Hacker News Reader

Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

Google hates Amazon and Facebook.

Amazon has been expanding outside of their core retail space (e.g. AWS, advertising, services, etc) while Facebook has been eating Google's advertising dollars for a while.

I wouldn't go as far to say that Google doesn't care about Apple/Microsoft, but in both cases Apple has presents on their platforms and still makes money on them. They are only competitors if you view Android as something Google makes money with rather than something Google uses to advertise Google's services.

View on HN

> Facebook has been eating Google's advertising dollars for a while.

All I've ever heard are horror stories about how advertising on Facebook does not work. I definitely don't see how ads on a social network can compete with ads on the largest search engine and almost every ad funded website in the world.

HN is famously... not neutral in regard to Google. Not necessarily because anyone's doing anything nefarious, but because early users came from certain places and formed a certain culture. You won't get a neutral perspective on Facebook's effectiveness here.

Facebook advertising has been very effective and profitable for at least some clients. I think Google+ shows that Google is terrified of Facebook. I have no knowledge of how Google's advertising revenue is doing, and wouldn't be at all surprised if they still dwarfed Facebook.

Using the Facebook platform for advertising can be extremely effective and profitable. Facebook Ads on the other hand have been lacklustre at best. They can be effective to drive activity to a Social campaign on Facebook, but are immensely less effective then google's ad products.

On the other hand, google knows it is likely just a matter of time before Facebook gets it right, and when they do they are one of the few companies who could complete at scale with google.

They're very different ad platforms. Google is great for targeting purchase intent. I think of Google ads sort of like coupons.

But people spend way more time on Facebook. It's entertainment, whereas Google is a tool. So brand advertising works better on Facebook. It's more like TV advertising.

Facebook's ad revenue share has been increasing, while Google's has been decreasing. In just two years, Google has gone from owning 10x as much ad revenue share as Facebook to just 2x [0]. Facebook has much more data on its users (age, location, school, etc) than Google which allows advertisers to target their ads much easier. It seems like Facebook is better if you want to narrowly reach a specific demographic since they know so much about their users, whereas Google is better if you just want to broadly reach a lot of people since they have such a dominant presence on the web. It depends on what you want as an advertiser, but there's definitely people who would prefer to spend their advertising dollars on a specific demographic.

[0]: http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Driven-by-Facebook-Google-M...

I'm baffled to think that one company providing its own advertising for its own website is constituting such a huge portion of web ads in general, considering there are thousands of websites using Google Adsense that somehow live off the ad revenue.

anecdotally, I've never intentionally clicked on a google ad, but there's so far been 2 ads on facebook which directly led me to a purchase

Conversely, I have clicked on Google ads only to find that I have blocked the ad domain using my hosts file (which I had forgotten). I have never clicked on Facebook ads, as I don't have an account there.

Weird, I know. Actually, I do have an account but only used it to write a Facebook app for a client, not for actual use on that mini-Internet (kind of like Geocities isn't it?)

They probably all code on MacBooks, search using Google, buy their books off Amazon and I bet they all have a Facebook account.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com