On Facebook you buy ads for ~$1+ because you can set target demographic to something as specfic as "women; 42-47 years old; looking for relationships with other women; with a degree in biology or computer science; attened Harvard; Works at IBM; who likes horseback riding or skiing"
Imagine if google knew BOTH your search term and your complete personal history. Then the ad price and conversion would increase enormously.
I am not convinced it is that useful to have explicitly targeted audiences for advertisement. It may be better to understand and interpret an ad campaign, but generally, what works best when doing statistical prediction is not what is the most intuitive.
Also, even though your example is obviously not meant to be taken as is, it shows that targeted demographics quickly don't have a lot of data behind them. Successful stories in AI usually involves lots of averaged data with only little "focused" data to adapt your model quickly (e.g. as done in speech recognition where models are estimated on 1000s of hours from many speakers, and the model is then adapted for the one speaker to be recognized).
I think the value of the so called social graph for advertising is overestimated. IMO, what's interesting about facebook is more the amount and diversity of data than its personalized nature. But then, I have little knowledge about algo for advertisement targetting, maybe the situation is different than the domains I am familiar with.
> "I am not convinced it is that useful to have explicitly targeted audiences for advertisement. It may be better to understand and interpret an ad campaign, but generally, what works best when doing statistical prediction is not what is the most intuitive."
If you've collected marketing data that tells you your conversion rate among pet owners is 2% when your conversion rate among the general public is 1%, then you know that every ad you show to pet owners is going to have twice the impact on your bottom line.
Ad targeting enables you to collect this kind of data and to exploit it once you have it. If you find the right audience, your advertising dollars can go more than twice as far.
Buying a sponsored AdWords ad on Google results in people viewing it while they are actively looking to solve a problem or buy a product.
Buying an ad on Facebook that happens to be related to something they once had interest in, and may still do, will result in it being shown while they are not always looking to solve a problem or buy a product, but to entertain themselves, and most importantly may not care about that subject at that moment.
Online advertising is not a cut and dry field. You can get great results from either place, but you won't get the same results from both, at least in my experience.
The thing is that Google dont kneed to place ads on Google+, but they will know your personal information and place better targeted AdWords for each person.
From my experience as a Facebook app developer for household brands, Facebook ads are one of the most effective methods of marketing today. Across all of the IP we manage, our company is behind over 800 million fans, likes, and shares, and a significant portion of that was generated from those ads.
Who says it's about effectiveness of the ad? It might just be effectiveness of getting money from the advertisers. More data means you can do more hand-waving to say that this ad will be the one that really really reaches people this time.
Because in the end if ads are not effective, you won't be getting money from the advertisers anymore. Marketers can't know in advance which marketing channels will work - so they kinda carpet bomb with their campaigns. However once they start getting data, they sure as hell kill of the channels that don't work.
Unethical behavior does not scale in business, no matter how much your calculations rationalize it. In the end people just go away from sleazy businesses. GM and Ford might tell you a story about it and millions of others short term profit oriented businesses also.
Theres only so much bullshit you can pile up before your reputation catches on to you.
The classic statement on advertising is attributed to John Wanamaker (1838 - 1922), a businessman who pioneered department stores in the United States: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." As long as tools to analyze which advertising money works and which doesn't in an overall advertising campaign leave room for hand-waving, merchants will spend too much on the advertising arms race.
As much as I'd like to think you're right, you're probably wrong. The advertising industry is making very real money, which gives people an incentive to keep it going even though it delivers close to nothing.
Why do people buy Coca Cola? Is it because of the tremendously expensive advertisements they put out or is it because the stuff is ubiquitous, tastes fairly good and is usually not surrounded by a lot of competing products at the places where it's sold?
Don't believe me? What about if you're in a restaurant that sells only Pepsi. Do you leave the restaurant in search of another that sells Coca-Cola? Most people probably don't, thereby proving that all the so-called "positive emotions" advertisements instill in consumers do absolutely nothing when the time comes to make purchase. Theoretically, yes, in a situation where you can choose either Pepsi or Coca-Cola for (roughly) the same price, Coca-Cola's advertising campain may have an effect, but such situations are exceedingly rare. In most purchasing decisions there are variables that have much more significance than the advertising history of the products.
So ads are, probably, not effective. And despite this fact, there has been an industry selling them for over a century and that industry has been getting richer and richer, thereby proving that you can perfectly well build a business on scamming people and keeping it up indefinitely. You do, however, have to keep playing around with some superficial parameters of your business model to keep it convincing. Which is exactly what Google is doing here.
(btw, I use - and love - Google's services, but never in my life have I clicked one of their ads or even looked at one for more than a split second)
I was talking of marketing in general. Advertising is only a single branch of marketing.
And its obvious that Coca-Cola's marketing has been waaay better than Pepsi's. And also I believe that Pepsi is quite comfortable in its #2 position. As is Burger King in its own.
Don't forget, that second biggest player in a huge market is usually still a friggin big behemoth. And that for Pepsi and BK being #2 is a core business strategy. Less upside, but also less downside. These companies basically use their bigger competitors as a hedge against market change.
Errr.... you have occasionally been in convenience stores and supermarkets, yes? Restaurants that serve both Coke and Pepsi are rare, yes, but stores where you can buy either are an everyday thing for most of us...
Given how precious space is in supermarkets, and how companies pay for prominent placement, the whole side of the aisle devoted to soda at mine inclines me to disagree.
What I meant was Coca Cola probably sells more soda in places like fast food restaurants, gas stations and pubs than in supermarkets. And probably at higher margins, too.
At one point my college campus was a "Pepsi campus" and you could not buy anything but Pepsi. I think I bought it once, and I drink far more Coke than is probably healthy. That stuff tastes bad. I would bring my own Coke from home or buy water. If I'm at a grocery store and they're out of Coke, I will take the red label no-name cola over Pepsi or blue label cola. While we're at it, if people didn't care that much about the difference, I doubt my grocery store brand would make both kinds of cola.
It sounds like you're not very familiar with the industry.
One of the reasons Google's advertising programs are so successful is that they are measurable. A site can compute return on investment and know that for every $X spent on Google ad clicks they are generating $Y in sales.
I'd love to hear some figures on that, because the ones I've seen from various (large) online retailers were abysmal. Setting up adwords campaigns for these retailers was a fun diversion, in some cases also a good excuse to huff and puff about the future of online marketing, but not at all a significant source of revenue. It was done mostly "to keep an online presence", probably out of fear that if they didn't buy those adwords someone else would.
The retailers I'm talking about may not be representative, however: they already had a strong market presence and strong brand recognition before they went online. Maybe there are businesses that have started from scratch online that did see significant revenue from adwords, but I doubt it.
The more niche you are, the more effective Adwords will be. High volume/low margin rarely makes sense on Adwords, because you'll face death by a thousand cuts by people who can target better, make bigger margins, bid higher and get better QS.
For businesses that can best exploit Adwords targeting, it can be breathtakingly effective. I've dealt with specialist contractors who saw 25000% ROI on their Adwords spend. Search terms like "loan consolidation" and "car insurance" cost tens of dollars per click and are absolutely worth that much.
The question Coke's ads answer is not just Pepsi Or Coke, it is To Coke Or Not To Coke. You always have the option of drinking water. Water dominates Coke as a beverage for health, it (perhaps) loses on taste and texture. Hence a lot of advertising stressing Coke's positives. How do you know that when you say it tastes fairly good that they haven't gotten to you too?
That's why we skip ads in my house, they are just too hot to handle.
Excellent point here. There's a lot of advertising dollars to be spent, in fact too much. Superbowl advertisements certainly didn't help companies like Pets.com during the bubble, but man, did the NFL cash in on that one!
A lot of sales guys sell by telling stories, not necessarily by persuading metrics, and all the contextual data makes for GREAT stories.
I originally wrote from my iPad and I have a hard time using the touch keyboard.
Here's my 2 cents:
1) Cheaper than Adwords, much much cheaper. The ads tend to be expensive when you first get an estimate from Facebook, but in practice, this number goes down 5-fold. Also, in comparison to Adwords, it is at least 5-fold cheaper.
2) Easier to target people. This depends on what you are doing, but I believe it works better if you are trying to build a community with a specific interest. However, Adwords is probably better for targeting advertising for an e-commerce store.
3) If you advertise your fan page, you have a hook to constantly advertise to your fans. I like building my fan page, generating conversation, and sparking interest. It is important to give users good content, but it also doesn't hurt to self promote about 10-20% of the time. It all depends on what you are doing.
I am convinced that it is useful. I do it every day :)
Without going into specifics, think of this data as just another signal to use in ad targeting. Maybe users in certain regions are more likely to purchase a product? Maybe men versus women, people who have kids, people in certain income ranges. We ad people use all this info to eek out performance from campaigns.
Google is going for the holy advertising grail with +
If advertisement is paid per click, and not per impression, Google itself is interested in better targeting of what to display to whom, because it frees up inventory without impacting revenue.
But you don't have fewer impressions. The number of ads you display doesn't change, you can display just as many targeted ads as you can untargeted ones. If each of the targeted ads has a higher conversion rate, the number of clicks goes up without ever changing the total number of ads you display.
The number of impressions Google has to sell in total is determined by the number of pageviews. They still have to optimize what to show to whom. (And of course, make people view their pages more often.)
However, Google know what you're looking for, and all your past search terms. Although Facebook might have more demographic information, with google, you can target ads for people who are looking for dog worming tablets, regardless of who they are.
There are areas where it's already at close to that. In law & education for example, there are certain area/keyword combinations that can be turned into phone calls at a very high rate. Add in a few more filters (eg has 14 year old child) and that conversion rate goes up. Gogle already translates conversion rates in active markets into click prices very efficiently.
It would really be expanding the number of $100 clicks available and I think thats almost inevitable.
I find it highly implausible that google has as strong a desire to form simple, narrow narratives around its strategy and ambitions as bloggers and the media do.
Great usage of the G+ photo viewer for slides, but I don't think G+'s main focus is about moving apps/games into the cloud ..
The most convincing argument I have heard is that 'social signals' are (going to be?) a fantastic resource for cutting through the spammy, link-swapping www of today.
I'm not quite used to seeing a photo of myself in the top bar across Google sites, but I can certainly see where they're taking this is more than the 'facebook killer!!' the media would make it out to be. Google has a lot more to offer as a company than Facebook - YouTube, Docs, two OSs, a vast ad network, search and news - in addition to their features which overlap with FB, such as Blogger or Picasa. Google+ is unifying all of that into a very impressive product, which is rather unprecedented. I'd be looking at what Apple thinks, too. And Amazon... it's definitely not just about Facebook.
It's times like this that I wish HN was curated. It seems that everyday we get posts like this where some random person - "I'm a first time tech founder; I'm also a first time programmer." - conjures up a bunch of ideas supported only by their imagination.
I think his usage of G+ album to create a presentation was awesome and inspiring.
Also I believe he has a point. And found his message to be more lucid, clear and entertaining than 90% of three paragraph ramblings about this and that around here.
And just as a conclusion. Bill Gates was once a radnom person, as was Larry Page, Steve Jobs, Paul Graham, etc...
Maybe you should focus more on originality and evaluate merit of these ideas instead of only craving for more stuff to be fed down your throat by current status Quo holders.
And I believe that this is what HN is about. HN is curated, by HN community - and it's obvious that HN community believes this contribution's place is at the top of the front page.
What was his point? Where's the data to back it up. That's right, there's nothing of substance, only speculation. If your high profile names wrote some speculative piece I would consider it equally worthless. Either your argumentation has merits or it doesn't.
I don't think you understand the meaning of curation. Curation doesn't imply censorship or that a certain group of people filter content based on a certain set of value, rather it means that they would ensure a high signal to noise by removing posts that don't really contribute to a discussion.
I think you're over analyzing. G+ is out for barely two weeks now. It has not even been released to the general public. Any internal strategy Google itself has is merely of speculative nature until it gets proven or not.
Any great strategy is merely speculation also is figuring and/or anticipating other peoples moves. A great strategist needs to have a great gut feeling and be lucky. When Napoleon was presented with a new officer and after his merits have been presented to him, he supposedly asked "Very well, but is he lucky?".
That is why bean counters never get to do anything great. And that is why people love good speculators. And all the guys I mentioned are incredible speculators.
Not everything can be quantified and analyzed. And regarding curation - the community has decided that this specific piece of speculation is interesting and insightful. I hope I don't need to remind you that this particular mob is not you average Joe Sixpack mob?
Right now, G+ is populated by a bunch of early adopters and it's pretty nice, mostly because 90% of the folks you know and only keep in touch with out of a sense of duty haven't gotten in, and G+ doesn't support superpoke and Zynga yet.
Even so, with a smallish population of users and the spammers still figuring out how to operate, G+ has some serious usability problems (like you can only see 2-3 items in your stream at a time on a high resolution display) and it's already getting kind of spammy. In to succeed, Google needs to maintain laser-like focus of usability and continue to innovate on a small number of features -- it can't just glom random stuff onto it or integrate random GoogleLabs projects.
For those whom Google Docs is a suitable replacement for Sharepoint, I doubt integrating G+ will make a huge difference. For those for whom Google Docs is inadequate, G+ won't tip the balance. If G+ takes the proposed approach it will actually alienate many potential users. It's better to embrace the outside world than replace it. (And, in fact, it contradicts the "blue ocean" strategy.)
Frankly, from a big picture strategic viewpoint, it's great to see Google annihilating Facebook, but it's fiddling while China burns. It's losing search, and no-one in China aspires to own an Android phone -- they're saving up to buy iPhones and using non-Google Android phones while they wait.
"Even so, with a smallish population of users and the spammers still figuring out how to operate, G+ has some serious usability problems (like you can only see 2-3 items in your stream at a time on a high resolution display) and it's already getting kind of spammy."
My feed has interesting/funny comments and links... because I just put interesting and funny people in my circles. And I don't consider the fact that I can only see 2-3 items on a high-res display bad if the quality of the content is higher than other sites I visit. There are some blogs whose index page have the same issue and I'm fine with it because I know that every single piece of content posted is well worth the surface area.
G+ is about moving everything into the Google "cloud". In a same way Facebook (and VKontakte, and whatever else) is about moving everything into their "cloud".
Cloud is a buzzword, it doesn't really mean anything here.
G+ is just a Buzz (thus, GMail) + GTalk + Picasa + Latitude + Google Profiles, covered under one convenient interface. You can't peer with it, you have to actually use it itself (i.e., have and maintain an account there). Yes, there are some APIs to control that account (FB has some, too), and you could have a backup copy of your own data, but doesn't really matter.
YES! I stopped reading when I hit that slide. It's a bunch of bullshit and handwaving that people do when they don't know what the hell they're talking about.
As far as Cloud hype & buzzwords goes. I was of same opinion until I started doing my startup. Now basically all infrastructure I have (besides my personal computers) is of SAAS nature somewhere in yes Cloud.
We could say Internet, but that would be confusing - since Internet is such a broad term.
For what its worth as a reformed nonbeliever I'm telling you. Cloud is awesome and its here to stay. So you better get used to it.
Cloud is a good thing, but it is pointless buzzword in that context. "Cloud" is when you distribute your stuff over some cluster of physical machines. This increases reliability, allows to scale performance, simplifies deployment and so on. Does it matter to end-user how Google infrastructure's organised inside?
Sure, some cloud providers have compatible APIs (as this is the case with Amazon S3 API), so the data could be moved between "clouds" easily. Compatibility is not a general property of a "cloud", and moreover - this is not a case with G+.
And SAAS is not a "cloud", it's just that nowadays most SAAS are marketed as "cloud" because they internally rely on some distributed storage or processing system. It's just that "cloud" quickly became a buzzword, replacing cumbersome "SAAS" abbreviation.
We've had SAAS in 90's (and, probably, earlier). Remember hosted forums, webchats and guestbooks? This was certainly SAAS, and probably not a "cloud".
Summary: Google+ is an attempt to move applications/things onto the web, and make sharing and coloborating easier. The goal is not to take on Facebook/Twitter, but to take on MS Office and App Stores
> "do you know how often people still email documents / photos / spreadsheets?"
Great, so G+ is yet another attempt to get people to stop using common communications standards like email and instead break the internet up into a set of distinct one-provider-oriented services that can't talk to each other?
Apple has the game center where all your scores form your iPhone are automatically loaded into a public database with your friends scores. It's the same for Zynga and Facebook.
The problem is that your social graph on Facebook is probably everyone you've ever met. Google+, on the other hand, feels much more like using email. Circles are kind of like mailing lists which we use to keep in touch with real friends and colleagues. Incidentally, these are also the people we email photos, documents and presentations to.
Circles is at the heart of Google+ because it makes everything they own better. More and more apps are going to move into the cloud and I'm betting that Google+ is going let developers take advantage of this.
There was a post on here about it recent enough, but I don't think I saved the link. It basically suggested that it shouldn't matter what social network your friends are using - you should be able to seamlessly connect with someone who is using facebook from google plus.
I would expect that idea to apply to apps and the sharing of documents as well. If your friend is not using google plus, the document could be sent to their email instead, but the though process would be "I need to send them this document" instead of "I need to email this document to them" or even "I need to send them this document using google docs".
But how does Google+ help accomplish that goal? It's a closed platform just like every other has been; for that you need federation APIs (like those of Appleseed & StatusNet) to enable cross-server communication.
I remember reading somewhere that Google's overarching policy is really a "scorched earth" policy where due to the "fuck you" money afforded them by their search business, they are able to offer services and products from which their competitors (probably anybody in tech) derive their core business from for almost nothing. Effectively this creates a moat around the Google castle with the surrounding land razed, allowing no one else to subsist or grow large enough to ever challenge them.
Sometimes I believe this...sometimes I don't. Any thoughts?
Why can't it be about both? Also, from the perspective of Google, why let Facebook enjoy the 'blue ocean' of social, if the blue/red ocean is such an important concept for new products?
G+ is also about giving Google a much richer social relationships graph than anyone has ever had. I can only wonder at the long-term effects of the information asymmetries that are developing. At least with twitter (and fb, for that matter) most of the relationships were public.
From where I stand, G+ is about advertising - the more information Google have about you, the better they can target ads at you, and therefore the more likely you are to click on their ads, thereby making them money.
G+ is a move into social media, what's a better way to have live data on your user base than the data generated by a service you control, and maybe why profiles must be public.
FYI, it's really hard to see the blue ocean / red ocean slides on my mobile device, and enlarging them only makes it blurry (samsung galaxy s). It's funny because I got to the punchline and couldn't read it. I still don't know what it says other than guessing that it's all about the apps.
Nicely done and easier to follow. Although I think just like any good business Facebook cannot let it's guard down no matter what this presentation says.
Imagine if google knew BOTH your search term and your complete personal history. Then the ad price and conversion would increase enormously.
That is what Google is trying to get a piece of.