This is starting to sound very paperclippy. Ads fund the AIs to make us click on ads to fund AIs that are even better at getting us to click on even more ads.
Yeah, and look at how some very simple clustering ML/recommender systems impact social/political dynamics all to keep people engaged on the site and maximize chances to click ads ( see youtube/facebook, etc. ).
Damn right but I don't understand why. That is, why is ads business generating so much profits that it allows to build such ridiculously powerfull devices ? Is it because it's genuinely full of money or is it because Google is so central that it makes tons of money out of lots an dlots and lots of small adverts ?
It's a monopoly on eye balls. People don't casually walk in front of domain names, they must find them on Google
As a result, spending ad money on Google is ridiculously expensive, but companies accept this because there is no alternative hoping to "build long lasting relations" with the people who make them pay upwards of 1 dollar per click
At the same time it is also a huge bubble, that Google is just hoping will never burst. People and businesses way overestimate the impact their ads are having and way underestimate the impact, that treating customers well can have.
I definitely think this is the strategy of google leaders, they've heard to much of "how do you monetize your products?" from investors and now they are maximizing profits for that current software generation. I wonder though if that bulk of money will be that much of an advantage when the tides turn. It could attract the wrong kind of leadership amongst other things like customer distrusts and turn the company into an IBM of some sort. Namely, I would rather maximize youtube premium memberships (which is at "only" 50 millions) over ads (surely they've local-maximized the balance between the two as it is) - but its easier said than done.
I think both are important. Word of mouth is useful and important but no one would use google to search to buy stuff if that was the only way to reach customers.
Also, if your established it probably a good idea not to let new competitors get a foot hold in the market with an easy google win.
It's also pretty effective for local businesses because not a lot of local businesses are tech savvy enough use it effectively.
> people who make them pay upwards of 1 dollar per click
FWIW, the cheapest (quality) clicks I've seen, at least in the B2B space, is closer to $3/click, and it can quickly balloon to upwards of $10/click especially on company brand names where competitors are bidding on another company's brand name.
Knowing this, I cringe every time I'm screensharing with someone and they search "[B2B Company] login" to login to a tool they use every day. Each login = $2-$10
It's not uncommon for companies to spend $100k+/year JUST bidding on their own company name.
It honestly escapes me how these companies can be sustainable. The whole market is sooo inefficient. Companies also pay crazy money to appear in privileged positions in supermarkets shelves, and they will often pay crazy money for simply being in the supermarket at all
I just don't get where all the marketing money is coming from. Bootstrapping is clearly not an option these days
Computers DOUBLED the productivity of the USA since the second world war. All that money went to a few people and groups, and none of it went to average people. For decades, companies have just been sloshing the same giant pile of cash around and around the Ads ecosystem.
That bag of chips did not cost $4 to make, not even a little close.
My working theory is, that advertising is the overhead cost of doing capitalism. There is a certain percentage of resources which have to be spent on advertising to keep the system functioning. Google is good at grabbing a large portion of a huge pile of money.
Not really. It's sufficient to show cool products in "TV" shows (robotic vacuum cleaner in a procedural crime drama might even be a plot device, absorbing murderer's hair to be found by detectives, gasp!).
Coupled with a magazine or a show presenting new product categories for those interested, customers will eventually visit a physical or online shop and check out the goods. And then word of mouth will do the rest.
Aggressive advertising will mostly just help you get ahead of your competitors and perhaps speed up the adoption rate at the cost of increased volatility of the market and to the detriment of people's mental health.
We would be better off regulating aggressive ads away.
> Aggressive advertising will mostly just help you get ahead of your competitors
That's a hell of a load-bearing "just" you managed to insert there. Getting ahead of your competitors in market share can be the difference between having a company succeed or fail.
So if nobody is "getting ahead of competitors", does it mean that "capitalism is not functioning"? (which was the point of the comment to which the reply was)
Product placement is still advertising, likewise advertising plays a role in getting people to go to that online or brick and mortar shop instead of some other one.
I propose a law: nobody can advertise a product without mentioning all the brands which offer same or similar product on the market (and the mention must be neutral or positive).
Or: all advertisers of all brands with a same or similar product must collaborate. Only voluntary input counts as collaboration; if a brand simply doesn't care about presentation of itself in the advertisement, they have trivially collaborated. Easiest way to implement this is giving every owner of all relevant brands a right to veto every entire final advertisement product (this right could also be surrendered, for all or some possible vetoed advertisements, in exchange for something in a contract).
Ignoring flaws of this proposition itself, what could be society's reasons for rejecting it? Does society perhaps want havers of more money to gain further advantage over havers of less money?
>nobody can advertise a product without mentioning all the brands which offer same or similar product on the marke
Maybe 50 years ago that would have worked. Today, not so much. Go to Amazon and look, well, just about anything. What is BEHENO, what is DINGEE, what is Etoolia, what is Romedia, what are the over 300 different 6/7 letter companies that show up when I search up some random product.
Unfortunately your consideration causes its own parasite effect of countless companies forming up to feed of the big advertisers budget.
Since the product is standard, why is it actually bad? If there are too many brands to be included in a single advert, just choose randomly (the lower the price, the higher the probability for a single brand; I don't know the function).
Because, in the US, this will quickly fall foul of free speech laws. Over 'public' airwaves maybe you could go some distance with this, but advertising on private property, as long as it is not fraudulent will present a constitutional challenge to what your saying.
And, you're also crating a regulatory nightmare. Say I put up an add for XXYZXX company, and it includes ZZXYZZ and YYXZYY information (I mean totally random picks), and I just happen to have a stake in those companies too. Now you're going to have to track hundreds of thousands of these entities to ensure no fraud is occurring, and in most cases the fines for this kind of behavior are well under the cost of doing business.
Everything you've said so far just creates bigger messes and solves nothing.
It solves a hypothetical skew towards brands offered by already richer businesses.
About regulation, how hard is it to just audit the random picking procedure?
I now understand that my second variant, with vetoing of final advertisement, is very flawed (one can cheaply obstruct anyone's advertisement by making a company that vetoes any version of it). How about dividing an advertisement into pieces of information solely about each distinct brand, and let every brand owner compose the piece for its brand? Then all pieces are added into final concrete form in a collaboration - I think it would succeed in most cases, and if brand owners can't collaborate, then an independent company will work on it.
Then we need to look how exactly freedom of speech is defined. If it means ability to express views without attaching any additional information, then such freedom is incompatible with my proposal. But if freedom of speech allows attaching additional information as long as base message is preserved, I see no problems. Note that the proposal essentially just forces you to advertise other brands as they wish, along with any advertisement that you do, which (brands) it doesn't mention.
@h4kor one of my crazy ideas is to cap money companies are allowed to spend on Marketing once they reach a certain size. It would encourage a better form of decentralized capitalism and prevent monopolies
This could easily turn out to be counterproductive. It would provide an additional incentive to hide marketing in all kinds of other business activities rather than openly advertise what's on offer.
Marketing is already difficult to tell apart from other company communications, product documentation, etc. What about a company blog showing how to use their products? Is that marketing or product documentation?
The point is that "openly" advertising would be capped. That would reduce the price of doing so, making it more affordable to smaller players and removing the insane profits ad monopolists enjoy today. Plus, "openly" advertising is one of the most effective ways of advertising. Lastly, by diverting marketing budgets to non-traditional routes (charity donations, etc), the economy would benefit as money would be spread more evenly across
I wonder if there’s some sort of automatic stabilizer that could be applied instead.
Tax ad companies, and spend that money on education. The better ad companies are doing, the more we spend on education, the fewer gullible marks we produce, the worse ad companies will do.
sure, but what do you consider to be an ad company? is a newspaper that places sponsored articles an ad company? accounting for "marketing" expenses might be easier to track and at the end of the day, companies use accountants that are liable and so need to report accurately
Exactly, it’s the mechanism for exchanging information in a capitalist economy.
Conversely, in Communist systems they could never get this right. Factories were just told to produce 5 or 10% more than last year, didn’t matter if the product quality was worse or if people didn’t want it.
There was some competition amongst consumer goods producers and TV and other ads in the UUSR. High scarcity of good quality stuff meant they didn’t need to advertise but there was also an oversupply of junk nobody needed. Those companies has to move their inventories somehow since it was much harder for them to go bankrupt.
A little freaky when you think about what that really means. Some of the most advanced AI systems in the world are solely focused on being good at manipulating human behavior. Cool... cool cool cool............
Tangentially, I think this explains the conspiracy theory that ad companies are spying on everyone's phones and serving ads based on what we talk about in real life.
Think about all the stuff ChatGPT and GPT-4 can do with even minimal prompting. Even when they hallucinate, the text is still ostensibly coherent and natural sounding. Now imagine a similarly powerful model, but its input is a ton of metadata about your behavior and its output is ads.
Now consider that adtech has had substantially more funding for substantially longer than research into LLMs, so ad serving models are probably way more powerful and optimized than even GPT-4.
Another thing is: people's individual behavior is not as unique as we'd like to think. As a whole everyone is unique, but in single surprisingly complex aspects of our life we are hardly ever alone.
It's ads that makes the market efficient. Potential customers should know the corresponding producers so that the information assumption of a ideal market stands.
How else would I know that “Elon Musk created a TeslaX platform that allows everyone to get rich”? Or was it Pavel Durov… Seriously, I can’t even report these on YouTube.
