hagbardgroup

Ad blockers block most native ads because they get loaded dynamically and have trackers associated with them to provide accurate billing and accountability to advertisers. So that part of the article is at least wrong. Every native ad that I'm aware of loads almost exactly like a banner ad.

Most people don't particularly want or need objective news. If they want it straight, they can pay premium prices for it through outlets like Consumer Reports or from specialty newsletters. When they don't want it, they pay by renting part of their attention to advertisers, marketers, and salespeople.

"Tips" are another word for "commission." Waitstaff are sales people for restaurants and bars.

Restaurants can certainly try to motivate their sales staff with a wage instead of paying commission, but the consequence will be that their sales people will lose motivation, be less competitive, and less aligned with the interests of customers and more aligned with the interests of management.

Could also be that it's easier to bot Instagram.

The mafia should hire this guy to pump penny stocks.

People use mobile phones in addition to desktops. They might be doing a price check on a mobile phone and then actually purchasing on their desktop.

They might be reading the news, which is roughly 50%-99% PR placements depending on the publication, which pushes them down some sales funnel or another. They're just browsing higher up in the conversion funnel. Searches higher up in the funnel tend to be less valuable in terms of costs per click than searches which are closer to the purchase.

Everything in the news is marketing anyway, and it's just as paid for as it is when it's an ad -- often times it's more expensive, because access to the news is rationed by publicists and PR firms rather than by the advertising department. Further, the bulk of social media is the effluvia of PR as it reverberates through people who talk too much on the internet. As far as Google is concerned, that propaganda consumption is just likely to stimulate more searches later on which can be advertised against.

The flow might be: Check Facebook App -> Click Gossip Rag Article -> See fabulous new shoes in celebrity photo -> Order lunch on Seamless App -> Go home from work -> Remember to Google "buy red high heels kim kardashian" -> Click ad -> Price check, bounce (Google gets paid) -> "red high heels discount" -> Click ad (Google gets paid again) -> Buy shoes.

When they are ready to buy, they will pay for the $10 click -- maybe multiple times across different advertisers -- on their desktop or $15 app download on their mobile phone.

The headline that this author uses is also really loosey goosey. Google's ad products on mobile are also increasingly more biased towards generating paid phone calls. When you search for a locksmith or auto repair, you want to get a guy on the phone right now, and are likely to need to buy immediately.

So, this isn't really Google's "growing problem" -- Google as an organization is set up to use machine learning to figure out how to make money off of mobile search behavior. The company is still learning what it has to do to make money off of mobile search behavior and how it differs from behavior on desktops.

Also, as far as Google's customers (advertisers) are concerned, if a desktop search results in people subscribing to an e-mail list that they read on their phone, the advertiser earned measurable results from the money that they gave Google. If their customers don't like to buy on mobile or they behave differently, campaigns can be configured accordingly.

Yes the parent comment you were replying to was off base and you were right to correct him. You didn't seem rude to me. I was being a little bit sarcastic about Spotify riding a fraud-wave to a public offering based on inflated numbers.

Nope, doesn't invalidate what he did. Everyone would be better off if this was either cleared up or if other streaming services with models less prone to fraud could pop up.

Advertisers may or may not care. Many are indeed both stupid and inept. Their clients should care, but may not be technically savvy or aware enough to care. Fragmentation in advertising also makes accountability a lot harder.

Spotify definitely has to care in the long run, but it may be better for their chances of making it through that IPO window to see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil until someone forces it upon them. If it worked for Facebook and Twitter, why wouldn't it work for Spotify?

Honestly, this is one of the reasons why 'free' services provide such low value to advertisers unless there's world class fraud fighting capability at the company. If the service is paid, it's significantly more expensive to generate fake traffic. But that'd be bad for the loosey goosey user numbers (AKA 1990s era 'eyeballs') that so excite momentum investors.

It does make things cheaper -- whether in time or money.

I don't get it how your statement about Facebook's customers not being the users isn't consistent with the idea that it's 'free.'

Everything costs resources. Facebook isn't 'free.' You use Facebook in return for allowing Facebook to spy on you on behalf of their customers, and give those customers chances to influence you through various forms of media.

There are plenty of communications alternatives which are more private and expensive. Phone companies offer various tiers of paid service. There are tons of messaging apps that permit you to mass message people. You can send electronic mail to anyone in the world. Whoa! So many options!

Facebook is pure frippery, and most people's lives can be improved by quitting the service in the same way that unsubscribing from Publisher's Clearinghouse improves people's lives.

However, plenty of people are willing to give up their attention in return for low price entertainment. People can go to the movie theater for $10, or they can spend two hours clicking Buzzfeed for $0 and two hours. Advertisers pay Buzzfeed's bills so they can remind those readers to buy more tacos from Taco Bell. It costs the advertiser maybe $0.03 per page view for that user owing to Buzzfeed's excellent rates -- so a cool $0.60 for a 20-listicle binge.

The readers spent two hours, but plenty of people are willing to make that trade. Others aren't.

Free web services need advertisers way, way, way, way more than advertisers need those free services. If those web services can no longer provide value to advertisers, then those web services will need to start charging users rather than advertisers to fund the service. Else, you can lobby the government to fund GovernmentBook -- hopefully with co-located servers in that Utah data farm. Then, taxpayers will pay for a continually degrading monopoly service, and you'll get government ads instead of commercial ones. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

Yes, we can.

Private roads have no ads. Expensive neighborhoods have no ads. You won't see many ads on Park Avenue in Manhattan.

Expensive HOAs ban lawn signs. You can pay extra for the ad-free Kindle from Amazon. If you buy books, the books are ad-free. Expensive newsletters are ad-free. Pay per view movies are ad-free (except when they have products inserted surreptitiously into the content on behalf of advertisers).

Are you seeing the pattern, here? You get to pick two from this set: cheap, good, fast. If it's cheap and fast, it'll be bad. If it's good and cheap, it'll take a long time. If it's fast and good, it won't be cheap.

Plenty of people -- the majority, really -- want lower prices in return for submitting to brain-scrambling.

So, the reviews never happen without the marketing push.

The interplay between the marketing and the reviews are to help consumers decide if the vendor fulfilled their promises to the public. Critics with prestige will only review films that they anticipate will have an audience. The audience will go to the critics to see if they verify the sizzly promise from the trailer.

There is no demand for critical evaluation of a product without trying to generate that demand first through marketing and advertising. Try launching a product without doing any marketing at all and see what happens (absolutely nobody will buy your thing).

Different consumers care differing degrees on how much they want to research before they make a purchase.

Ask an indie film director how unimportant promotion and hustling are to actually getting people to see a movie.

Yelp and all crowdsourced reviews that don't even try to verify purchasing are easily scammed and gamed at scale.

Similarly, reviewing on Youtube -- especially for things like games and children's toys -- is rife with concealed bribery for influence -- illegal in the US. This stuff is harder to 'disrupt' than it seems.

But this doesn't scale to huge cities with tens, hundreds or thousands of choices. We can't know the reputation of such a wide array, and we can easily be fooled by advertising. Internet-based recommendation systems make the grapevine and reputation scalable. I hope we see more innovation. Yelp is a start, but it fails miserably because if I rate a place 5 because I love very authentic Thai food, and another person rates it a 1 because they are used to Americanized Thai, the restaurant gets a 3 (I'm simplifying for illustrative purposes). In other words, Yelp's rating is useless to both me and the other person.

What happens is that people in cities tend to pick a small number of vendors that they trust based on repeated positive trading interactions. They might decide to test out different vendors if they receive a sufficiently enticing offer.

Yelp is not terribly good and doesn't even make money. This is also kind of a non-problem in search of a solution: people will evaluate restaurants based on peer evaluations, their own experience, professional critics, and crowd reviews. The kind of people who make judgments based on crowd reviews might just want to be with the popular crowd rather than quality. What crowd reviews tell you is what's popular -- since you don't have a sense of the personality and knowledge level of each amateur critic, each individual review carries little weight.

So for example, most Yelpers would freak out at the 'slow service' of a super-high-end restaurant because they're tasteless scenesters. If you want to know what the herd of mindless scenesters think is hot right now, Yelp'll tell you. Or in your Thai example.

They do. Google also produces the most widely-used ad platform for publishers, which makes it much easier for those publishers to blacklist and whitelist given ads and advertisers.

The ads suck for a lot of reasons, but lack of capacity to filter them isn't one of them.

Plenty of ad units that you see on a publisher may be filled by Adsense on one pageview and by another ad network in another one. Those networks may or may not have the same quality requirements that Adsense does.

Publishers tend to optimize for the amount of money they can make from an ad rather than how good it looks. An ad ops person will filter out offensive or porny ads while otherwise looking to top out their commission pay.

They also give some control over how the text ads appear in terms of color and font: https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/6002607?hl=en

It's just that a lot of publishers don't know how to handle the settings or don't care. Most publishers are not tech-first companies, and their websites don't make the bulk of their revenue anyway. For any TV channel, their website is a rounding error in terms of total revenue.

They are supposed to be programmatically targeted, but programmatic is not as accurate as it's billed as. They do get targeted, but a lot of the traffic that they go after is spoofed somehow or otherwise inaccurate. Models of web traffic are much less accurate than unmodeled subscriber rolls.

Lots of high end people pay out the nose for information collection and shaping. They're called assistants. Others pay for specialized newspapers and magazines for their profession. There is no such thing as 'free' media because time and attention have value. If the information is more important than the entertainment value, then you can pay someone $10-15 an hour part time to read everything that you need read and give you a digest.

You can also have an ad-free life by paying someone else to read the news for you and moving to a rural area, where there are few billboards.

Print ads tend to have better targeting because the subscriber rolls get backed up with credit card numbers in most cases. This is a case in which early 20th century technology is a lot more reliable than 21st century programmatic advertising.

And from the seller's point of view, it's damn near impossible to work out the ROI. You can't assume that view-click-sale works, because often people will research a product before buying. So you don't know if they've seen the ad once, or fifty times, or been persuaded to buy in some other way.

Actually, you can, at a certain level of scale and spending on many platforms. That requires the user fingerprinting that bugs privacy advocates so much. It's called 'cross-channel attribution,' and there's a lot of material out there about it.

Also, it's not that users aren't intelligent. Most people are pretty dumb, but few of the people with disposable income are dumb. You use repetition because you're only getting a fragment of someone's attention, and a fragment of someone's cognition is pretty 'stupid.'

The better ad networks ban auto play audio. Unfortunately, what ad networks are being used on a given page can change frequently, as publishers shift between what ads they show based on who is bidding highest.

There are advertising standards boards that recommend against these kinds of ads, but unfortunately, not enough publishers take them seriously.

FB's demoting the value of that 'like' button for non-publisher brands, while preserving its value for publishers.

Remember, small to mid sized advertisers make up roughly 55% of US ad spending [1], so if Facebook wants to fulfill its mission, it can't just churn and burn these little guys and hope that they come back wallets open. There are such a dazzling array of options that aren't Facebook that it isn't as if they're the only guys in town.

FB should understand that advertisers could, for the most part, care less if a giant fireball hit Facebook's offices and the company disappeared tomorrow. There are tons of perfectly serviceable replacements for, users, the people who pay for the social network, and investors looking for better opportunities.

[1]http://kantarmedia.us/press/kantar-media-reports-us-advertis...

The reason why these guys are getting cleaned up is because the teams at companies like King set it up so that they will choke out their possible competitors with sky-high rates.

Working as intended.

Which their ad platform is mostly OK at doing. This is about using the social channels as a business like an ordinary user. Which is overall not a good move to make.

Once you truly know the audience, it opens up whole new opportunities for marketing (subtle product placement, indirect promotion via influencers etc) - which almost nobody is doing effectively right now.

'Subtle' is actually illegal, but that doesn't stop a whole lot of people... these kinds of arrangements will deplete the trust of social channels, which I don't care about, because I expect it to happen, but some of you people might.

What we see instead is the same tired web banner concept, clumsily applied to FB or Twitter, and we're getting inundated by ads (that annoying DOMO 'are you still using Excel for your data?' ad comes to mind) - no wonder they are not seeing any ROI.

Domo probably sees ROI, even though I agree their product is dumb.

Most banners are mediocre formats because of the way that the human eye tracks the page. These are increasingly being replaced by in-stream or semi randomized formats that mimic print tradition more than banner methods. The in-stream formats used by the social networks are not like banners because

a( they're randomized b( they're within the typical user's eye-path

Those two points go after the banner blindness issue.

I think the bigger problem is that social networking is a fad that may not be capable of really supporting advertising, just because of the value that users expect from using them. For the same reasons we hate unsolicited marketing that comes in by phone, many people dislike advertising that comes in by social networking.

Girls clip out the ads in Seventeen magazine to save for later. Almost none of them save-as the ads they see on social networks. I would not care, as an advertiser, if all the social networks popped out of existence tomorrow and banned advertising. I would adapt. It really doesn't matter to me whether these companies live or die.

Good call.

Yeah, but it's not like there aren't a lot of companies already out there making personalized stickers. There are many of them.

A marginal innovation in sticker-making is something interesting for Sticker Makers Quarterly; not the flagship magazine for thinkfluential technological super-innovation.

SV will not care about this until another 2000-level crash. Then, they will be forced to care, because the revenue will stop coming in. Until then the community will do the see no evil / hear no evil / speak no evil routine.

Yes. You can. Google has made some acquisitions lately in this anti-fraud space.

Most of the Valley does not care, and seems to be invested in maintaining and expanding the scale of the fraud. The market will eventually punish this when conditions change to be less frothy. It will be 2000 redux, for similar reasons as to why SV lost so much credibility the last time around (pervasive traffic fraud).

Another example, ads that follow me. Oh god how I hate these. I visit a website, usually for a product that I already own, and the freaking ad from that company follows me wherever I go. This is money wasted.

Well, they do work for some people. They just have to be managed in a way that doesn't create this annoyance. You cap the frequency or make it so that the offer is actually attractive and useful to the user. Or you limit what it triggers on to only go off when the user does something that signals their intent to become a customer (like adding certain items to their cart and then abandoning without buying).

Many things that people hate about online advertising as a whole is more caused by people mismanaging the ads than is caused by platform problems.

As in, should most web content be free if more and more people are declining to have display advertising render properly in their browser? It can't be at scale and consistently without a revenue engine of some kind.

If someone successfully exploited the web and created a business relying on ads, that's fine, but he don't have an implicit right for that. Internet users are not obliged to display data he provides through http the way the creator expects.

No, they're not. As this trend continues, the assumption that underwrites a lot of free content will stop being nearly as true. When the assumption stops being accurate, that business model fails, and more free 'content' winds up being ads gussied up as content. This is not exactly what the visionaries of the web had in mind, but them's the breaks.

In print, there are free publications handed out on street corners and in boxes. They tend to have low ad rates because the distribution is unverifiable. On cable, ad rates are still super-high, because the distribution is verifiable, and the cable networks have all the data they need about you on your cable bill + viewership surveys to aggregate for sale to advertisers.

Agreed. Question is whether it's harder or easier than restricting traffic fraud, and if you can comply with know your customer laws and still protect privacy.

This is pretty close to ad fraud.

However, I agree with you that display ad networks suck. I'm also not sold on the idea that the web should be free. The happy medium is to have users pay for content, making it so advertisers don't need to track users to verify that they're real humans, and improving the web for everyone except poor people.

One way that this could be done is to use bitcoin for tiny micropayments, billed frictionlessly. Rough for legal reasons among others, but ideas like this are sensible if only for human verification reasons.

If you want the web to largely free content, to pay for that you must accept privacy-destroying ad networks to bear that cost. We've created a situation where the choice is to free ride on other people, or to surrender privacy.

If you want the web to be largely teasers for paid content, then you can have significantly more privacy also. Instead of the articles being articles, you will get articles that are actually big ads for paid content (already the case for a huge number of popular search results).

Spreading tools like these kills free content like snaps fingers loudly that. I'm indifferent. Users might not be.

For some people. For sales people and others whose job it is to be ready for interruption all day, it's convenient.

"They're always trying to alter peoples' behavior."

Just like every customer of the Wall Street Journal that's not a subscriber. All of the sophisticated advertisers for the Journal, online and in print, are running similar tests.

Building a nuclear power plant solves a lot of energy problems. Getting a permit to build one is more challenging than assembling the engineers to do it.

Innovating on the hospital is not even legal. You don't need to ask permission to develop an app (unless you count Apple's process as permission).

Actually, this also undermines the credibility of the institution that you attended. You can say "that's a small sample size," but it's indicative of larger problems at the institution that the honor code was not so internalized that bluffing the data would result in social ostracism.

The 'hard' sciences in the US are developing as much of a credibility problem as its 'soft' sciences. Institutional science may not be working out for us as well as has been hoped. It's a recent establishment and may not survive without a reversal in the decay of standards.

Right. This is the correct way to do it, with natural language related to the ad.

Amazing. Thanks for this.