And again, who does not want to drive a tractor in their city when they hit the pothole? Or at least to re-plow half of the city just because of the stupid buildings they put in there?
I'm not an ad guru by any means, but isn't it expected that you will get junk clicks with a bid like that? Seems like a you-get-what-you-pay-for scenario.
No. Bidding low means less or no clicks, but should not affect traffic quality.
Did they try bidding more? It's possible they are just only getting the dregs. (In which case the ads would be expensive instead of garbage)
OP here. No. The cheapest version of my PerfectTablePlan software is £19.95 + VAT, one time fee. So I would be insane to bid £2 per click.
>It's possible they are just only getting the dregs.
Bidding higher generally means more clicks, but the quality could be worse due to winning bids when your content is less relevant.
Believe it or not, they did not deliver.
But I go to some blogs (philosophy, jazz, and men's clothing) that have ads that are literally just image links. The ads are actually relevant to the content, and because I go to the blog of my own volition, that means that more often than not the ads are at least somewhat relevant and usually worth a look, like the curated ones you see in a magazine. Most other ads online are so irrelevant it's almost comical, and I have no idea why people pay to use those services. All these tech giants who make enormous sums of money from advertising are emperors with no clothes - a hard look at the quality of their product reveals it's unanimously considered garbage by the public. Their promise of delivering hyper targeted advertisement was obviously a lie predicated on market capture and becoming the only middlemen in town.
But then, is any and all public communication about a product or a service originating from a stakeholder of said product or feature basically an ad?
No one likes to acknowledge this, but there is an alternate timeline where only the rich kid in school has a Google account, reddit account, meta account, and almost all content is still produced by massive media conglomerates.
Ads suck and everyone hates them, but don't lose sight of what they enabled by hyperfocusing on the bad.
It is not at all obvious that this would be a worse timeline to live in.
Here in Serbia, even in the worst of times (sanctions, NATO bombing in 1999), people with internet access could participate in local and global fora, newsgroups etc. It was expensive to get a computer and internet access, but people were willing to pay to host a small community. Late in 90s and early in 2000s, there was a huge number of cheap "virtual hosting" providers, and even cheaper LAMP stack providers, where people would run their own phpBB or similar forum software. IRC I probably need not mention.
This "great equalising" has been nothing but a negative in the long run.
I don't think any single form of advertising is effective on the whole population.
Outside a captive platform like Amazon, most ads are garbage and a total waste of money.
If I’m on Amazon trying to buy X and my search for X “promotes” an option to the top of the list yeah that probably influences me buying that.
But the broader online ad ecosystem is a total waste of money. Yes, I once searched a question about golf balls… no I don’t want to see “targeted ads” about golf balls following me all over the internet for the next three weeks.
Probably more that from an ROI perspective that’s probably the “least worst” vs the best.
I looked for rain boots, and I bought a pair of rain boots. Getting ads for rain boots now isn't going to drive any purchasing, right? Meta or Alphabet get paid still, so the advertisers are getting hosed.
My experience with performance adtech was that 95% of the energy went into targeting whales, with a focus on products that drive massive revenue (mobile gaming, gambling, crypto). It's truly insane what these whales are spending.
Sure, there's still a lot of money in the 5%, especially for a surface like ChatGPT where people are making retail decisions. But I'm not particularly shocked if they're a little behind.
1. Click fraud is rampant, and the ad platforms seem to not care in the least as long as they can drain your budget.
2. The ad bidding process is completely opaque, and no auditing seems to be done, my inclination is that there is large scale fraud here too.
The main place I see ads is YouTube on iOS. I used to have ad targeting turned off, but I’ve since opted into all of googles tracking and ad-targeting, in attempt to curate the ads I see and improve them.
I’ve had all the Google tracking and ad-targeting turned on for close to a year now. Google still can’t even target me ads that are in English. I can’t read Chinese or Turkish or Spanish but I still get ads in those languages. Most of the ads are still scams or questionably legal products. And nearly all advertisements are blatantly targeted toward the wrong demographics. I get both “you can buy this multi million dollar hotel” and “you can use food stamps at our store”. I sometimes see advertisements for local politicians but I just as frequently see ads for politicians I cannot possibly vote for.
The content that ad-based websites brought was mostly clickbait designed around serving these ads.
Without paid media, marketing spend gets pushed to “organic” and “content marketing” aka blog spam and other crap.
At most, I would call advertisement a Tragedy of the Commons. But the way publicity works, it feels like the tragedy is unavoidable; all smart advertisers will eventually transgress against normalcy.
My personal bet would be the country would suffer for it quite a lot, similar to places that have banned e.g. loans, but it'd be very cool if I were wrong!
I vaguely remember a blog post by a former FAANG engineer on HN lamenting the tyranny of designing for the marginal user (ie the one that gets swayed by an epsilon of optimization). That marginal user has incredibly short attention span, makes incredibly dumb decisions and overall has the cognitive capacity of some plankton.
Insanity•1h ago
But if their competitors (including open-weight models) can offer similar quality and ease of use, Ads is just another reason _not_ to use them.
lnsru•58m ago
ryandvm•32m ago
- Why is online news just partisan rage-baiting? Ads
- Why is real journalism dying? Ads
- Why are your web search results less helpful? Ads
- Why are recipes 2,000 words long? Ads
- Why is social media engineered for scroll-maxxing?
- Why is your car/TV/refrigerator spamming you?
- Why are pharmaceuticals so expensive?
- Why is your population voting for assholes?
Future generations are going to look back at how we live with advertising the same way we look back on leaded gasoline and asbestos.
livinglist•26m ago
beezlebroxxxxxx•14m ago
This is not really true. Ads, especially the classifieds, were often the only way that newspapers and news organizations stayed afloat aside from public funding. What happened was the major ad-tech companies captured the revenue and the subscriber data that came from ads and viewers that would normally go to those organizations. "Real journalism" often didn't make much if not any money. "Real journalism" at least for most of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st has always existed alongside advertising. Magazines literally survived on advertising, their entire product to readers was long form content, while, to brands, a higher quality product and more targeted subscriber base. It's pure romanticism to say that ads themselves were the problem. Ad-tech, it's monopoly control in the hands of 2-3 behemoths, is the real issue.