A blog post lamenting the demise of Google Adwords.
I don't know what comes next, I just know it will be worse.
What killed the open web was Facebook, Twitter, and their ilk replacing that whole mess with social media profiles, networking connections, and templated, pre-fabricated organization home pages. When social networks became dominant enough that businesses could use it to get their info out there without having to author a webpage, the balance tipped (at least for business-motivated web content).
Plus to be honest alternatives aren't much better. I use duckduckgo but the results are still a deluge of spam (content mills).
There are other networks as well: X, Meta, YouTube, LinkedIn, Amazon ads. It depends what’s your target group. But all networks have targeting tools so you can test them with minimum budget just to see what works and what doesn’t.
For sure, you have some personalized landing pages with CTA (Posthog script included so you can see what works).
AI should equal the playing field and promote businesses based on merit and capacity not how much they can spend.
I give it maybe 12-18 months before AI results are polluted by advertising.
If you're shopping around, an LLM you control can work for stuff like summarizing customer reviews or compiling a list of products with specific features (if you don't mind them being randomly wrong). But for general shopping advice / "plan my vacation" kind of queries, it's already firmly in the land of SEO-garbage-in-SEO-garbage-out.
Have you been on amazon lately? We're already there. :-/
the product promotion text will be integrated into the responses
'your prompt is insightful and refreshing. reminds me of the refreshing taste of organic coconut-cinnamon water. here's a QR code coupon for $1 off a 48-ct pack you can use at your local HoleFoods.'
"Fantastic! It's great that you care about what you should feed your children. A bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch is a great way to start your kids' day with the energy they need, and it's something they're sure to love! It's also fortified with vitamins to give them the nutrition they need! If you don't have any, I can start a DoorDash order right now."
Or "It's great that you want to find a way to earn some extra money for holiday presents for your family when you don't have anything left over after paying your bills. You're so thoughtful. You're an avid sports fan, so you've got the knowledge to have an edge in sports betting. DraftKings has a $10 credit when you bet your first $15 on tomorrow's game. You're automatically a winner!"
One mustn't forget that propagandists are frequently just straight malicious.
I'm pretty certain that the ChatAI providers want to show ads, but until they can bill for it, they aren't going to.
At some point the billing will work, and then they will.
The AI people call this "alignment" or "safety".
Wasn't that pretty much also the promise of Google as a search engine originally? For the longest time Google actively fought SEO, while running a minimal set of ads, then they bought DoubleClick and everything went to to shit.
AI should equal the playing field, but it won't. The current generation have our bias built in and it's not in a good place financially. It's only a matter of time because it becomes infested with ads. You think OpenAI aren't going to promote shitty products or companies, because the algorithm says they shouldn't? No, they might charge that customer more, but they aren't saying no.
This is a multi facet problem. There's a generation of advertisers who believe that advertising is clicking around in the AdWords interface, maybe sprinkle in a little ad spend on Meta and boom, you're done. The reality is that they can't advertising anything, they don't have the skills required to sell a product.
If they can't rely on Google, where can they go? Social media, AI? Nope, because many of us have been burnt by the major online platforms and won't trust any of them. I'm never signing up for another social media platform, hell, I'm reluctant to sign up for ANYTHING. The current generation of marketing has sacrificed the future for a quick profit now. Many aren't on social media, we use adblockers, we pay for services to ensure no ads, we don't watch TV, newspapers are dead, we don't go out much, so where are you going to advertise exactly? Even if you find a venue, many see so few ads that your attempt at marketing is going to feel like an assault, because you're so desperate that you don't dare tone it down enough.
Advertisement needs to reinvent itself, and it needs to stop funding the entire online services industry, because it can't, not without cannibalizing its own future.