make sense to me. Limiting bidders should drive the price down, because fewer advertisers are competing for the same potential ad impression. The article describes Google's influence as "Google controls the auction-style system," which is a bit more open-ended about the specific alleged practices.
It could depend on how they 'limit the number of bidders'. If they sell seats to be able to bid, then the bids are lower to account for that, and publishers get a share of the bid, not the fee bidders pay. I'm guessing though...
"The US argues that Google used its financial power to acquire potential rivals and corner the ad tech market, leaving advertisers and publishers with no choice but to use its technology."
> In limiting the number of bidders, Google inflated the prices for ad inventory. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-26/closing-arguments-giv...
I had a hard time finding any specifics in that article. It's about closing arguments and does not even mention the number of bidders.
The DOJ press release [1] would be a better citation.
> Google engaged in bid rigging where competitors agree on who will win a bid, again to inflate prices. https://www.justice.gov/atr/preventing-and-detecting-bid-rig...
Note that this link is just to the definition of bid rigging, not an accusation against google.
> Google entered market allocation agreements to create an unfair playing field. https://www.winston.com/en/insights-news/avoiding-antitrust-...
This is an article "Avoiding Antitrust Issues In Search Term Ad Agreements".
[1]: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/press-release/file/1563...
Frankly, I think what the parent comment is doing is flat-out lying. Or else they were doing some kind of test to see if people actually read citations.
The last two you quote are especially egregious. E.g. saying "Google engaged in bid rigging where competitors agree on who will win a bid, again to inflate prices. https://www.justice.gov/atr/preventing-and-detecting-bid-rig... gives the clear implication that the link supports the antecedent. hammock's comment is complete bullshit.
Note that this link says absolutely nothing to support the sentence before it. Which isn't a surprise given that limiting the number of bidders could hardly drive the prices those bidders are paying up. But the issue isn't even mentioned.
There's a case to be made that on top of google being broken up, the market should be heavily regulated in order to restore trust for market participants.
Advertising is an intentionally complex system so that companies can clip the ticket at multiple stages throughout the process. Google should be broken up, but the whole ad tech system needs to go into the bin if these problems are going to ever get fixed.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/02/15/how-muc...
> Three industry studies showed less than 50 cents of every dollar goes to showing ads.
Every penny of what is spent goes to showing ads, by definition. However, that doesn't mean that every penny goes to the publisher. The advertiser may look at the 60 cents being spent on everybody between them and the publisher and say "hey, I'm getting ripped off! I could be paying 4 cents/CPM instead of 10 cents/CPM!" but each middleman (usually) adds some kind of value to increase acquisition rate. For example:
* Identity providers who have lists of user IDs that belong to "high CTR" audiences (users more likely to click ads)
* Geo providers who tell the bidders where the User's location is so that they can target locally-focused advertisements to them
* User intent plugins, "abandoned cart" retargeting, product recommendation providers, etc. who look at user interaction events and build profiles of people who can be retargeted
* Exchanges which conduct auctions across multiple DSPs to get a better price for publishers while also making more inventory available to advertisers
At one company I worked for, we allocated impressions ahead of time. Based on prior years' data and viewer ratings of TV shows, we could predict the future, determining how many viewers a video or TV show would get, and then selling the advertising inventory based on that prediction. That shit ain't free!
All of these things are designed to increase your acquisition rate from x% to y%, where x > y. Sure, you could just pay $5,000 a month to a website to show a banner ad directly, but a larger % of your money would be wasted on users who are utterly uninterested in your banner.
This is the argument that gets made, but very rarely is it true.
From Neumann et al in 2019 [1]
"When investigating gender (being male) and age (three different tiers: 18-24, 25-34 and 35-44 years) individually, we find that digital audiences for gender are on average less often correct than random guessing (accuracy of 42.3%)."
If the accuracy of targeting is worse than random guessing on average then it's value is less $0.00. Advertisers would reach more of their target audience by simply buying more media instead of spending money on 'targeting' even after you discount wastage to $0.00 in 'value'.
I agree with everything you're saying about programmatic *in theory*, but I would argue that in practice the whole system is just broken.
[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3203131
Instead of selling "clicks" and "impressions", just sell the damn banner ad. The advertiser sets their budget and target audience, a few suggestions of websites where to run a banner for (x) days show up, the advertiser picks some of them. On the other side same story and the website picks which ads they want to run.
Many other models are possible.
I wonder why we don't have such competitors. Ah right, because Google abused its monopoly position. :-)
> * Geo providers who tell the bidders where the User's location is so that they can target locally-focused advertisements to them
> * User intent plugins, "abandoned cart" retargeting, product recommendation providers, etc. who look at user interaction events and build profiles of people who can be retargeted
That's horrible! In a better world such practices would be made illegal and those involved would be hung, drawn, and quartered.
I tried to buy ads for “Foo photography” as people in my town literally type that in. And my budget wasn’t enough to buy all instances of that search.
I didn’t need geotargeting for my local business.
Comically google kept trying to geotarget. Every time it did this I would get people all over the place who searched “photography” and a large percentage was burned. I kept trying to turn off geotargeting.
I guess this is a big and probably unbridgeable divide, some people think this sort of thing is obviously evil and others, like me, actually prefer it very strongly over a world where all advertising is untargeted but there is massively more of it because it's so much less valuable...
However, mine and many other folks' position is not preferring untargeted intrusive annoying ads over targeted intrusive annoying ads. It's preferring almost zero ads with maybe the rare, non intrusive easily avoidable ad on certain appropriate websites[1]. That is why we aggressively use ad blockers and go to great lengths to avoid the status quo.
[1] a shopping website having a _single_ banner on the home page announcing an ongoing sale for HP laptops is OK. However, if I search for lenovo laptops and I see a HP laptop as the first "sponsored" result....(Looking at you amazon).
And about tracking, I absolutely don't want my librarian running to my travel agent telling him I recently looked up france travel guides. The digital equivalent of this happens daily to everybody. It's simply a no-no for me, there can never be a justification for it.
The fact is that if you ban these two classes of practices, the whole of ad tech comes crashing down. I hope everyday for this to happen.
And so you're paying for the content you're reading as well?
im not talking about piracy here - I pay for multiple streaming services and yt music provided the resulting experience is ad free.
But ads on your news/shopping website? Regardless of if I pay or not I'm gonna get upsells and ads. That simply does not fly. In any case, intrusive ads are a no-no. If your platform utilizes intrusive ads, I have no remorse for any loss incurred on your part.
"What, paying for MY news? How dare they"
This is already the case for most newspapers. Helas, most users prefer the free but ad-ridled version.
> Even the ones that _do_ have a half-decent, "ad-free", paid option, if you actually pay and visit their website, you will be sure to see ads related events in the network tab. Disqualified.
You should report this to the publishers. This is usually and genuinely not what they would like to happen if they provide a paid version.
> For the case of tracking, like I (again) stated above: if my library goes over to my travel agency telling them what travel guides I have been looking at, I have zero remorse for the library's revenue stream, even if they satisfy all of the requirements above (such as offering a completely intrusive-ad-free paid subscription).
Most of the time the data itself will never be sold. What happens is that a brand or ad agency will buy pre-filtered traffic or ask the publisher to operate a campaign on specific user segments. This means that the data never leaves the site that collected it.
There are of course external companies that become third-party data providers as a business model like credit card companies or telecoms. But even then, data providers try to protect their own data by operating campaigns themselves rather than selling the data.
> If there are alternatives that don't indulge in these completely unethical practices, I would love to, and I do, use them. However, there are exactly zero news websites like that, so it leaves me with no choice but to "steal" whenever I read an article.
Just as an added piece of context, due to publishers surviving (and I really mean it) thanks to advertisement income, they also have little in-house tech talent that can actually make sur that things like "absolutely 0-tracking if it's a paying user" is correctly implemented.
Do what you will with this information.
> Finally, if your company ever does something like using Wi-fi SSIDs as an alternative.
Only mobile apps might have the SSID (and only with granular user consent on app install). Websites do not have access to this information.
However external data providers are used to retarget specific audience segments on said publisher's users.
If you want to sell ad impressions at reasonable rates, you'll need to provide audience segment targeting, otherwise the ad performance will be too low for brands to continue buying it at previous rates.
In a comment elsewhere in the discussion: accuracy of targeting is worse than random sampling https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43719816
2. Ads have existed for as long as commerce existed. Google became a trillion dollar ad behemoth before it started collected everyone's data by simply offering contextual ads.
Literally nothing in the ads business requires you to collect and sell so much of user data that it would even make Stasi pause and re-think.
I could provide a long answer but the gist of it is that the study is flawed. Among the reasons, they don't differentiate desktop and mobile traffic which is a massive measurement problem. They also use Nielsen DAR which is in itself a heuristic method of determining what age and gender a user is and thus is not a great pick as an oracle.
The study also does not mention click and bounce rates which are good proxies for targeting success.
Beyond the performance, the marketing and sales aspect of targeted advertising is also a strong selling point, no matter the performance.
> Ads have existed for as long as commerce existed. Google became a trillion dollar ad behemoth before it started collected everyone's data by simply offering contextual ads.
No, it didn't.
> Literally nothing in the ads business requires you to collect and sell so much of user data that it would even make Stasi pause and re-think.
It does because contextual advertisement does not provide enough volumes and lower performance (lower click rate, higher bounce rates, lower conversion rates).
Example: If 1/100 people read hockey-related content and out of those people, 1/100 pages read is about hockey, it means that you're reaching about 1/10000 page views.
Now if you do implement user tracking, you're available inventory is 1/100 page views.
Show me a non-flawed study that shows you need vast amounts of user data and tracking, for each user, throughout their lifetime to deliver ads
> No, it didn't.
Yes, yes it did. The skyrocketing revenue is attributable to increased internet usage across the globe, and Google outright owning a large chunk of it.
> It does because contextual advertisement does not provide enough volumes and lower performance
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
> Example:
Example: if you collect and sell vast amounts of sensitive user data without user's consent, and the outcome is indistinguishable from random noise, are you more effective?
Example: if targeted ads are found to be somewhat more effective than contextual ads, is the lifelong invasive tracking of every user action a preferred tradeoff?
(It's quite telling how people defending targeted advertising never address the elephant in the room)
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
> Example: if you collect and sell vast amounts of sensitive user data without user's consent
The users do give consent and this is handled by Consent Management Platforms and passed in the programmatic advertisement auction chain in the form of TC strings.
The fact that you don't know this is also quite telling.
> [...] and the outcome is indistinguishable from random noise, are you more effective?
But it isn't, and if you are making claims, please provided sources.
Why would brands and agencies pay additional fees for data if they would provide no uplift?
> Example: if targeted ads are found to be somewhat more effective than contextual ads, is the lifelong invasive tracking of every user action a preferred tradeoff?
Are users prepared to pay for the difference?
If a service cannot be offered at a certain scale without such practices, it should not be offered at that scale. Before you start talking about how this enabled google's innovations, remember that the path we have taken to our current innovations is not the only path that could have been taken. By correctly squashing out immoral avenues like today's ad tech, we lay the path for the same innovations to happen taking a different, more ethical path. Sure, it could be that that would take more time and certain innovations would be delayed by an entire era[1], but note that we could also be going 5x faster than today w.r.t TPUs or whatever if we enslaved and forced enough people to work for Google's ML infrastructure team and nobody/nothing else. But we don't do that, do we?
[1] on the flip side, certain innovations may also come an era early
To whit:
Most the big projects Google started or acquired, and that are still available today, Google started or acquired before targeted advertising. Google itself, Docs, Youtube, Cloud, Android...
Targeted advertising is not a requirement for innovation
That sounds like an opinion and one tha isn't shared by the hundreds of millions of users Google has o it's services.
The worst part is that I completely agree that advertisement and at the very least targeted advertisement, shouldn't exist.
Problem is that users prefer not paying in cash so companies find alternatives.
If advertisement or privacy really mattered for users, we would already have alternative Facebook, YouTube, etc, but it isn't and so we don't.
User ended up preferring the classic version, even when they were informed of its inner workings.
"Ad company does survey confirming that people like their ads and definitely don't want an alternative"
is not the win you think it is. Are you hearing yourself?
You're free to step in at any time with actual viable alternatives, studies, etc.
May I remind you once more that the possibility to create this magical Internet world you guys live in is already there but somehow nobody builds or uses it. Maybe there is a good reason for this?
Ads don't require pervasive and invasive tracking
> but somehow nobody builds or uses it. Maybe there is a good reason for this?
Yes. Because unrestricted unlimited capitalism will always exploit any possible niche and avenue, and people will cheer it on until it's too late.
Yes, the unethical path is easier and more importantly, faster to take. If it is not explicitly disallowed in the system, it will be taken.
> Popular among users
Google is popular due to their superior search capability/really good workspace product and of course youtube is brilliant. The whole point is to try and achieve these same things while also maintaining ethics, even if it takes a century longer. Like I said in a previous thread, you wouldn't enslave people to work on Google's TPUs, would you? Even if it would help us achieve AGI in one week.
You can't say, let the users decide, when there is information asymmetry. No one using a phone today is aware of the slavery in the rare metal industry in Congo etc, as much as they are aware of the number of megapixels in their camera.
If you are really in the "let the users decide" camp, then there must be 100% information symmetry. Add to the iPhone box a detailed report of every single part of the supply chain. Add a video of the slave in the mines, not just the PPE suit in the high-tech-looking lab.
Google search should market themselves as selling your ad information to various businesses.
You can't let businesses push the positive side of their business more than the negative side, cause an information asymmetry, and then say that users should be allowed to decide.
If the negative side of the business is hidden in a T&C document, then the positive side should also be forced to be in a T&C. They should be on equal footing. This would mean effectively banning marketing. Which of the alternatives do you prefer?
Back to the point, If you disallowed intrusive/targeted ads, then purely ad supported journalism would be unsustainable, thereby forcing businesses to charge for most of their news. Copy this ditto for other industries.
Doing good things like this could also naturally facilitate other desirable things such as a simple payment system for internet services and remove other blockers needed for the system to work, which we don't have today despite all the trillion dollar tech companies. Why? They have the brightest minds, but the economic incentives need to be set exactly right. Today, those bright minds are being used to add dark patterns to user interfaces, deceive or even outright lie to users, and doing cunning things like tracking my location using their Wi-fi SSID even when I explicitly turned off location. These tracking systems didn't come out of nowhere, nor are they easy to build. They exist because the incentives let them, caused them to exist. If the incentives instead caused more ethical businesses to exist, the same human/otherwise capital would be converted to more ethical systems.
No. The users are tricked into giving "consent" through a plethora of dark patterns.
When dark patterns are removed, users refuse to give the information
> But it isn't, and if you are making claims, please provided sources.
Have you provided sources for any of your claims?
> Are users prepared to pay for the difference?
Still waiting for any source of your claims that:
- targeted ads are more effective
- ads require lifelong collection of any and all user data
- that without pervasive and invasive tracking ads are somehow prohibitively expensive
Well you're free to bring this up to the various data privacy national organisations in the EU.
But I see that we're moving goalposts.
> Have you provided sources for any of your claims?
One of many available links on Google:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016781162...
> ads require lifelong collection of any and all user data
Data collected has an expiration date. This is also part of GDPR compliance.
> that without pervasive and invasive tracking ads are somehow prohibitively expensive
We're now going in circles, but essentially you're ad performance (brand attribution, clicks and conversion) will determine your expected purchase price per thousand impressions (CPM).
If your targeting isn't competitive, your inventory will not be bought or at a lower price.
This already happens for Safari and Firefox impressions.
> But I see that we're moving goalposts.
We are not moving goalposts. You literally claimed that users give consent to data collection. No, they do not. They are tricked into giving this consent because that's the only way ad industry can obtain consent to livelong invasive tracking.
> Have you provided sources for any of your claims?
> One of many available links on Google:
> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016781162...
Let's see what the paper says:
--- start quote ---
Our simulation study reveals that more than 50% of audience segments (i.e., 23,407 out of 45,440 audience segments on the right-hand side of the dashed vertical line in Figure D2 in Online Appendix D) require a minimum increase in performance larger than 700% to be at least as profitable as no-targeting. ...we find that more than half of the audience segments require an increase in CTR0, CR0, and m0 larger than 100% to be at least as profitable as no-targeting.
Approximately half of the audience segments on Spotify require a higher increase in CTR0 for the advertiser, suggesting they might be less profitable than no-targeting.
--
By highlighting the questionable profitability of many audience segments, this paper aims to help advertisers decide whom to target.
We suggest using our model to calculate the break-even performance for many segments and then order these segments by break-even performance from smallest to largest.
... our findings also reveal that untargeted campaigns may yield higher profits.
Our proposed model has limitations, as it relies on inputs that may not be readily available to all advertisers
--- end quote ---
So. Questionable profitability, untargeted yield higher profits unless you ignificantly increase performance of targeted ads, a suggestion of an unproven model relying on data that may not be available to advertisers.
Yes, this truly is a paper that proves the amazing great efficiency of targeted advertisement, especially when offset against lifelong invasive tracking and wholesale trading of user data.
> Data collected has an expiration date. This is also part of GDPR compliance.
1. GDPR isn't available worldwide
2. Ad industry claims "legitimate uses" for a bunch of data and end up with "oh, we'll maintain your precise geolocation for 12 years" https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1817122117093056541
> If your targeting isn't competitive, your inventory will not be bought or at a lower price.
So what?
> This already happens for Safari and Firefox impressions.
Good.
No, they're not tricked. There are obvious cookie banners with the possibility to see the list of vendors and reasons for collecting the data and consent completely, partially or reject.
I'm sorry, if you don't know how advertisement works for news publishers there's not much to talk about.
> Our simulation study reveals that more than 50% of audience segments (i.e., 23,407 out of 45,440 audience segments on the right-hand side of the dashed vertical line in Figure D2 in Online Appendix D) require a minimum increase in performance larger than 700% to be at least as profitable as no-targeting. ...we find that more than half of the audience segments require an increase in CTR0, CR0, and m0 larger than 100% to be at least as profitable as no-targeting.
This might be correct for Spotify, however it isn't for news publishers. Data costs usually represent 10% to 25% of media cost, which means that the uplift of targeting should be at least these values which are nowhere near 100%.
> 1. GDPR isn't available worldwide
Sure, but since a lot of sites have European users they usually stay in line of the strictest guidelines for all users which is generally the GDPR.
> Ad industry claims "legitimate uses" for a bunch of data and end up with "oh, we'll maintain your precise geolocation for 12 years"
Not "ad industry", "one bad adtech actor", but we're already used to incorrect takes.
If the legitimate uses are invalid (which I believe that they probably are) they can and most likely will be fought in court.
> So what?
So journalists don't get paid.
I am old enough to remember the world before targeted ads (and internet), and back then I did not see more ads than today - on the contrary!
How do you know that the waste is higher with the banner ad?
Some companies like Google are incredible at this. Google is not a "monopoly" in this space. In fact the world has far too many Google equivalents but absolutely no one comes close to Google in generating top dollars for publishers. I am saying this after working for 10+ years competing against Google.
But since Google is playing both sides and has so much sway over the market, they're able to manipulate things. Even if they're not manipulating things to their benefit, it's still not great to have a single party have so much control.
but that is the value of a marketplace, aligning buyers and sellers via the price mechanism
Every setup where someone makes the platform and sells stuff built on top of it is inherently abusive. You just don't know when the abuse will come and against whom.
There's certainly some tension between advertisers and publishers, in that advertiser would like to pay less and publishers would like to be paid more; but there's a lot of things an ad exchange can do that are good for both. Selecting ads to display that result in meaningful downstream conversion is good for both advertisers and publishers, because they'll both get paid and maybe something about the user getting something they want too.
Showing inappropriate and ineffective ads isn't great for the advertiser, and it might make the publisher money in the near term, but it can drive users away and tends not to be sustainable --- advertisers stop advertising in venues where they don't get results.
The value of a good ad exchange for the publisher and the advertiser is when it provides reasonable matching at a lower cost than the parties arranging advertising directly. Possibly some amount of assurances for both sides too --- the exchange should ensure the advertising code and destinations aren't going to compromise the publisher or their user and should ensure that the ads paid for are actually seen (to the degree possible). There's room for the exchange to profit from scale while still being lower cost than self-managed advertising.
Of course it matters if a middleman is skimming off 70% of the revenue in a given market.
> it is incredibly efficient
On what planet is a loss of 70% of the resources to the matching process between buyers and sellers "incredibly efficient"?
> What matters is how much they are earning compared to the next best alternative.
Right, which is why it is illegal to prevent there from being a next best alternative via anti-competitive practices which is precisely was was proven in this trial after a detailed examination of the evidence.
One where the market maker is taking up the cost of providing a market. E.g. Steam takes a 30% cut for providing the infrastructure required to distribute games. Some people/companies can do it for less but it is the best option for a majority of sellers.
If the market maker did not the seller would get more revenue but would also eat the cost directly instead of paying someone else to do it.
This also neglects the fact that the programmatic market routes billions of dollars intended to be spent on real media (ad placements on real news websites etc), to fraudulent mobile apps and websites and bot traffic.
Serving the ads is probably much more expensive than serving the news site, since there is a ton of heavy algorithms to determine what ads to show.
Total costs for each depends on how much it costed to make the news article so is hard to say.
Static text is much cheaper than dynamic content. News isn't anything that couldn't be served out of a .txt or sqlite CMS.
News providers seem wholly uninterested in providing anything better and actually competing with better content providers
Does a landlord on a literal physical market take 30% of revenue? I find that unlikely.
How did we arrive here, where supposedly ‘efficient’ digital marketplace is a form of rent higher than actually building physical rent, and expenses on wages and materials for a typical business?
Ad platforms too are fundamentally about letting someone perceive ROI lesser than their real ROI, for your own benefit. For me, it falls under the same category as all of the above - zero productivity endeavours.
Maybe we should go back to the previous millenium and make usury illegal. Should fix all of these problems, albeit in a nuclear fashion.
Which is why market makers like Google quietly work very hard to discourage, prevent, interfere or buy their competition.
We seen dumb platforms with linear tv. Go watch any TV with an antenna.
Could you explain more on this. What do you think makes Google Ad or DoubleClick so special? And
>What matters is how much they are earning compared to the next best alternative.
Correct me if I am wrong, you are suggesting even if publisher only earns 30% of the revenue they still earn more than on other alternative platform?
Also users should benefit because they are getting relevant ads. Linear tv is notorious for non relevant ads like all the drug ads for conditions you don’t have. If you’re forced to see ads, wouldn’t you want ads that are relevant?
This is why I block all ads, but still appreciate super bowl commercials.
And I have discovered that this actually works on me. I like the Nike ads, so on the occasions when I buy sportswear, I have positive feelings about Nike stuff. I spend 100-10000x more on stuff that isn't sportswear, but I think Nike gets more value from me watching that ad than anyone who advertises some "relevant" SaaS product or whatnot.
Why would any advertiser pay the same in such a scenario?
They would obviously value your attention much less on average if that was a hard limit.
My emotions matter. If I see a scary person who is not my friend, I yell "put him down" in my head, and take actions.
If that scary person knows more about me than I know about myself. I bark like a small dog. Arf! Arf! Arf! In English, that roughly translates to "Get out of my sight! Get out of my head! Then I'll feel fine again."
If this doesn't make sense to you, then you are suggesting a world where money/truth matter more than emotions. But then why do people make money, if not just to survive? Arf! Arf! Arf! (This originally translated to: "Don't engage with me unless you value low-status people")
Since everyone values emotions differently... there would still need to be some intermediary, like money, for emotions to have any agreed upon value at all beyond narrow circles.
Otherwise what’s stopping, e.g. nihlists, from valuing your emotions at zero or a negative value?
Rewards of up to $.50 for people willing to be scared to death (or, you know, moderate social media content).
With money, we can value emotions. Since everybody has some money, everybody's emotions (outside of children) will have positive value.
Relating to my original example:
I, as a provider of PII, feel scared about my information being sold. If Google has a $100/year option to stop my PII from being spread, I would consider buying it.
However, I predict now some people feel angry. They feel Google should not be allowed to do this. They won't pay Google to stop, they will go to the govt.
Considering this problem, I wonder what is the next step we would need to do to ensure a world of positive emotions and money.
> Otherwise what’s stopping, e.g. nihlists, from valuing your emotions at zero or a negative value?
Well, I think a lot of people value my emotions negatively, especially angry people and corporations. In particular, corporations like to take money and make it time consuming for me to get a refund.
As for people, I am at peace because I cannot change my skin color, face, or personality, but I can adjust my goals to be smaller/non-overlapping.
This is something that people in advertising say a lot, but it's generally not true. I do not want or benefit from you having "better" ad targeting - I will find your product if I want it without the sales pitch.
It’s probably not even possible for decision makers to discern it from noise.
Each user’s comment has to stand up under its own weight so to speak
So then why did you reply if you already knew your comment and the rest of the comment chain was irrelevant?
Pointing out that many people don't like relevant ads is then a significant thing to acknowledge.
You're acting like pclmulqdq brought up the idea out of nowhere, which is very much not the case.
What people think about ads does matter, and does affect the bottom line.
And it's just annoying for you to act like the dislike is just an "individual opinion" but the "people like relevant ads" claim isn't equally anecdotal.
In case you didn’t see, the user has already claimed to believe the entire comment chain is irrelevant, so your a bit late.
> what is your actual argument
Was it not clear? Okay I can try again.
When advertisers claim that relevant ads are something people want, that's very far from being universally true. Lots of people don't want that. Don't let them use that unsupported claim to support tracking.
Note that the desires of advertisers are not part of this particular argument. It's a simple claim and counterclaim.
Anyone can have an unlimited number of irrelevant opinions that they believe to possess this or that attribute, they may even genuinely believe so, yet it doesn’t amount to anything.
Even if the claimed argument was flawless… it seems strange to put a non sequitor at the beginning.
Not all ads are necessarily bad. Eg have you ever seen an ad for an event in your town? Maybe a play or a concert you'd want to see. Those to me feel more like "public notice: thing is happening" and every once in a while I'll actually go buy tickets. But technically, those are ads, just not the kind of exploitative ad you are talking about.
A good ad informs, while leaving the decision up to you. A bad ad distracts you with garbage and/or tries to get you to indulge in your worse impulses
I get those on the local town board, online in the town group I explicitly joined, and from people around. I do not want those on a random page when I'm trying to do something else.
Thank Dog that is a false dichotomy. I am not forced to see ads, my ad blockers are effective. Back in the day I moved mountains to get MythTV working so I could dodge the ads on linear TV
I do not want those creepy greedy monkeys anywhere near my data
No. A thousand times no!
No it doesn't. As explained by the parent, Google is in a unique position w.r.t to the publishers, the sellers and the bidders.
There's a ton of very talented adtech companies out there, but they only get to play an unfair game.
Lots of unrecorded meetings and “no notes taken” sessions
* Google unilaterally changing bid mechanics raising costs 15% https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-changed-ad-auctions-ra...
* Conversion attribution and cookie bombing fraud from both Criteo and Steelhouse https://finance.yahoo.com/news/criteo-versus-steelhouse-clic...
* Phunware click flooding fraud https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/17/ubers-l...
* A nearly unending list of different mobile ad frauds https://www.fraud0.com/resources/ad-fraud-cases-of-the-past-...
* Viewability fraud https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/31/procter-gamble-chief-markete...
* Session hijacking fraud https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/ad-indus...
This doesn't sound like a healthy and efficient industry. Not only do vendors clip the ticket aggressively, they divert dollars that advertisers are intending to go to quality media/real publishers, and siphon it off to fraudulent sites and apps where they generally take a higher margin.
Depending on how busy it is or how exotic your question one can easily be on hold for an hour or two. Then you get the bill and pay 54 euro per hour.
Google thought this was a great way to make money. The ad ran forever.
Makes you wonder which other phone numbers they highjacked.
Would they provide the same service if I copy some website?
There are probably people with large phone bills who didn't notice and ones who thought the tax office was just expensive to call.
There has to be some sort of competition for markets to be efficient, and you're essentially suggesting there hasn't been a viable alternative in a decade.
It can be great compared to next best and they are still harmed by illegal practices that make it worse off.
Not if Google illegally monopolizes the market unfairly hindering 'the next best alternative'.
> Google is not a "monopoly" in this space.
You've made that comment on a post where a judge has ruled "Google is illegally monopolizing"...
> In fact the world has far too many Google equivalents but absolutely no one comes close to Google in generating top dollars for publishers.
They have not been able to compete in a fair market.
This comment has some great examples.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43719246
https://upriseup.co.uk/blog/something-doesnt-ad-up-google-ad...
Bloomberg Radio April 17 2025: https://www.youtube.com/live/iEpJwprxDdk?si=9WaFIJENUwyIJvpk
but publishers receive stable share of click cost (67%?), so they should be happy with this arrangement.
1. CPC: google has strong incentive to generate clicks, because that's where they get revenue: advertisers are charged per click.
2. CPM: publishers get their guaranteed CPM if that's their choice.
https://www.adexchanger.com/platforms/google-is-found-guilty...
There's serious nerd sniping potential in asking how best to construct an automatic bidder, especially with the speed and scale requirements in place. It's an incredibly deep problem, and I don't believe there is a single right answer.
The problem is that it is unwise to trust an bidding algorithm designer whose incentives are aligned against yours. Google benefits from higher winning bids.
In the ad tech space the only winners are the people building and operating the adtech; everyone else is a sucker.
The only truly novel version of it which I have seen emerged from the Turkish hypercasual games space, where they managed to construct a giant audience everyone else thought was worthless, funnel them into their games, and then use the attention in the games to sell access to this apparently worthless audience.
Of course the audience actually were worthless, because all they were really interested in was new free hypercasual games, so the real suckers here were other devs that paid to access this audience but didn't have the adtech chops to make the most of it before the players moved on, and they funded their competition in the process.
RTB bid requests have support for the normal auction based bids but also indicating possible private marketplaces which may come into play depending on the exchange and seller, meaning that the highest bidder will have indicated to the world their price, but not won the auction, so they may (erroneously) conclude next time to try bidding higher, leading to price distortions.
I suspect a large proportion of advertisers still believe the whole thing is a nice transparent fair auction process, and have no idea of how convoluted it has become.
Valuing a bid is a complex and interesting task. Ever since Second Price auctions started dying out DSPs should have moved to essentially algorithmic trading. A price calculation depends on tens if not hundreds of factors that are evaluted on a per auction basis.
Advertisers have been demanding more transparency into where their money is going for quite some time now. If you're an advertiser and your DSP isn't giving you detailed reporting into the fees they're being charged then it's time to move DSP.
its about Display Ads business, which is 10% of Google revenue as per article. So, everything there can be broken up without destroying Google.
Google does search ads mostly, has competition with say, bing, amazon, chatgpt now.
On video ads they have competition with tiktok, netflix (even if they don't do ads I guess), and tv.
Maybe there's specific criteria that have legal precedent or sources, but I don't see it.
https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2023/01/6371209cd0cce428b526...
Which part of this diagram is responsible for displaying ads of blue sweatshirt when I say "blue sweatshirt" in a room next to the room where my smartphone is?
Not "is it strictly necessary for them to be broken up to prevent them from reoffending"?
100% I would expect them to reoffend. No question whatsoever.
Recently someone even posted a timeline of google starting to hide the keywords advertisers are buying and the increase in Google's ad revenue. Eye opening.
That entire industry is a horrifying shitshow of sociopathy, at the expense of absolutely everyone else, both viewers (supply side) and advertisers (demand side).
Was looking over my mom's shoulder last week to see what site she was reading out some information from. It was "google.com" but looked like a third party website, probably this AMP thing? Google really is hijacking everything