I’ve spent most of the last 10 years earning my living from an e-commerce business I own. The online advertising industry is unrecognisable from when we started. My thesis, in beef, is that the industries excessive uses of personalised data and tracking lead to increased regulation, and then a massive pivot to even more “AI” as a means to circumvent that (to some extent). The AI in the ad industry now, I believe, is detrimental to the advertiser. It’s now just one big black box, you put money in one side and get traffic out the other. The control and useful tracking (what actual search terms people are using, proper visible conversion tracking of an ad) is now almost non-existent. As an advertiser your livelihood is dependant on an algorithm, not skill, not intuition, not experience, not even track record.
Facebook, Google and the rest of the industry were so driven by profit at all cost, and at the expense of long term thinking, they shot themselves in the foot.
Advertisers are searching for alternatives, but they are all the same.
I think online advertising, as a whole, is probably f***ed…
Trying to restrict my advertising budget to just one city and do a hard geographic restriction to just US IP addresses did not work. I filed 5 tickets over two weeks with Google trying to get this resolved, only to have over half my budget spent in another continent making impressions with people that will literally never buy the local specific product advertised.
By default it's set to "People -interested- in your target location" . You need to change it to "People who are -in- your target location".
This setting is hidden under a toggle, so it's very easy to miss. Definitely a dark pattern and results in a lot of garbage clicks if you overlook that setting.
This is just one of many dark patterns which makes Google Ads effective only for people willing to spend the time tuning and tweaking every single setting.
A big part of the problem is Google themselves - they say always use "broad" keyword matches (and of course it's the default). Broad matches are really not good for most campaigns unless you have an extremely large budget, yet if you read their documentation they heavily encourage it.
While we're at it...
1) Never enable the "auto apply recommendations" setting. If you do, it gives Google free reign to modify your campaigns (this has always resulted in worse performance and more spend in my experience)
2) Never listen to a google ads rep if they call. Once you're spending enough, they'll call you every week trying to convince you to change various settings. 95% of the time their advice is just plain bad. The quality of the advice does increase once you're spending enough and get assigned more senior reps. But even the senior reps are there to get you to spend more money, their job is not to make your campaigns more effective, "ad specialists" are simply sales people in disguise.
Google intentionally modified both geo-targeting and mobile app targeting, removing the options advertisers set. For example, you opted out of mobile app targeted. Then they removed the option and you had to set it in the domain blacklist. Then they removed that. This wasn't a one off, hid, modified, and moved these options repeatedly.
Advertisers didn't know that when you geo-targeted a location, by default it was set to users searching that location. You didn't want people in India who were interested in NYC? Too bad.
Remember the whole Adwords prescription drug settlement. This is an organization run by people who would be serving hard time if they didn't have a legion of lawyers and bottomless pockets.
For whatever reason, Google was showing my ads to people on the other side of the planet and then taking my money for the privilege.
Most other non-faang ad networks are hot garbage. So many bots. In my view, Google has a "monopoly" not because of anti-competitive behaviour... It's because they have the best ad product.
If google is making it harder for people to spend money on ads, something is either seriously broken or alphabet figured out another way to make money that isn't ads
This is not possible unless the end user are willing to provide geo tracking for your convenience. The IP of the phone is the one of a datacenter, and it can be in any state (speaking about the US) - heck, in some cases, there could be multiple outgoing IPs in different datacenterss, different states.
It's just a fallacy and wishful thinking... unless google combines the geo location data where the user has been logged with the browser one. Which, of course it is.
In other words, companies now have to compete by making useful products at a good price, rather than gaming SEO.
Say, In a world of 1,000,000,000+ great products, reaching consumers through word-of-mouth is hard.
I bet there are products that solves a lot of your current problems at a decent price. But you don't know about it and none of your friends or network have the same problem for you to give you the solution.
The only way to solve this problem is for the product/service provider to know about you and the fact that you have a problem.
Advertising is actually an optimal / scalable way for companies to reach you.
In a Billion+ product world, you need at least 10 Million Trust worthy reviewers to give you an unbiased review of everything. But, how do you trust the reviewers?
If you don’t pay Google/Facebook you’re absolutely screwed. You will lose no matter how good the product is.
What this actually means is that now companies have to pay a Google/Meta tax simply to enter the playing field. And once they enter the playing field. And once you enter the playing field, the only winners will be the ones who pay them the highest amount of money.
So a smaller business, which in the past could potentially use some ingenuity, or target a specific niche audience to get some traction and then build word of mouth and let the product do the talking, doesn’t even stand a chance now because they simply cannot differentiate themselves as your exposure is entirely dependent on how much money you give Google/Meta.
This is a delightful turn of phrase. I wonder if it was deliberate or an autocorrect happy accident.
It shouldn't surprise anyone here that online advertising is wildly saturated and that users are unable to engage with thousands of brand voices a day.
Maybe we’ll move back to a better model that helps support decent content.
You can say it's their fault for building on top of someone elses land, and you would be mostly right. But online commerce has become a mess, and it is just hard to make it work without being on these platforms. They have hoovered up all the customers, and dominate all the avenues for advertising online.
It seems to be that Google basically collects the whole profit margin. Companies will do this to keep growth as high as possible to justify their high market caps and hope that they can eventually scale back on advertising and keep their customer base.
People complain about the tracking of visitors, but the tracking of advertisers own business is equally as abusive.
Look, I’m about as anti-consumer at you can get, but whoever is in charge of advertising over at Instagram has me literally scared for my life. I want almost every product they try to sell me, and I’ve never been this targeted by any ad in my entire life. I even recently made a new purchase of shoes outside of Insta because of the influence their ads had on me. It’s pretty fucking incredible.
In short, and paraphrased a bit to speak to your context, you're no longer buying impressions / clicks in the traditional transactional sense. Instead you're buying the influence on behavior within the broader context of what these networks know about the individuals within a market, but also what other influence these networks have accrued on the individuals.
It's a blackbox be because it's no longer a simple transaction, but also because the AI (?) is in a broader sense exerting proactive influences. Nudges on behavior that add up and ideally can not only be predicted but also created.
The book is long and deep, but it will also change how you view the world and Big Tech.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capi...
Search advertising is in real trouble, it's one of the reasons I sold my Alphabet shares a year ago. I see long term headwinds in this space. I don't doubt Google can engineer their way out of this, I'm just not willing the market has priced that risk in.
It still felt like a total money pit into which you toss offerings to a dark god which may or may not grant blessings.
Could you elaborate on some of the things that have changed to make it unrecognizable? Wasn't it still targeted ads 10 years ago by the same players mentioned in the article i.e FB and Google?
Does this say anything about AI in general?
My issue with the AI behind ad networks is that it a hostile AI, it is trained with an agenda that does not align to that of the user (the advertiser). The AI is trained to maximise the profits for the platform (Google or Facebook) at the expense of the advertisers own business and the viewers of the ads. It’s an exploitative relationship (to both advertisers and viewers), compleat with all the usual gas lighting and manipulation.
In my view there needs to be a separation of ad placement vendor and advertising exchange. The exchanges need to be regulated in the same was a securities exchange is.
If one subscribes to the idea that reducing spending can help curb inflation, then consider that the "business model" of online advertising-supported "tech" companies seem to require that consumers keep spending, in spite of inflation.
I think companies that are so large, and do one thing (advertise!) cannot be immune from business cycles. But is it a bad thing if these companies don't grow every single damn year.
As far as I know, the technical term for that is greed.
Here is just one of MANY possibilities: https://qbix.com/ecosystem#Decentralizing-the-Marketplace
disclosure: i'm a co-founder
"No, no... we're not competing with ad firms. We're about bringing products to users before there's even a need to advertise them."
In my view advertising can't end fast enough, but my worry is that our economy is so tied to advertising as a model that it would cause a deep depression - as spending would shift and slow down to a halt.
Psychopaths with money that want to trick people into doing what they want will always seek out the most targeted way to manipulate people.
If there's a system that allows advertising psychopaths more granularity in their attempts to burrow into your brain they will be all over it, until all the competitive advantage is burned out and then they will hop to whatever gives them even better advantage
My evil genius idea in 2016 was to eventually just inspect every piece of trash that people throw away (legally possible) to build the most personalized and predictive profile of a consumer possible without strapping a camera to them, which is the ultimate goal.
Would it, though? I can't think of the last thing I bought because I've seen it in an ad. There certainly were some, but I'd be surprised if it all added up to even 1% of what I spent on products and services.
I sympathize with this position. I operate a one stop shop for digital advertising for huge brands.
First I agree that the regulations (the government ones and Apple's) have benefitted no one. This is in a sense totally factual, and I challenge the blowhards here to like, name one substantive harm someone has experienced from ad ID tracking on an iPhone. While I believe government regulations should be proactive, rather than reactive, I believe the sum total history of ad tracking has pretty much confirmed that there aren't any substantive harms to correlated ad IDs.
From the perspective of advertisers:
An enlightening explanation of the Google value ad I read came from another guy explaining how he advertised dev tools on Google. He created a YouTube ad so that Johnny Programmer, watching YouTube videos on a weekend, would see a demo of his devops tool because Johnny searched "how to connect git to kubernetes" or whatever in the previous 10 days. And those ads converted really well. Even though the YouTube video had no contextual relationship with the ad the user saw.
So it sounds like you are complaining about the flaws in Google's tracking UI. Well, I guess e-mail them some more.
The sense of entitlement from those on the other side of the ads business, and their disdain for what users might want or how they feel, shows exactly why this business and industry is broken. And frankly why the whole thing is being dragged down right now. Figure it out. Adapt. It's what every other business has to do all the time.
You then give a perfect example right in the next paragraph:
> so that Johnny Programmer, watching YouTube videos on a weekend, would see a demo of his devops tool because Johnny searched "how to connect git to kubernetes" or whatever in the previous 10 days.
So now Johnny Programmer's work life is hounding him on weekends. Even worse, he is being influenced to buy a paid product to do something that could probably be easily achieved with open source tools as well.
How quickly we forget/forgot this proof of concept:
http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-...
Things don't have to cause obvious harm to still be inappropriate.
Building up a huge library of data about you in an unregulated fashion has never backfired on the public at large, oh wait those exact data warehouses have been continuous sources of pain for users.
The reality is these breaches cost the business next to nothing. After all even if millions of users have <$100 worth of damages it is impossible to recover that. So the business did hundreds of millions of damages at no cost to itself.
People do not want to be tracked and then bombarded with the cloud's idea of who they are (right or wrong), they want to be in control.
Do you think all the uBlock origin and other "anti ad/pro privacy" folks really pay for, say, Youtube to remove ads when they use it. Of course not. Talk is cheap
That will definitely work
Making zuck and google richer.
Twitter is now a unit of being moderately unsuccessful at advertising.
the amazing thing about social media ads, is that they make me less engaged than more... i wouldnt touch a facebook url with a ten foot pole... I will never update my linkedin again.... blech
How is it so inconceivable to you that people use LinkedIn?
Twitter advertising should be the highest CPM out there, with the probably wealth and influence level of its audience.
You and I have very different experiences of Twitter
What? Twitter is firehose news for, in my experience, the lowest common denominator unless you spend an inordinate amount of time curating your own experience.
1. Platform power: Apple was a key supplier to Facebook in the sense that they provide platform driving a significant % of their Ads revenue. With Apple tightening privacy they have become an indirect but significant threat to Facebook. Google is relatively safe.
2. Threat of substitutes: as seen in Amazon, Ecom platforms are much closer to the customer. Us timer is about to make a purchase. I think over time Advertisers will eventually shift to platforms like amazon, Etsy etc so that can reach the customer right when they are about to make a purchase. Some what same appeal with snap and TikTok.
Overall online ad industry will continue to flourish but will see big changes in who are the big players.
2. This has already happened. Amazon's Ads is making more profits than Amazon E-Comm itself.
It is nice we finally have some decent discussion on Ads. Rather than the usual HN rant about how all ads are evil. Or Internet should be free of Ads.
In the meantime a new crop of semantic search + question answering engines appear (like DeepSet.ai's Haystack). It's time to ditch link based results. They are primitive and actually don't work well today.
The solution is proper oversight. We've gone too long without regulating advertisements, app stores and video platforms, and we've witnessed the consequences. It's time that we put the interests of the people before FAANG shareholders and HN pundits.
Just like how streaming killed cable, not for the good of the consumer, but so they could simply take on the same profitable business practices.
Second is using my search for socks elsewhere on the platform. This is essentially using user-data outside of the intent it was given and that should be controllable by the user and default to the most conservative option without annoying dialogue boxes or other harassment. Whether it's within the platform or not shouldn't make a difference.
So competition is good, but unfortunately what I'm taking away from this that companies are going to bake more ads into their products because the products themselves aren't seeing much competitive pressure (except maybe for Meta and rightfully so).
not necessarily. I don't see how there could be a correlation between the two. When you see "sponsored" on a listing, that doesn't tell you how much the vendor paid. Also many large and reputable vendors will pay simply to guarantee they are at the top of the listing. For the vendors that don't sponsor, you don't know whether the amount they save goes into a higher quality product
> This is essentially using user-data outside of the intent it was given and that should be controllable by the user and default to the most conservative option without annoying dialogue boxes or other harassment.
Except feeding user data back into the system makes certain things technically possible that weren't possible before. Do you think modern map applications would have the same degree of accuracy if they weren't able to use user data to improve it?
> Whether it's within the platform or not shouldn't make a difference.
It does make a difference because keeping it within the platform could be used to improve the platform itself. Sending it outside the platform could be used for more malicious purposes. In the map application example, the user knows their data feeds into improved accuracy. But they don't know where that data goes outside the platform
For the vendors that don't sponsor, you don't know whether the amount they save goes into a higher quality product. Maybe it did, maybe it didn't.
But for the vendors that DO sponsor, you definetly know that the money didn't go into a higher quality product.
Some eCommerce companies who are agressively using Google/FB/Social will spend 30%+ of their revenue just on online/influencer advertising (based on companies I have worked with).
[1] https://www.makeuseof.com/windows-11-remove-ads/
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-08-14/apple-...
It's pretty disgusting and dehumanizing.
I can't wait for Windows 13 when Microsoft has sold installer ads to the highest bidder and I'm asked if I want a case of Mountain Dew during install.
The fact that matchmakers always make way more money than the makers is not a new phenomenon.
As a matter of fact, I'd wager that it's been this way since the day man invented barter.
Cosco doesn't make the goods they sell - they are just being an intermediary between you and the the manufacturer. An intermediary that takes a 60+% fee for their work.
https://twitter.com/modestproposal1/status/10026493600422830...
Everything you just said is voided by the fact that Google's ad business continues to boom. It's going nowhere. And I say that as someone that dislikes Google. Your pitch is emotionalism, I've been reading rants like that on HN for the past ~15 years. They're in practically every thread on Google or advertising. Meanwhile Google has gotten 17 times larger in that span of time.
Their business has doubled in size since the beginning of 2019. Their operating income has skyrocketed.
When did the death struggle begin for them exactly?
Google once had the right approach - showing ads related to the search terms. It was polite and nicely delineated. But that wasn't going to earn them money from unrelated ad campaigns.
Google may very well face competition from device manufacturers and the like, but this article does not provide any details about it whatsoever.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/small-businesses-cou...
Apple accidentally attacked small businesses that used to rely on geographically relevant advertising by increasing privacy protection.
There is no easy solution here.
The reason I see TikTok as a threat is largely because the company ignores all the rules and regulations that protect the privacy of minors and adults alike and companies will want that data regardless. Facebook won't be able to supply it to them since it has to abide by our laws.
OTOH TikTok being based in a nations that's a strategic competitor to the U.S. may well mean the company is simply banned. IMHO it would be more fortuitous for Meta and Google to lobby for a ban. Fighting TikTok will not work.
Real-Life ads became competitive with internet advertising. In fact, they might be better for a large number companies.
Unless they can manage to guarantee that ads are being seen by real humans, I think their revenue will keep dropping.
It might be in our individual best interest to have super effective advertising (for increased revenue), but it might be in the world’s interest to not allow that, because effective advertising leads to consumption… (and for privacy reasons,etc.)
Oh wait..
https://ethique.rexel.com/en/competition-law/abuse-of-a-domi...
"A dominant position is not defined merely by market share, but by classification as a market leader. Typically, a company is considered to hold a dominant position if it has a market share of more than 40%, but even a market share of 15% may be considered dominant if it is the largest player in a fragmented market. "
kagi.com bets on becoming a business with revenue. In the same way, Google could start asking money for searches without ads.
In the long run, Google should make more money because a society that runs on the best available information will be more valuable. The information market will be bigger and thus Google's income should be bigger.
The problem is that it's too easy to pitch advertisers against each other and force them to pay a huge fraction of their profits. On the other hand, profit margins in a transparent market are small.
Google could become something like Bloomberg and sell their good information to companies for high margins.
I refuse to believe I'm some kind of one of a kind special snowflake, but whenever I wanna buy something cheap or disposable, like food, socks etc. I just see it and buy it.
On the other hand when I'm looking for something I'm planning to get a bit more mileage out of, like a laptop, a pair of headphones or a cordless drill, I usually read the reviews and buy the product I think is most appropriate for me, not what the ads show.
One place to start on the difficulties is an excellent paper by Lewis and Rao from the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2015. The original title was something like: “on the impossibility of measuring the returns to advertising.” Just getting enough data to reject the hypothesis “this ad campaign did nothing” is extremely challenging. Lewis is a great producer of research on this topic and has written papers based on his experience at Yahoo.
Another great paper is by Blake, Nosko and Tadelis from Econométrica in… 2014? They turned off all of eBay’s keyword search ads in some markets as an experiment. They found that they maintained about 95%+ of their business while saving $50 eBay million dollars or so.
Beware confident assertions from people in the ad industry that ads clearly work. It is not so obvious that they do. This isn’t to say they don’t work! But it’s a challenging scientific question.
advertising creates a barrier to enter a market, not the market.
when you spend on ads, you are not creating new market for you, you are just unlocking some of the reserve market the established leaders secure via misinformation and brand brainwashing.
I.e., people buy stuff they wouldn't buy if they got honest information.
It works against the main argument in favor of the free market: not the best product wins, but the one with the biggest advertising budget.
I have a broad-market/horizontal smb Saas and tried google ads to not much success. Was getting charged ~$3/click for quite irrelevant searches even after lots of negative filtering. Suppose I could’ve tried some more…
That being said, I tend to agree with you in the sense that I never buy the obscure products that are recommended to me on FB/Google.
On the other hand, I think paying YouTubers to promote products is super effective. People are extremely receptive to influencers recommending products, esp. when it doesn't seem like advertising.
While we may identify and scroll past all sponsored google results (or even use adblockers or custom host files to block certain actors, etc) most other people are not at the same level of computer sophistication and won't necessarily do the same. Ads get clicked a lot.
Online advertising is far, far better than other forms. Marketers can tie individual sales to specific ads and improve ads by making them more like successful ones. This kind of specificity isn't possible with TV or print ads.
what the ads show
A good chunk of advertising is "brand awareness" not necessarily just selling one product. The point of brand awareness is to associate your brand with its brand values in a person's mind.
But I did notice a couple I'd fallen for. I happened to see Harry's Razors and Tommy John underwear in a store. They are heavily advertised on podcasts -- go to the online shop, the host will say, put in the code, get it shipped blah blah, your face and/or balls will feel nice. Somehow as a result they'd gotten into a mental niche in my brain as "things that would otherwise require jumping through annoying hoops to get," so when I saw them in a store, I ended up grabbing them. Because getting them otherwise would have been annoying. Yes in retrospect I recognize how silly this thought process was.
The razors I've been using for a while. They are basically fine I think -- which is to say, you only really notice is a razor is really shitty, and they aren't, so I'll call that a win. Just got the underwear recently, no notes yet.
I'd assume you bought those things because you lend a higher degree of credibility to the podcasters' recommendations than TV ads or side banners.
These ads have nothing to do with the high tech $300B AI and data driven ad industry mentioned in the post, there were sponsored segments on radio talk shows more than half a century ago.
I can say that my bad ads get less sales than my good ads.
My good ads consistently work, my bad ads don't.
So, ad copy matters.
However, a good advertiser accepts that not everyone is a good ad target.
You may not be a good target for advertising.
I would say, I'm not a good target.
Some people are very moved by advertising.
Others are not.
The 80/20 rule applies here.
80% of the profit in advertising probably comes from 20% of the target population for a given product.
I've learned that it's better to think of good advertising as just a form of communication.
A great ad is factual information that answers questions customers have, and provides urgency.
An ad might contain some fluff, but to really sell it usually needs to state explicit, accurate facts, in easy to understand language.
There is a lot of bad marketing from people that think they can make an ad just because they're a hip or a cool person, or they have an eye for color.
Those ads can be egregiously bad.
Just as some marketing sites are all fluff no substance, but sold to unsuspecting business owners, the same happens with advertising.
But the key idea is that, for certain products, good ads sell "enough" to the target audience to be very lucrative.
A great book on this topic is "Ogilvy on Advertising." Specifically, the first chapter.
As an avid internet user, my mind is automatically turned off to ads on any content I see.
I also blindly ignore the YT ads and focus only on the skip ad button. Strangely, I also ignore the audio, it just doesn't register.
However, If I am researching to buy a product or service, I keep getting shown ads about it everywhere I go to, so I do click on some ads.
Also a lot of people won’t be able to make the distinction between an ad entry and an organic entry in a listing. I’ve mistakenly hit ads, and might be hitting some here and there without realizing it, and I would bet you do too.
That’s part of why legit businesses have to buy ads for their own product to avoid having a competitors eating up their result page and getting all the misplaced hits.
Same for my solo stove.
My first thought when asked if online ads work is “No. Of course not. I just ignore them.” But then I remembered these purchases.
most web pages are up to 60% ads, search results are almost all ads, tv is mostly ads
google with their "answering question" thing has thought people to just trust it and click on first results, most of which are ads
ads, cookie banners and privacy popups cover easily most of the page, especially on mobile.
During lockdown I found several fantastic butchers who decided to launch a delivery service to reach more people through ads on Facebook. I'm still a regular customer.
For things that are available in a supermarket, brand advertising is better, for smaller businesses operating online, ads do indeed work.
Amazon is trying to sell me dental office equipment, or specialized restaurant tools, and a dozen other things that few outside of a particular area of expertise would remotely consider. It’s bizarre.
Of course you have to qualify Advertising as being a persuasive Ad' shown to an audience that may purchase your product at some point!
What constitutes an Ad' is also open to some debate, but you get the general idea!
There was a promotion like 25% off on Thermomix. For a week only. I wanted one, but I naturally distrust campaigns that urges yoi to buy in a short time.
Now it is like 25% more expensive.
I was compelled to note this. I'm Sorry.
Of course that's not what the article means, but it's interesting that Google, Meta and TikTok are described as advertising giants when their products ostensibly serve different purposes. I wasn't aware they were comfortable with being so mask-off about the actual nature of what they are, namely vehicles to generate ad impressions.
Having US social media in your country is a huge geopolitical risk, especially if you're one of the regimes that isn't just doing what the US wants at all times.
Key quote:
> For Meta and Google’s corporate parent, Alphabet, the cyclical problem may not be the worst of it. They might once have hoped to offset the digital-ad pie’s slower growth by grabbing a larger slice of it. No longer. Although the two are together expected to rake in around $300bn in revenues this year, sales of their four biggest rivals in the West will amount to almost a quarter as much. If that does not sound like a lot, it is nevertheless giving the incumbents reason to worry. Five years ago most of those rivals were scarcely in the ad business at all (see chart).
- today: Google and FB have 75% of all sales combined and those other rivals have 25%
- 5 years ago: those other rivals had 0%
What does this say about the market share of FB and google 5 years ago? Nothing. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Maybe it was 90%. Maybe it was 75%! But hey, whatever, let’s publish that clickbait article.
YouTube, in my opinion, is far more effective as users are forced to watch 5 second ads prior to watching the video that they are interested in. 5 seconds is too short to context switch and can also convey a lot of information.
Spread that click amongst billions of users, and you have a good revenue stream.
"a combination of independent commercial or industrial enterprises designed to limit competition or fix prices"
They have been sleeping while making money. Now it's time to wake-up and do some serious innovation or become irrelevant
Replace the operator and the subaru with a drone then the prospects change. With a single drone flying a programmed route at 20mph during daylight you'd have mapped the ~22000 miles of maintained roads in Los Angeles in under 100 days. Maybe you could contract with city vehicles who would like to have street view maps of their cities, and just stick the cameras on garbage trucks and the like and have the bulk of the area mapped before long over the course of their regular job duties coming into different areas.
Google's big advantage is that their core product has fundamental value (search and by proxy: ads) and their secondary products are such loss-leaders that outcompeting those freebies (Google office suite, Gmail, maps, YT, chrome, ml tooling) is where the real difficulty comes in. But building a core-search competitor is far easier than competition with Apple or Msft's core products. Google has a lot more scaffolding that FB, but they too have a single point of failure. A sea-change (like Mapreduce, pagerank, the smartphone) can see them collapse swiftly.
On the other hand, enterprise / feature-checklist companies lie in a stable equilibrium. You can't really beat them unless you invest a similar amount of resources into it. And even if you defeat them, they'll catch up to you in time if they're run at similar levels of competency and can throw a ton money money at it. Microsoft and Apple are exactly that. It's like trying to start a Boeing or Nvidia competitor. You better at least be at Airbus's or AMD's level before even trying to compete against boeing.
Microsoft's weakness is best displayed by Adpbe's acquisition of Figma. If Microsoft is run in a similarly predatory manner and a competitor gets 10 free years to catch up on 1 feature while you continuously fail to innovate, then you feel a mild threat, at which point you can simply outbid and acquire them. That shows how remarkably comfortable of a position Adobe is in, and Microsft and Apple sit a couple of orders of magnitude above that.
Why don't we put Apple in with somebody like: MAIA -- Microsoft, Apple, Intel, AMD. Maybe add NVIDIA, you have to work out a good acronym though.
Likewise, Apple sells luxury goods.
If I had to bet on one FAAMNG in a sharp recession it would be Amazon. They have the most diversified revenue streams.
The later has a "bot protection" page that looks like Cloudflare's but someone suggested it is not. Makes sense because archive.today and Cloudflare were in a spat some time ago. Archive.today wanted to allow monitoring of users' locations, e.g., via EDNS Client Subnet, but Cloudflare did not send ECS.
Unlike Archive.today, Internet Archive does not try to force users to enable Javascript or make them solve CAPTCHAs. Nor does Common Crawl.
It is interesting to contrast the Internet Archive (IA) with Archive.today. The later is vague about how it is funded and admits it could sell out to advertisers in the future.^1 There is obviously no small amount of data it could collect about user interests and behaviours that could be used to support advertising. For example, what usage data does it store, if any. What are the Terms of Use for that data. There are no public statements about any restrictions on what the website operator can do. The operator invites users to "Ask me anything" but AFAICT the website has no Privacy Policy. The operator admits it sends the client's IP in a X-Forwarded-For HTTP header. This is not something one would experience with IA. The server hosting the page being archived receives an IA IP address as the client IP address, not an IA user's IP address. IA has a Privacy Policy, last updated in 2001.^2 Unlike Archive.today, I feel reasonably confident IA wil not sell out to commercial interests but who knows.
1. From Archive.today's FAQ:
How is the archive funded?
It is privately funded; there are no complex finances behind it. It may look more or less reliable compared to startup-style funding or a university project, depending on which risks are taken into account.
Will advertising appear on the archive one day ?
I cannot make a promise that it will not. With the current growth rate I am able to keep the archive free of ads. Well, I can promise it will have no ads at least till the end of 2014.
2. YMMV, but IME but the fewer "updates" to a Privacy Policy over time the better.
Archive.today FAQ:
Do you preserve archivers' privacy? E.g. not disclose the source IP address?
Yes.
But take in mind that when you archive a page, your IP is being sent to the the website you archive as though you are using a proxy (in X-Forwarded-For header). This feature allows websites (e.g shops or the sites with weather forecast) target your region, not mine.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220913195108if_/https://archiv...
You can easily test this. You will find that, actually, it does not send this header. Or the client's IP address in any other way.
Advertising ruins every form of media it touches. From radio, television, newspapers (it's arguably responsible for killing journalism), and now the internet, and all the services we use it for.
Web search is useless because of it. Most websites are pretty much spyware. A large percentage of them are SEO spam, existing only to serve ads. Most content on YouTube, the largest video platform, is unwatchable due to constant ad breaks and sponsored content. Astroturfing is everywhere, promoted posts flood social media sites. Advertising is instrumental to spreading of disinformation, propaganda, toppling of democracies and companies like Cambridge Analytica. And if all that wasn't enough, _paid_ subscription services have started serving ads. It's the same business model from TV, but even more intrusive and lucrative since user tracking and microtargetting is now possible.
Stop. Just stop. Users want none of this. Of course, everyone loves getting services for free, but what adtech companies are getting in exchange for user data now is worth much more than the "free" services they offer. *They should be paying us instead.*
We need new business models that are as easy for content providers to implement, yet don't come at the expense of user experience, and don't cause services to deteriorate into a privacy nightmare. This should be easier nowadays with cryptocurrencies. I still think the Basic Attention Token[1] is a step in the right direction. Are there more examples of this?
This solution is backwards; people should not only create content for you, but they should pay you for the privilege of having you enjoy it?
It wasn't ads that killed journalism; it was the proliferation of free content that killed the funding for any kind of meaningful journalism. BAT isn't the right direction; they just tack on a crypto grift to make other people rich. I'd argue services like Netflix and Disney+ are the type of business models that work without ads, its just that people dont want to pay for content.
but they perform important economy function: connect buyers and sellers..
I don't see blockchain as a knight in shining armour here. Search is one of those hard things. Like sending a man to the moon. No one can compete overnight. Maybe the hope is AI could create a scenario where a search engine running locally is realistic (like all the prompt-based image generation stuff that has come out, can be run locally now).
