Slashdot Mirror
Is Online Advertising Worthless? (zerohedge.com)
turkeydance shares a story from ZeroHedge:
Category 1 storm clouds are gathering over what has traditionally been one of the most lucrative, and perhaps only profitable, sectors to come out of Silicon Valley in decades: online advertising. Two months ago, it was P&G which fired the first shot across the "adtech" bow when not long after it announced it was slashing its digital ad spending because it thought it was not getting the kind of return on investment it desired, it made a striking discovery: "We didn't see a reduction in the growth rate." CFO Jon Moeller said "What that tells me is that that spending that we cut was largely ineffective"...
So fast forward to last week, when during Thursday's Global Retailing Conference organized by Goldman Sachs, Restoration Hardware delightfully colorful CEO, Gary Friedman, divulged the following striking anecdote about the company's online marketing strategy, and the state of online ad spending in general... What Friedman revealed - in brief - was the following: "we've found out that 98% of our business was coming from 22 words. So, wait, we're buying 3,200 words and 98% of the business is coming from 22 words. What are the 22 words? And they said, well, it's the word Restoration Hardware and the 21 ways to spell it wrong, okay?"
Stated simply, the vast, vast majority of online ad spending is wasted, chasing clicks that simply are not there....One wonders how long before all retailers - most of whom are notoriously strapped for revenues and profits courtesy of Amazon - and other "power users" of online advertising, do a similar back of the envelope analysis, and find that they, like RH, are getting a bang for only 2% of their buck?
So fast forward to last week, when during Thursday's Global Retailing Conference organized by Goldman Sachs, Restoration Hardware delightfully colorful CEO, Gary Friedman, divulged the following striking anecdote about the company's online marketing strategy, and the state of online ad spending in general... What Friedman revealed - in brief - was the following: "we've found out that 98% of our business was coming from 22 words. So, wait, we're buying 3,200 words and 98% of the business is coming from 22 words. What are the 22 words? And they said, well, it's the word Restoration Hardware and the 21 ways to spell it wrong, okay?"
Stated simply, the vast, vast majority of online ad spending is wasted, chasing clicks that simply are not there....One wonders how long before all retailers - most of whom are notoriously strapped for revenues and profits courtesy of Amazon - and other "power users" of online advertising, do a similar back of the envelope analysis, and find that they, like RH, are getting a bang for only 2% of their buck?
Clearly they are spending their advertising budgets with the wrong consultants.
Anyone decently competent at online marketing knows how to narrow their most effective keywords, and push them harder, to achieve better click-through rates.
Yes. Please kill it.
Any one with a passing familiarity with the internet could have told them this in 1999
You're clearly just not making your ads obtrusive enough.
Is
I would like to know who placed an ad for me on this site trying to persuade me to buy a Surface. I would like their job. I would at least be as ineffective and make more money.
When you search for a company or website on google there is an advertisement for it right above the search result taking you directly to the web site you were looking for. I always click on the search result because clicking on an ad is just weird to me, even though they both likely take me to the same spot. But what is the point of buying an ad like this if they are already trying to get to your site in the first place? Why convince someone to do something they are already doing? Are they afraid another company is going to buy the search ad and someone is going to randomly click on another website instead of the one they were specifically looking for?
Banner ads? Absolutely. Sponsored search engine results? Those probably have some return but may or may not be positive. Search engines bumping their own online stores in the shopping section or adding their afffiliate codes to Amazon links when you search for a random product? I guarantee those make money.
Some is worthless, some is not. For example, Amazon advertises products you have looked at in your Facebook feed, and I'm sure those ads are well worth it for Amazon.
Real lawyers write in C++
who plans on retiring on revenue streams from books he recommends and ebooks he oozes out from his blackheads.
...or someone who said half of his advertising budget was wasted...but identifying which half was the problem?
Given that this advertising is usually targeted at the 80% or so of the population that barely know what an internets is, I wouldn't agree with you. I still come across plenty of people that install stupid shit like Honey or coupon printers, so SOME advertising works, you just need to target it in the right way.
Personally I'd rather have my idiots at home glued to the TV than out doing idiotic things
I am one of those who ads do not do any good.
I am the one who uses lynx (linux text mode browser) that does not bother with pop ups. I get the text of the article without the pop overs. Therefore I do not see about 80 percent of the ads on sites.
And I cannot be the only one doing this. . . .
Most Respectfully Yours Mark Allyn Bellingham, Washington
It actually makes a lot of sense to advertise Surface devices here. Maybe you don't see this because you don't understanding how marketing works?
A couple of weeks ago Slashdot reported that Linux has only about 3% of the desktop market.
Despite the community at this site supposedly being Linux-friendly, I doubt the usage here is really that much more than 3%. It's probably about 10% to 15% at most. There's probably a smattering of *BSD and Solaris, too, along with very obscure OSes like Plan 9 and Haiku.
Being generous to Linux, the *BSDs, Solaris and the other niche OSes, let's assume they make up 20% of the Slashdot user base. That means the other 80% are using Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android.
Of this remaining 80%, it's probably about 50% mobile, and 50% larger-than-mobile. Typically Android has about 80% of a site's mobile market, leaving 20% for iOS. Of the desktop and laptop half of that 80%, probably 90% of it are Windows users, and about 10% are macOS users.
So our estimate of the OS market share breakdown for Slashdot, intentionally skewed in favor of Linux, is around this:
- Linux: 18%
- *BSD, Solaris, etc.: 2%
- Android: 32%
- iOS: 8%
- Windows: 36%
- macOS: 4%
Realistically, Linux's share is probably less, and Android and Windows have larger shares. But again, we're trying to be favorable to Linux in this analysis.
Of the 18% who are Linux users, there's at least some fraction who are reasonable people. They'll consider hardware from Microsoft, because these people aren't driven by ideological blindness. The same is true for the macOS users. So being conservative, we'll assume that most Linux and macOS users wouldn't consider any product form Microsoft. So that leaves us with let's say 5% of Linux users and 1% of macOS users who'd consider a Surface device.
It's reasonable to consider everybody using Android or iOS as potential customers. They've already shown that they're interested in mobile computing of at least some kind.
So when we add the numbers up, we find that Surface devices could easily appeal to about 83% of the market here, give or take a few percent. It's very reasonable to advertise to this share of the Slashdot user base. People here likely are making technology purchases now and then, if not for businesses then for their own personal use. So it's well worth ignoring the 17% of users who would never consider a Surface tablet if it possibly means reaching some of the 83% who likely would.
As a FreeBSD user myself, and somebody who would never consider a Surface device, it's still easy to understand why it makes sense to advertise them here.
What does this mean for Google's future?
The idea that if your brand is not been seen everyday it gets selected less and less when a consumer goes shopping. The other band that spent big on new ads got selected for been new. A consumer has the need to try a new look competitor again due to more new ads.
No matter how near a monopoly a brand gets due to quality or price it has to keep spending big on its name as if it was entering the market.
Classic TV, print, radio, billboards ads gave way to banner ads and deep tracking internet ads. Anything to keep humans seeing the trusted brand name and its products everyday.
The new problem for the ads is the old separation of TV, print, radio, billboard ads is now their direct online competitor. Social media wants to sell and build their own trusted consumer and entertainment brands.
Private label https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and other ways computer company/social media owners/shopping sites now want to sell are replacing or buying up decades of generations trusted names.
Browsers are considering blocking outside ads. Social media and online shopping push their own new brands or partners that profit share.
The need for ads has not changed. The way select products get presented on a few captive platforms has changed.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Certainly it is, it cherry picked the one example it could find supporting its clickbaity headline and then congratulated itself on all the clicks, and subsequent advertising money, it got itself for doing so. Proctor and Gamble just cut back to the advertising space it found most effective, it didn't stop it all together. Nor did the company in question suggest it was going to stop advertising all together. The general consensus of the conference was that online advertising should be more targeted than the weird blanket coverage many companies do now.
/.
That's an article that might be worth writing, reading, and posting to
Instead what we get is clickbait bullshit that implies Apple, the most valuable publicly traded company in the world and one that doesn't do online advertisement, is worthless along with any number of other things, just to be even more clickbaity.
Given that this advertising is usually targeted at the 80% or so of the population that barely know what an internets is, I wouldn't agree with you. I still come across plenty of people that install stupid shit like Honey or coupon printers, so SOME advertising works, you just need to target it in the right way.
The same could be said for Nigerian Phishing scams.
Just in time, coin mining is coming to replace ads.
I suppose the next step will be to make all links internal to a site with ajax, so the coin mining script can run continuously as long as a user is on the site.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
Imagine a fair amount of advertising on- line much like off-line worthless but part of the discovery process. Try X campaign if positive results then maybe effective if not a learning cost. Need to learn before going bankrupt. Advertising does work if have a desirable product and reach correct audience. Advertising also bothers a lot of people who are irrelevant and adds unnecessary costs to products when not effective. I find products and services that offer discounts for registering most effective for me since I have an interest to begin. If I can get a deal then more likely to buy within reasonableness. Only buying so much stuff. I have not purchased anything from a FB advertising to my recollection. Yet FB and Google know more about me then I care.
I don’t intentionally click on or even look at ads. Web advertising is nothing more to me other than an irritant.
My observation in retail has been that appeal to brand loyalty is the most effective form of advertising. You probably aren't surprised by that, but you likely don't realize how insane it gets. It's extremely common for my customers to think an HP printer will work better with an HP computer.
As for advertising: Fake reviews. They work. You don't even have to explicitly buy them; give someone a free product and they'll give it five stars about 90% of the time. Doesn't hurt that Amazon customers reliably upvote five star reviews and reliably downvote negative reviews.
If Russia can spend $100k and swing an entire US presidential election, why can't P&G and its 11-figure marketing budget figure out how to sell some laundry detergent?
"No"
Whenever I see a food advertisement, and I have it at home, I feel the urge to eat. It turns into a sale later, after it's gone.
But I'm trying to figure out how I ended up with a drawer full of black t-shirts with silly phrases. I seem to remember some hot chick wearing them...
Because Russia didn't swing the election.
Yes it is. The only ad's that I see these days are reasonably well-targeted youtube ads on my kid's device. Those are just the same as broadcast commercials. The rest is garbage.
Every computer I clean up has crap I know got there via clicking on ads or downloading computer speed up and optimization apps. Every customer I warn about this has no clue what I talking about and assures me that they don’t click on ads.
Clearly P&G just needs to be more deceptive in the placement of their advertising if they want clicks.
The ironic thing, like the crazy dude on the corner proclaiming the end of the world for the last 50 years the night before the Sweet Meteor of Death finally arrives, you have actually posted something as relevant as it is accurate.
Congratulations!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Given that this advertising is usually targeted at the 80% or so of the population that barely know what an internets is, I wouldn't agree with you. I still come across plenty of people that install stupid shit like Honey or coupon printers, so SOME advertising works, you just need to target it in the right way.
The same could be said for Nigerian Phishing scams.
Than those phishing scams are amazing, because on my domains I see a lot of traffic hitting tracking URLs that are not indexed and are only linked to garbage ads for which I pay pennies.
I don't know why, but a lot of people click on ads.
10 Shocking Things You Didn't Know About Ads that will Shock You Into Clicking Links About Shocking News
lucm, indeed.
It is a very expensive toy .... and now you all know why it's a good idea to advertise here.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
P&G can't sabotage their rivals with someone horribly unlikable and full of skeletons like happened with the Trump thing.
The three ad types are:
1) Sales. Click here to instantly buy this thing we are advertising. This is the most common and the most useless. You can measure it's effectiveness exactly, which is what makes them popular. But they are remarkably uneffective. If you want to buy it now, you google it. (Or just go to amazon/ebay/etsy directly)
2) Branding. Hey, remember our product? We still sell it. People in X group love us. We are cool. You want to be cool right? When you need product like ours, remember we are the COOL one. This is more common outside of the web, but still is found here too. Basically, most Superbowl commercials are doing this. Harder to measure effectiveness, but over the long term can make or kill your business.
3) Informative. Hey, did you know that our product is on sale/now fights gingervitas/ is the first cure for the common cold?
This is relatively rare, but if your product is good and fills a new need AND no one knows it, it can instantly make you successful. Best example is going on Shark Tank. That's half the reason why people go the show.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
When this bubble pops we're all gonna be in the splash zone.
If they'd just app apps instead of spending on LUDDITE ads they would be getting 100% return from app appers app apping their apps. APPS!
I agree, it is all about payments for added value, like freemium.
If I'm buying stuff from an online store, there is not really much value for a middle-man to add. I'd much rather the store itself just have a searchable catalog.
Here's an advertising idea: instead of paying for a click on the ad, pay only when the click results in a sale. (Surely modern tracking technology can figure out whether that happened.) Then you'll have a 100% accurate measure of effectiveness. If Google won't agree to it (and of course they won't), start a competing company that will.
Of course successful clicks will have a significantly higher price, but you pay only when the product is sold. Just like a salesman who is paid a commission only when a sale is made.
Branding benefits ads targeted at content.
I read an article and like it and share it with a friend. They see the exact same ad. I bookmark the article and i see the exact same ad when I bring the bookmark up again.
The highest bid for this moment advertising benefits counterfeiters and knock offs.
I've mostly seen the advertisers coming back. There's a lot of stuff out there I just plain don't need but that I might actually want. If you don't advertise to me I honestly forget the stuff exists. Video games are an obvious choice. But there's other stuff like computer hardware upgrades, cool parts for my bike and other misc hobby stuff. And when I still had a kid under my roof there was the nonstop cavalcade of adverts for cloths and movies she was into.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Early 90s, just around the time of CERN and html and Netscape, Mad Ave. figured out that most of the trad media advertising dollars were just wasted. Of course they didn't spread it around, but it was the elephant in the room in ad agencies in the 90s.
Online advertising has always been worthless except with real specific targeting. And without advertising dollars what, exactly, finances much of the online tech job market? Online killed newspapers and took all the money out of the music business (in the later case richly deserved) and, shocking, there's very little real money in online.
Ad-tech generally means google. I'm a consistent increase in anti-google news articles recently (some justified, some just speculative to add fear, uncertainty, doubt). I wonder who is pushing it?
What if a porn site that exclusively shows penis enhancement senior porn becomes the second highest search result? You know, restoration hardware.
I don't know if you have been paying attention to what's going on lately in the world, but most anyone with a passing familiarity with the internet in 1999 was already being ignored then and that hasn't changed.
I've been using the internet for almost 30 years and I think I've intentionally clicked on an ad twice.
I believe most users train themselves to not look at ads.
What particularly bewilders me is when some news sites load then a few seconds later the entire page is overtaken by an ad. That and the super annoying ads on mobile that scroll up from the bottom when the user is intending to scroll the article.
I cannot fathom why any respectable news company or big retailer would think this was a good practice. It makes me want to boycott them both.
I don't know, the Russians sure did a lot with $100,000 in Facebook buys. Maybe they just know their 'consumers' better.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
The Democrats swung the election. Them along with most media outlets predicted Hillary in a landslide so why even bother running on a good platform or picking a good candidate? I lean towards Libertarian but still liked Bernie for the same reason the Democrats hated him. He doesn't take corporate money. No way would they stand behind a guy who can't be swayed by corporations.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Fact: the majority of online advertisers do very little proper analysis on their ad spend, and there's a lot of wasted money in online marketing. Totally agreed!
However, the challenge is, "How do you effectively measure ad spend?" Branding campaigns do very little to directly drive immediate sales, but it may significantly increase the effectiveness of more targeted advertisements. It's POSSIBLE (but not certain) that visitors come to Restoration Hardware's site using one of those 3178 terms, do some research, then search for "Restoration Hardware" when they're ready to do business.
There's a grain of truth in all of this--there's vast waste in most online advertising (and even in most large corporations). However, it's not exactly the "death" that this post makes it out to be.
Wait. So you're saying the Trump campaign managed to convince the Democrats to nominate HRC as their presidential candidate? That the screw-job on Sanders was not an internal Democratic party thing but the result of Trump's campaign exerting some sort of strange influence?
With the insane ideas believed by those that call themselves liberals nowadays, I don't know if your comment was serious or not.
Have you or anyone you know ever clicked on an advertisement online?
Online ads have become far too annoying for me to pay any attention to them. Just because the advertisers are able to place ads in front of me, they think that those ads leave me with a positive impression of the company and its products. On the contrary, I shun the products that are advertised to me in an annoying manner.
To idiots, no. To society as a whole? YES!!!
Advertising anywhere is wasteful. The problem for all those advertisers is that they are selling commodities. Products and services that are indistinguishable from (or inferior to) their competitors.
The solution for those people is simply to produce a better product. As we hear daily on this site; Apple didn't invent the music player, the cell phone or the tablet device--but they made them better. They made them compellingly functional and attractive. While HP, Compaq, IBM and others were assembling generic parts into ugly desktop boxes, Apple was offering colorful, graceful computers that just happened to appear on every interesting TV show. Many consumers were influenced by the look and a growing reputation for ease of use, reliability and service after the sale.
Smart Americans are buying more Toyotas, Nissans, Hyundais and fewer Chevys and Chryslers. Nissans? Damn, most are UGLY! But they have a good reputation for reliability. I bought a Papa John's pizza today- their slogan: Better Ingredients, Better Pizza.
It works the other way too. Walmart has a reputation for lowest prices, which is enough to bring in hordes of buyers. Nordstrom's has a reputation for quality and service that places them high in retail sales. Radio Shack had a market niche that faded away and they couldn't adapt. Every seller needs a unique place in the market or they will have to advertise like crazy.
So long as there are commodities, there will be sales costs. The best investment for products is not advertising, but R&D topped off with functional and/or fashionable design principles. And IP protection. And reputation over the long term.
...omphaloskepsis often...
I propose that businesses that use online advertising perform their own test - no consultants, no biased salesmen - their own people.
Method:
1. List all the various media you advertise on
2. Make a schedule where you drop each media in turn for say 2 weeks, returning for 2 weeks to all media as before between tests.
3. Track, track, track.
4. Run the numbers.
5. Make real business decisions.
My bet is you will end up firing your marketing manager (or even the whole team). Or have building security "welcome" that marketing / advertising consultant on his next visit...
I'd go so far as to say beyond the superficial and informative, all advertising is useless. People are not as easily brainwashed as some would believe. I weep at the billions of dollars that are pumped into it.
that that spending that
Will someone PLEASE introduce the editors to the works of Strunk and white?!
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Twitter is fucking worthless. But we all already knew this. But just for shits and giggles, lemmie tell ya some numbers.
Twitter gave me one of those ad trials for their service, a free $100 credit to try them out as an advertising system.
My company received a 0% click-through rate.
I guess I got exactly what I paid for, absolutely nothing. But one thing was for sure, Twitter made sure I absolutely NEVER gave them any actual money for advertising, since it was literally useless and worthless for my business.
...ads are either blocked by software or my mental ability to completely tune them out as visual noise. If I want something I search for it.
It's less than worthless.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Let's suppose this trend continues, and the whole online advertising business goes down the tubes. When they can no longer claim it's "ad revenue", how will Google account for all the black budget money they get from fedgov and other repressive regimes in payment for conducting mass surveillance?
They sell something like 90% of the detergent in the world under a variety of names. They have trouble getting more people to buy their detergent for the same reason Facebook is having trouble getting people signed up - the population of the world is an upperlimit.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Advertising is inherently manipulative. Overall it's just furthering misconceptions, comsumism, possessivism (words i may or may not have made up just to illustrate). Rule #1: If you see an ad for it, you don't need it.
We need everyone to have an adblocker, like uBlock origin, or preferably Adnauseam (based on uBlock, it additionally "clicks" ads in the background to pollute advertisers' databases, personally i have generated over (estimated) 500$ for the sites visited, which is paid out of Big Ad's pockets. Also don't give me shit about the ethical side of this, if someone is dumb enough to pay money for my browser sending a web request, they deserve having their money taken from them) Install it for your parents, they are likely not savvy enough and frequently browse those ad-filled news sites.
I'm 54. I've been online more or less every day since the internet began. As of right now I typically buy things online three times a week. I've been buying things online for over a decade and I can say with high confidence that I've never, not once, made a purchase because of an online ad. In fact I can also say that there are businesses I actively don't buy from and encourage others not to buy from because of their ads. Usually because they're obnoxiously everywhere. AT&T is a good example. Lately I've purchased a monthly subscription to an IP hiding service because of how insidious targeted ads are. An argument could be made that I've made purchases that were influenced by an online ad but I can't recall one so unless subliminal ads are real I think I can safely say "never". I don't know how true this is for others since I can only speak for myself but I suspect a higher than expected percentage of internet ads are useless to the entities using them. Personally I think the internet could damn near be a utopia if some other way of revenue were employed rather than ads.
As chancellor Merkel said "Daten are the resources of the 21st century.", wouldn't this imply that basically all future business is advertising? While all the internet companies live on some income from advertisements, now hardware manufacturers start drilling on that data-well, tool. Windows, Occulus, Nvidia, car manufacturers, ... all transmitting data home, to be able to target adds at the users. As everyone is doing it, it obviously must be more profitable than the product itself.
It's because we sheep prefer cheap, and don't mind about our data.
Where in the old days there was revenue that could be distributed, and used to by something else, where someone else was able to earn revenue, today's product prices are dropping down to production cost, revenue is now adds. Distribution isn't in actual "impressions" or "clicks" but calculated in money at an astonishingly high exchange rate. That's probably just a bubble.
People only have so much money to spend. Advertising can't make more of it. All it can do is possibly get it to spend on your brand rather than another. There's nothing special about online there. Advertising is mostly a drag on the economy, it only actually provides value when it informs people of goods/service they otherwise wouldn't have known about. The vast majority of ad spending, especially by major established brands, doesn't do that.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
If you actually were Libertarian, you wouldn't have a problem with corporate money in elections because its their money and they can spend it how they want to. Either you don't actually know what Libertarianism is, or you're a troll. Leaning towards the later.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
The main reason the internet has become a corporate surveillance nightmare is because the only way to really pay for small bits of content has been through advertising.
"Surveillance is the businessmodel of the internet" - Bruce Schneier
HTML6 needs to have a micropayment feature. I want to be able to choose to pay google 1 cent per query in return for not being tracked. All this talk about innovation, yet this simple payment system has still not materialized.
A blockchain payment system might seem like an obvious fit to this problem. However, I suspect that in the long term the blockchain might pose an even bigger privacy risk. When the cryptography of these distributed leggers gets broken, everybody could know which websites you visited.
Jaron Lanier — 'Funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one's anus to one's mouth.'
Answer: P&G doesn't sell fear.
All Russia had to do was help convince the moderate Republicans that we're being overrun by dangerous immigrants at an alarming rate.
Nothing sells Republican votes like fear of immigrants entering the US to take their jobs, marry into their families, and spread "wrong" religions.
People wouldn't be blocking adverts if they weren't so intrusive, either visually or aurally, privacy invasive through cross-site tracking, and inherently insecure due to wanting to run third party JavaScript . It was advertisers and websites that began this arms race, and they're the only ones with something to lose. Blocking adverts for me is a matter of security and privacy.
Also, P&G may see better returns from advertising if they weren't race baiting to sell fucking shampoo. Go look up The Talk advert.
It's certainly heretical to the doctrine of "Libertarianism" but I think there is a kind of neo-Libertarianism out there that generally aligns with traditional Libertarianism but rejects Libertarianism's reflexive and doctrinaire support for existing corporate power structures.
I think there's a notion in this neo-Libertarianism that too much corporate power is just as bad if not worse than too much government power. Democratically elected governments are at least nominally constrained by constitutions and civil rights protections, while corporations appear increasingly unconstrained, by either government or by the market forces which are supposed to constrain them.
I think these notions are what drive some Libertarian-leaning people to find Bernie appealing, despite his obviously socialistic policy goals.
And I think to a certain extent, people tire of the recursive logic of doctrinaire Libertarianism. Defending general corporate behavior under the guise of individual freedom and then rejecting criticism of specific corporate abuses which actually constrain individual freedom as being the result of government power and non-libertarian policies. "$Corporation should be free to do whatever it was. If we had real Libertarian government, $Corporation couldn't do that specific thing,"
There seems to be no room in Libertarianism to acknowledge the abusive levels of power for which concentrated economic wealth is capable of or any room to accept government regulation is likely the only way to mitigate them, at least in the real world we live in, which is unlikely to ever be organized under "real Libertarian" policies.
About 3 years ago I performed a little experiment.
Had 20 EUR to spend. Spent them on Google AdSense (or AdWords? well whatever) to boost my Youtube channel which had many (unmonetized) World of Tanks replays. This was not to make any money, but to verify what would happen if I did go that way.
That 20 EUR lasted about a week, during which the amount of views of my channel increased tenfold, from about 200 accesses a week to over 2000. then it dropped straight back to 200-something a week.
Now, the question in TFT (The Fuckin Title) is retarded. Online Advertising can be very anything from very lucrative to worthless. The outcome depends on a shit ton of factors and decisions.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
P&G threw billions into online ads to show annoying cartoon bears on the corner of some website because "ooh digital." Maybe mass market "branding" type ads are harder to do profitably online. In businesses with higher returns on each conversion the equation maybe works.
Every computer I clean up has crap I know got there via clicking on ads or downloading computer speed up and optimization apps. Every customer I warn about this has no clue what I talking about and assures me that they don’t click on ads.
Clearly P&G just needs to be more deceptive in the placement of their advertising if they want clicks.
It's because a frighteningly large percentage of the population doesn't know what the hell they are even looking at.
While I can spot an advertisement a mile away (because they are so offensive to me perhaps), I also have to admit that my mom clicks on every single thing she sees while on her phone. I've had to help her with her phone after she clicked on some stupid shit from a facebook post (that was also obviously an ad) more than once - and it's usually just a full page browser ad saying that "Your phone contains viruses and malware! Click here to clean it up".
Telling her that it's an ad and it doesn't matter and you shouldn't click on stupid shit doesn't help in the slightest. So, she clicks on those ads, and somebody gets paid for it, but in truth she has no idea what product or company she just clicked on and isn't helping whoever actually funded it in any way.
My girlfriend isn't much better. She isn't likely to click on things that are obviously ads, but when one sneaks up on her she panics as well and wonders if it's real.
The faster the Internet speeds the more crap (online ads) webmasters put on their web sites.
1) Ads that are obnoxious in any way, e.g., cover any part of the page, "float" down or slide in from the side. It's creepy and annoying and one way to absolutely guarantee that I'll never click on your ad.
2) For TV/streaming content, ads that are repetitive. I will never buy any canned vegetables from Dole, ever, because I once watched a 1-hour long show where EVERY commercial break (and there were quite a few) had the same exact fucking commercial for Dole green beans. By the end of that show I wanted to destroy Dole and vomit up every green bean I've ever eaten.
3) Ads that follow you around...I frequent electronics and musical instrument sites. When I come to Slashdot, for example, my browsing history on those sites is suddenly paraded before my eyes -- guitars or computers I had been browsing magically appear in a grid as part of the page's content. This again is creepy any annoying and really turns me off to actually buying anything from these sites. Obviously these sites are tracking and saving my browsing history via cookies without my consent. I believe it is called "remarketing" or "retargeting". I fucking hate it. Yes, I can install ad blockers and other plugins on Chrome, but 90% of the browsing I do is on my iOS device via Safari.
One of the points of all this shouldn't be mixed: if online ads are worthless, doesn't that mean all this data collection is mostly worthless also? Thoughts on this?
Also FYI, I just clicked an ad 4 times on the site here with my finger because I was trying to close the ad...
I'd much rather go to a world where I pay a dollar a month for Google and Slashdot.
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The problem is that you want to have people click on something and buy it. That's not going to work. Ever. For more than one reason. And it all comes down to feelings.
First and foremost, when I go to a page, I go there for a reason. To read something, to watch a movie, what I certainly did NOT go to the page for was your ad. Even if it was the most topical ad, even if it advertised something that would solve all my life problems, it still is NOT what I wanted to get at that very moment. The worst thing you can do now is force me to see your ad before I can get to what I wanted to see. Because that loads your product with negative emotion. You and your product are between me and what I want to have.
Instead, what you should do is make me feel like you made what I'm looking at possible. The whole "sponsored by" and "brought to you by" ad line works wonders. We get a good feeling about you and your product if we feel like you're the one that gives us what we want and maybe even love. It needn't even to have anything to do with your product. You could be making car windshield wipers, if that's what allowed me to find the solution to a coding problem I had, I feel good about your wipers and next time I need some and they're offered, I'll probably even prefer to buy them because subconsciously they are connected with solving a problem I had.
This way advertising can work.
Being obnoxious makes us feel bad about your product. Yes, we will more likely remember it. But it will be remembered as the product that stood between us and the content we wanted to see.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Google teaches people setting up adwords to buy an ad for the name of their business, even though if you search for the name of their business the first result links to the same place as the ad. Anyone who clicks on the ad is a "conversion," and anyone who clicks on the identical organic result right below it is not a "conversion" even though you still get the site visit so they basically are.
Dashboards that show ad effectiveness are a strength of digital advertising: "tracking" people over long periods is as much about targeting ads as it is about evaluating whether brand advertising is effective. Did these display ads raise your opinion of HP, or Banggood, or Rod & Gunn, enough that you were more likely to buy a laptop, wire stripper, or linen shirt than someone who didn't see the ad? Search ad tracking is simpler because it doesn't need to retain data over time. You clicked or you didn't.
But television, print, billboard, cannot evaluate their effectiveness with the complicated and high-accuracy reports digital delivers, so digital has always been uniquely good at transparently evaluating itself and winning money from the other media based on its self-evaluation.
And I think this is largely fair. But ads identical to the first organic result are an exception to that. The dashboards all assume that not clicking on the ad means a lost conversion, and in the case of this scam, they don't.
Yes, it is a scam. Yes, companies getting 98% of their traffic organically probably don't need to buy ads at all. But as a user of the Internet, you know very well there are many more ads on the Internet than the silly ones that are duplications of the top organic search result.
I think this _is_ a scam and it _should_ be a scandal because Google Sales has had an optimistic, cooperative relationship with ad buyers that may be changed by understanding it. But it certainly doesn't mean all the money in digital is fake. Digital's own reports, which with the exception of this case are more convincing than these anecdotes, say that the money is really doing something.
Why would anyone buy a P&G product in the first place? They are grossly overpriced, and quality of house brands is as good if not better. The only reason would be for products without competitors, which begs the question of why they need to be advertised.
UBlock can't do these as well as (or @ all) hosts do 4 speed, security, & reliability:
Protection vs.:
1.) Bad sites (past ads)
2.) Fastflux botnet C&C's
3.) Dyndns botnet C&C's
4.) DGA botnet C&C's
5.) Downed DNS (reliability)
6.) DNS redirect poisoned dns
7.) DNSChangers in IP stack OR routers
8.) DNS requestlog trackers
9.) Spam payloads
10.) Phish payloads
11.) Bandwidth caps
Additionally:
12.) Get past dns blocks
13.) Speed up 2 ways (adblocks/hardcodes)
14.) Work on anything webbound multiplatform.
15.) Ez data edit
16.) Block ads more efficiently in cpu/ram/I-O use
* UBlock now uses hosts (no DNS benefits vs. dns issues) - poor imitation = "sincerest form of flattery"
Hosts = native vs. illogically "Bolting on 'MoAr'" & not ClarityRay blockable like addons.
APK
P.S.=> Hosts (1st resolver) do MORE w/ less in fast kernelmode & before slow usermode addons
Hosts ~3mb vs. UBlock = 64MB -> http://cdn.ghacks.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/adblocker-memory-consumption.jpg
UBlock can't do these as well as (or @ all) hosts do 4 speed, security, & reliability:
Protection vs.:
1.) Bad sites (past ads)
2.) Fastflux botnet C&C's
3.) Dyndns botnet C&C's
4.) DGA botnet C&C's
5.) Downed DNS (reliability)
6.) DNS redirect poisoned dns
7.) DNSChangers in IP stack OR routers
8.) DNS requestlog trackers
9.) Spam payloads
10.) Phish payloads
11.) Bandwidth caps
Additionally:
12.) Get past dns blocks
13.) Speed up 2 ways (adblocks/hardcodes)
14.) Work on anything webbound multiplatform.
15.) Ez data edit
16.) Block ads more efficiently in cpu/ram/I-O usage
* UBlock now uses hosts (no DNS benefits vs. dns issues) - poor imitation = "sincerest form of flattery"
Hosts = native vs. illogically "Bolting on 'MoAr'" & not ClarityRay blockable like addons.
APK
P.S.=> Hosts (1st resolver) do MORE w/ less in fast kernelmode & before slow usermode addons
Hosts ~3mb vs. UBlock = 64MB -> http://cdn.ghacks.net/wp-conte...
The ads are doing their job. Your reaction to them is data which the advertisers can sell to political aspirants to get themselves elected to run your country for their own benefit. As you are constantly reminded, you are the product, not the customer.
The basic problem here is that there are too many ads.
That much should be obvious to everyone -- adblockers are a direct response to this.
People aren't going to buy more because they see more ads; we'd all just run out of cash if we did; so once you hit saturation point with advertising quantity (which I would argue probably happened in the US some time in the 1980s), every new advertisement that gets added simply diminishes the return for all the others.
In fact, I feel that the explosion of advertising generated by the web has actually led an advertising backlash. People are now bombarded with so many adverts that they begin to feel resentment against the products being advertised, and may be negatively influenced by them rather than positively.
The advertising industry needs to reign itself in and drastically cut the number of ads being shown. Fewer ads will result in much greater value per ad for the advertiser and much happier consumers. Sadly however, this is not in the best interests of the advertising industry; they are driven by the need for growth, just as is every other capitalist industry, and thus will continue to increase the levels of advertising we are subjected to.
Back in the day, when advertising on the web was just a simple banner ad that appeared on a page, things were good, we didn't feel a need to install advertising blockers, cuz they weren't disruptive to our experience of web browsing.
Fast forward and the rise of pop ups, pop under, video, sound, splitting articles into multiple pages so you get more advertising thrust in your face. So most of us said enough is enough and the rise of the ad blocker occurred. And now they wonder why advertising is so ineffective? You guys did it to yourselves, you made yourselves so frickin' obnoxious and a bane of the browsing experience, we've tuned you out, either with our brains solely, or with technology to assist in removing your garbage from our monitors.
Traditional libertarianism is not anarchism. However it does hold 'doctrine' that monopolies only happen _with_ government assistance, hand waves away 'natural monopolies'.
Like all 'isms' it's only reasonable to discuss it in context of 'mixed mode' economies and government. As exists on the ground. Some 'isms' refuse 'mixed mode' which makes them irrelevant.
In the USA the Ds _never_ had a 'mind your business' principle, the Rs sold it out, decades ago.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I'm socially liberal and fiscally conservative. What party does that put me in?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
There's an ad for story about a female comedian who lost 220lbs.
Except she's from a country where they don't use pounds. And she hadn't lost that weight when she was in the news the other day.
The ad says she's gorgeous now.
Right next to it in the same frame there's an ad telling me how to buy my first bitcoin, and one telling me about the 'russian super tank', but the image isn't a T-14... it's some kind of scifi mockup.
I wonder where the root of the problem is here...
I say that when the proportion reaches 98%, it means you took your eyes off the ball long ago.
I wonder how much of the rise in Libertarianism in the last 50-odd years is the result of genuine interest in largely unfettered capitalism and tiny government and how much of it is a kind of way to latch onto a kind of political conservatism that allows for non-traditional personal behavior (pot smoking, sex, etc).
I'm sort of convinced that most people are into it for its contrarian appeal than as any sort of organized socio-political system, especially as one with any realistic chance of implementation.
I feel your pain, the wife and MIL are the same exact way.
Libertarianism won't be implemented, just like Socialism won't.
But principles of libertarianism will continue to be part of the United States government. It might take bankruptcy to get the government to 'mind it's business', but it will, one way or another.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
i just can't seem to care
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
On the contrary, I shun the products that are advertised to me in an annoying manner
I shun the products that are advertised to me IN ANY MANNER if I haven't opted in to receive that advertisement.
By "receive that advertisement" I include email, surface mail, calls, door-to-door, and billboards.
I'll go further, and shun not just the individual product being advertised, but ALL products of that vender or business, when I can do this.
Unfortunately, abusive laws that grant artificial monopolies make this difficult in many cases - but the mere fact that I received an ad from somebody and didn't ask for it will make me look FIRST at their competitors.
Note that going to a tech conference does NOT mean that I have opted in to receive advertisements from ANY vender that receives the attendee list for that conference.
It means you at least lean Democrat, of the two major parties. Since 1980, they've been the more fiscally conservative party as well as the more socially liberal.
If you wanted a party that was seriously fiscally conservative, like the pre-1980 Republicans, I'm sorry for you.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
the phrase "wrong religions" implies that there are "right religions"
Does anyone do metrics on the negative impact of digital advertising?
> Remembering and advertisement that came with an auto start video over the top of the article you are reading and avoiding that product in the future.
> Remembering the product that was in your face obnoxious on many different web pages and avoiding that product in the future.
Curmudgeonly avoiding many products due to obnoxious an inane advertisements for years. (I haven't entered a Quznos since the singing sponges.)
NRRPT/RCT
Madison Avenue is just a bunch of hucksters who managed to convince business owners that the more money they spend on advertising, the more sales they'll make. Bullshit. All the additional revenue doesn't pay for all the new advertising. But but Madison Avenue will pull out all these graphs and pie charts (that they produce) which demonstration their cost-effectiveness. So if they are willing to lie to your customers about your products (whiter teeth!. harder penis!) what makes you think they won't lie about their services?? Duh. This is especially true for internet marketing.