First, didn't realize this was Rand Fishkin writing it. He knows his stuff. He also has another linked article in there that is more prescriptive on incrementality measurement being all that matters and how to think about it at a high level and I completely agree it is all the matters.
The bottom line is what used to work no longer does, and marketers (and finance and leadership) need to get used to having less fidelity and availability than they were used to. It also means marketing teams who are thrashy trying a new low impact tactic every week instead of constructing experiments likely to deliver statistically significant results on incremental lift are going to be spinning their wheels and wasting dollars. And that's something to watch out for.
Unfortunately, setting up proper experiments, controlling for bias, getting clean data, etc. are material challenges that require skills, scale (to get a read on bottom of funnel especially), and resources/budget.
There aren't great options out there for that now if you're a smaller or mid size company that I'm aware of, though if anyone is aware of them I'd love to have them on my radar.
For low-funnel sponsored advertising, the effects are largely instantaneous, and you can measure your net profit lift simply by turning it on and off every hour (or day).
I would reword this as: It is better to carry a phone around than to carry a CPU around, which is the same as 5
There is no way I am using my phone for anything other than making a phone call when I am sitting in front of my computer.
Funny fact most people didn't live: I had a friend who in the 90's carried a CPU around in the backseat of his car. He thought "smaller computers" were too expensive for what they did and his "portable" computer attracted less robbers
> There is no way I am using my phone for anything other than making a phone call when I am sitting in front of my computer.
This is interesting. There are a significant number of things I'll do using my phone, even if I'm in front of a computer. In particular there are an increasing number of websites that are hideously bloated on a desktop browser, but are quick and don't obscure content so badly on mobile.
And then obviously apps - there are a few apps that I use on my phone where there are desktop options, but I prefer the UX on mobile.
Imagine doing this in 2008 or whatever. Google voice was the future. Pff, checking my voicemail? My voicemails get transcribed and texted to me!
Then they didn’t update it for 10 years, rolled back a bunch of features, and still have not even implemented RCS despite their full-court marketing push for the mandatory adoption of the standard. Fully expecting they’ll sunset it entirely rather than comply with the EU.
I’m trying to rearrange my life so that I can just hop to native iMessage and use that for everything, but I have to run two phone numbers in parallel thanks to all the sms 2fa out there.
Oh and that’s degraded too, 99% of sites no longer take SIP numbers (and sendgrid will not send to my gmail address because it’s got “spam” in the name). So I have been having to switch back to my physical phone number over the years, meaning there's a lot of stuff to clean up. Thanks google.
Even these core services are just actively enshittified, my experience is quantifiably worse than it was 10-15 years ago.
> and still have not even implemented RCS despite their full-court marketing push for the mandatory adoption of the standard.
As a user, I find it hard to be upset about that. RCS as a standard is so bad that my running theory is Google intentionally ruined it so they could promote a broken standard and force Apple to standardize iMessage instead. It's like a thrown-over-the-fence spec that they expect other people to finish for them. I'd have expected the court to block it on the grounds of being an unfair business practice if it didn't promote the smartphone duopoly and surveillance network it entails.
And it's not just the security issues, since both protocols suffer dearly for being centralized. It's a further fracturing of a system we can both agree is broken, pushing us towards Another Competing Standard that doesn't even want to compete. Since we're all in agreement that both iMessage and RCS are backdoored just like SMS, can't we just let the government coordinate text messaging and stop wasting everyone's time with proprietary products? It's exhausting and runs opposite to what we expect from modern communications infrastructure.
> There is no way I am using my phone for anything other than making a phone call when I am sitting in front of my computer.
That's perfectly fine.
The key aspect is that people are spending less time in front of a computer and are getting continuously logged into their mobile devices. It doesn't make much sense to focus on how you prefer to read a website on a computer if your users aren't spending time on a computer.
Speaking as a fairly average user, not an SEO expert, I don't think that is the issue. Say I want to figure what rice is good for risotto I'll google around and read some stuff / maybe watch youtube / check reddit and I don't really care if the articles are search engine optimised or not.
What I won't do is click the "Buy superbrand rice now!" link. I'll maybe google brands and stockists and get some from Sainsburys or wherever. It's more users don't like "Buy now!" more than users don't like SEO.
You care indirectly because if the articles are search engine optimized it means they are gaming the search engine by being artificially ranked higher. It’s the role of the search engine to find relevant content to your question impartially, not of the websites themselves. As a user with SEO what you end up seeing is the website that is saying “it’s me!” the loudest, instead of real search results. But I know that boat has sailed, SEO has won and real search engines are dead.
There are community driven recipe platforms which are intended to fill this gap. But Western users don't feel to pay anything for it and unfortunately it costs money to run so these businesses are also dying
Really? The Acquerello example really made me pause – like there are forces pushing in a gentler older-school direction than the surveillance tech I've grown up with.
Local business owners I've talk to who have splurged with an SEO marketing firm this decade regret it almost across the board. After spending many hours adding blog posts and videography to their website to impress the google bot (but which add ~0 value to real clients) their conversions didn't improve noticeably over the simple business card website they'd had before. And the clients they do get are much more trouble than the referrals they get through satisfied clients.
SEO is no longer influential over the kinds of clients you want.
I'm not sure whether it's SEO or AI that is to blame but in the past few years it seems like almost every article on the internet repeats itself in some form at least three times. Most blog posts about a topic feel like they were written as a High School English project. It's actually quite astonishing how bad the internet has become at conveying information compared to what it could be doing.
So I'm tossing around an idea in my head, of implementing a search engine that computes a 'redundancy penalty' on every web page it indexed. The measure of redundancy would need to be multi-scale and consider repeated phrases, points made, and paragraphs as well, so not necessarily a simple problem.
If you think this is something worth pursuing just let me know by commenting below.
First, effective writing will almost always restate the main idea somehow; you'll want your algorithm to be more sophisticated than "demote content that seems to repeat itself."
Second, your novel algorithm will be expensive to compute, so you'll need some other signals to filter out very low value pages before you pay to analyze others.
Finally, your technique will be valuable as a ranking signal until you (or someone else) begins to use your algorithm to help steer non trivial purchasing decisions. At that point, someone will dress up their low-value (or negative value) content to appear "high value" to your algorithm and your output will be filled with spam. You can delay this effect by keeping your user-base small, so consider selling private access to institutions who want a unique view of the internet for research or intelligence purposes.
> someone will dress up their low-value content to appear "high value" to your algorithm
You are falling into the trap of thinking that Google and its competitors are victims of this. They are not.
They are knowingly letting themselves get "exploited" because it turns out that those spam sites contain ads (that may be Google's) or analytics (that may be Google's), or make the search result page ads (from Google) look good in comparison and more likely to be clicked.
The heuristic to detect and block spam in general is very simple. Spam is there to get you to either buy something (the signal is the presence of a credit card form, "buy" call to action, or links that ultimately lead to the former) or view ads (signal there is presence of ads).
This would be very hard to game because those signals only work when they are visible (and obnoxious), which also makes them trivially detectable purely at the visual level by a crude classifier (trained on website screenshots with ads vs the same page with an ad blocker).
The resulting penalty score can be used as a ranking signal, so that all other signals being equal, a result without ads would rank higher than the one with ads for a given query.
This is not rocket science. The problem is that the mainstream search engines have the same business model as the spammers (and profit off each other), so there is no reason to suddenly slaughter the cash cow. The myth that search engines are "victims" to spammers/SEO provides very convenient plausible deniability so they have no reason to disprove that either.
This scoring is awful. Literally what you have done here is incentivise sites from well funded bad actors, or sites that push more elaborate scams on elderly people.
A plausible and sustainable funding model is a good sign for sites.
It's about incentivizing sites to do what the user wants them to do. As a user, 99% of the time I am not out to buy something, so all sites that do try to sell me something are just wasting both my time and their server resources.
This isn't a complete blanket ban on ads or the commercial web. If there isn't a profitable way to run a website that provides the content matching the search query, the ad-infested website will still come up first.
But now, a hobbyist, non-profit or even commercial enterprise that doesn't directly sell to you has a chance to outrank the ad-infested garbage.
First, effective writing will almost always restate the main idea somehow
Effective corporate writing.
This goes back to the era 50 years ago when public speakers were taught "Tell me what you're going to tell me, then tell me what you're telling me, then tell me what you just told me."
It works fine for certain long-form speeches, but as the length of the document/talk decreases, so does the need for repetition.
For the length of 90% of what's on the internet, repetition becomes redundancy and nuisance filler.
Not just length, but interactivity too. That suggestion makes sense for a long monologue that is ephemeral, but in the modern age where the content consumer is in the driver's seat and very little is actually "live", they can scroll/seek back, rereading or relistening to earlier portion, and review the summary and comments to regain context.
Initially snarky/amusing but the post you critique is a well written paragraph in which there is a clear progression and elaboration on one major idea.
Sentence 1: specified that quote is about one specific kind of speech.
Sentence 2: explains origins of the quote - history. It is the history part that makes this sentence valuable and adds something to the reader (me).
Sentence 3: states that this is not effective to the kind of content we talk about - internet articles.
Sentence 4: concludes that repetition is irrelevant and wrong.
-----------------------
The way you tl;dr it, the poster would need to completely change the topic to "not repeat themselves". What they did was saying something new with each sentence, just keeping the "repetition" topic on.
> First, effective writing will almost always restate the main idea somehow; you'll want your algorithm to be more sophisticated than "demote content that seems to repeat itself."
You very much not want it repeated the way it repeats now. Effective writing does not involve writing three similar paragraphs, it makes readers skip those paragraphs.
I’ve read some books where there where some major developments/ twists that were not clearly stated and not repeated. I had to go back and reread paragraphs to understand. If you read the Bible as a fantasy novel you will come across this several times
I would argue that the "were not clearly stated" is the root cause. There is also difference between repeating some fact a reader could have forgotten and repeating whole paragraphs of fluff.
The internet articles we complain about are in the latter category.
> almost every article on the internet repeats itself in some form at least three times
Even videos like YouTube shorts, which are meant to be short, have this problem. They are seriously padded with repetition. Here's thing, have you seen this before? Few people have seen this. Do you know how it works? I'm going to show you. People are surprised when they find out how it works. But I explain it.
There must not be stats on choosing "never suggest this channel again", I select that pretty consistently when I'm looking for short form content and these videos waste all that time.
I used to write blog and stopped as google algoritms changed. Basically, if you do not do SEO with artificial constructions, you was as good as not existing. I could not find my own post in search even when googling the exact topic.
I suspect that not coincidentally, blogosphere as used to be got much much smaller. Writing is not rewarding when no one finds it, so people just dont do it.
I think that AI will make it even worst. When everyone fires ChatGPT to get compilation of stuff, there is even less reason to write. So you dont.
> seems like almost every article on the internet repeats itself in some form at least three times
Spaced repetition, apparently it 'aids retention'. It's the same reason TV ads now run with a second shorter ad for the same thing later in the ad break.
I always recommend SMEs to not use _any_ form of tracking/analytics by default.
Just make the site useful, informative and well presented.
To find out how users interact with it: Ask them, and/or do tests. Use the actual relationship with users to improve the site.
Even ignoring privacy concerns, this mostly avoids bad UX patterns like "cookie banners", makes the sites _significantly_ faster and lighter. You end up with something that is higher quality.
Exceptions to the rule exist, but that is always my baseline recommendation.
Sounds needlessly extreme. Sure, don’t warp your site to please the SEO algorithms, but don’t plug your ears and cover your eyes to the basic info you’re already getting in your access logs.
It's tempting to play tiny violins for marketers who have, as a post below puts it, been "following us round smelling our farts to see what we had for breakfast". But the end of clicks is linked to a Balkanized internet where everything is on a big platform and subject to that platform's political and social filters. Is that good? Noah Smith thinks so [1], but it's not hard to think of disadvantages.
> But the end of clicks is linked to a Balkanized internet where everything is on a big platform
All that's happened is the normies arrived some time ago and are now being herded into large containers, just as they always have. The small sites aren't going anywhere, and they are part of "everything".
Giant corporations owning the biggest sites doesn't effect me in the same way giant corps owning the media companies in the 90s didn't effect me. It's a shame, but that's the way it has to be. The average person wants instant and poor gratification, and they will always be taken advantage of.
Reading it back I agree that it seems snobbish, and I'm sorry for that. I'm tired of bending over backwards to accommodate objectively poor behaviour though. Sometimes you just have to say "this is not for you".
If we go into that with a kind heart (and not just to elevate ourselves above others), it can be a good thing. Admitting unfashionable truths lets us move on to situations where more people are happy.
For my part, I'm more than happy to admit when something is not for me — be that due to a lack of intelligence, interest, or motivation — and I'm happier for it.
"Filthy normies" and such is always a hilarious bit of nerdspeak. But the crux of it, to some degree, I am normie and normie am I - i.e. it's human nature and in all of us. Facebook or reddit never set out to say "Hey, I want to be evil and polarize society". They simply wrote an algorithm, told the algorithm, "Hey algorithm, find out what people like to read, and give 'em more of it". And people answered "we love drama, we love juicy, we love gossip, we love the grey area" which it turns out, gets people worked up, polarized, and keeps eyes on the prize. Just as the original internet was a scholarly interaction method and turned out to be a porn delivery mechanism, so too with social media being intended to join people together and yet it splits us apart. Are we to blame the one who held up the mirror only for humanity to see its own ugly visage and become angered by it, hard to say. Probably we should blame them if they made 9999 gorillon dollars from it, which they did and are doing.
But those people don't really care about how the internet works, they just use the big mainstream sites and go on with their lives.
Everyone else only dislikes them because they're the ones being tailored to. Everything is going to become more generalized and bland because it appeals to the most amount of people, and that makes the most amount of money (and the most boring kind of Internet).
Pre-Telecommunications Act was nothing like Post-Telecommunications Act. Things actually changed. In the early 90s, you could complain about the media being owned by just fifty companies. Now imagining that many media companies seems mythical.
It was also the beginning of automated content, with the "Jack" radio format.
Trivia: if there hadn't been rules against media consolidation, ABC and NBC would never have have been forced to split up.
The same reason television programs aren’t television networks. They all have to play by the platform’s arbitrary rules or their show will get unalived.
"we need to monetize our site more" - proceeds to ruin the experience of the site, driving customers to adblocking technologies, reducing engagements
because adblocking applies to all sites, more sites push more and more intrusive ads, pushing the creation and use of more adblocking technologies.
rinse and repeat until the internet is literally unusable without pihole, uBlock, a good VPN, and a browser that isn't owned google or microsoft.
if real life had advertisements like the internet, we'd have advertisements painted onto the wall of apartments and landlords would get mad at us we cover it up with paint and art.
What makes me wonder is whether it is efficient. Very certainly, there are people who want to rain ads on you from every direction, even when you carry an umbrella and wear Wellington boots.
But does this actually increase the sales of the products being so advertised? Is there a measurable effect? What kind of businesses see uptick in sales, and how real / scammy they are? Does it work in general, or only by hitting some especially gullible individuals, like "Nigerian spam" does? Is it a ruse to oversell ads to gullible business owners, maybe with some help of complicit marketing departments?
I'd also note that not all ads are repulsive. It's mostly the obnoxiously intrusive ones that ruin it. Back in the day Google won a fortune by offering textual ads, that were unobtrusive and lightweight, so users did not jump.to block them, unlike the banner ads of the era. The minimal text ads are still there BTW, but now they seem to load heavyweight and more intrusive pieces of JS :(
> Is there a measurable effect? What kind of businesses see uptick in sales, and how real / scammy they are?
There are plenty of mismatched incentives in the advertising supply chain making it so that very few of the parties involved actually care about an uptick in sales.
You have the marketing department in the company, who gets allocated a certain budget. Their objective is to spend the budget (otherwise they'd get less next time) and find a way to convince their boss that it led to good results so they can justify their own salary/promotion/etc. Sales is a difficult thing to obtain (let alone attribute), but there's this magical thing called "engagement". You can pull it out of thin air.
The marketing/ad agency they hired needs to justify their fee. Again, sales are a difficult thing to obtain (for a start, the product needs to be good and useful to the purchaser) let alone attribute. But again, your objective isn't really sales when you can just show "engagement" and let someone else find an excuse as to how this relates to sales, if any.
The advertising platform is happy to take their money and send (or outright make up) "engagement" their way. They don't care how real or intentional this engagement is. Someone trying to dismiss an obnoxious cookie banner and clicking the ad by mistake? Great! Obnoxious lockscreen ad and person thinks they have to tap the ad to unlock the phone (this is real - I've seen it)? Sure thing!
The websites in turn are paid per click they refer to the advertising platform and don't care about how real/intentional those clicks are either, so placing the ads in inconvenient places where they're likely to attract unintentional clicks is in their interest.
At every layer someone skims some money off the top so everyone is happy to look the other way, and nobody is interested in exploring other approaches (such as a marketplace model where users who intend to buy something can search through ads) because such a model, even if it turns out more efficient in connecting sellers & customers, will eliminate the need for these middlemen which is an obvious problem for them.
> The websites in turn are paid per click they refer to the advertising platform and don't care about how real/intentional those clicks are either, so placing the ads in inconvenient places where they're likely to attract unintentional clicks is in their interest.
Of my maybe 20 ad clicks in the last 10 years, about 19 have been accidental clicks on moving banners on the phone. (Made up guesstimate numbers).
But I had this other revelation. I have a 4yo son, that every now and then sneak up on my wife's Windows computer and clicks every obnoxious embedded Windows' ad he sees until he get to some game he likes. He can end up with like 60 tabs.
Like. How much of ad engagements are really from kids that can't even read? I've seen toddlers click ads on parents phones a lot. The moving ads with pretty colors, might not really be a good ad for the advertiser but just kids pressing the obvious thing to press.
(I've since taken measures to protect him from Windows. Don't worry.)
I've been working in the difital advertising space for >14 years, and I'll second Nextgrid's comment.
>Is it a ruse to oversell ads to gullible business owners, maybe with some help of complicit marketing departments?
Absolutely. That's the dirty secret at the heart of online advertising.
The advertisers are unsophisticated, so there is a staggering amount of fraud taking place. Advertisers have no way / have no interest in checking which sites end up serving their ads, so you get situations where large firms are bankrolling extremist sites [1] (Nandini Jammi does a lot of work to expose how this works)
Because advertising networks are either sketchy or cartelized (search for "project Jedi Blue"), middlemen also skim ~50% of ad spend before it reaches publishers.[2]
But, ads do work. They just work on the portion of the population that is not savvy enough to use adblockers, or wealthy enough to pay for ad-free "Premium". And it is a dwindling group.
It works. I have a friend who works for a small but stable independent company selling a consumer goods ( imagine 10 people selling hats online). 90+% of their revenue depends on marketing. Almost nobody goes to "coolhats.com" to see if there is a sale, and nobody stops by to casually browse hats and see if there is something interesting.
Instead, you have to put a cool hat in front of someone on facebook or reddit and show them. Ideally someone who recently conducted a related keyword search or has otherwise been profiled as a likely buyer.
100%. HN users will sit here and tell you all day long ads don’t work, having worked ad’s adjacent, I can assure you, they do. I do contract work for a bunch of ecommerce customers and for everyone one of them AdWords is 95+ percent of their traffic and sales.
Do they “work” because they’re actually effective, or do they “work” due to being in so many places, that it’s basically inevitable that you end up in some conversion pipeline.
If someone searches for “your_site.com” and the top 3 results are: an ad for “your_site”, “a competitor” and then the link to your site, and someone clicks the ad, and purchases something, that conversion will 100% look like the ad worked, but realistically the user was going to your site anyways.
Since you mentioned Facebook, I find their ads most precisely targeted (seeing as a target audience member regularly presented with relevant ads). They are also not obnoxious, even though not very modest either.
Sadly, many websites and ad networks do a much worse job, which, to my mind, should produce infuriation and make a negative brand image, rather than awareness and sales.
In a similar vein, Instagram was the first platform where I actually took a pause and realized someone had actually figured out how to give me appealing advertising over the internet. I don't use Facebook to know how they differ, it may be practically identical.
My experience is that I use my Instagram account not to interact with my social group but to engage with content I like (primarily art content like sculpture, painting, light/projection, music, etc). It's actually a really pleasant experience and I'm doing my best to protect my groove in the recommendation algorithm. I basically get an effortless feed of art events in my area without me needing to subscribe to a newsletter. And it also engages me with a lot of independent artists selling unique items that I like.
I'd like a company to test out offering a separate tab of 'sponsored links' related to a list of search results. That would provide an advantage to advertisers as they are only charged for views when a person chooses to look at the ads (presumably because they are a more likely customer.) It would benefit users by giving them more actual search results and the choice to see ads, which should benefit the company taking this approach.
> if real life had advertisements like the internet, we'd have advertisements painted onto the wall of apartments and landlords would get mad at us we cover it up with paint and art.
Not to be pedantic but doesn't Google technically own Microsoft's browser? I agree with you though, we've all been pushed to this point and I just wonder if there's any going back - and how?
I hate to say this but it feels like the more people got on the internet, the worse it got. Not their fault, but it's akin to a really good neighborhood market. It doesn't just attract honest shoppers but pickpockets and thieves too. Now we're all stuck in a crowded and increasingly crappy market wondering what happened to our beloved neighborhood hangout.
If we're being pedantic, then no. Google has made the core of Edge, but doesn't own Edge itself. Just like how Epic doesn't own every game made with Unreal.
I do wish that uBlock Origin had a opt-in mode per domain. I would disable blocking by default and only enable it on sites that were particularly obnoxious. This would in theory incentive sites to actually have reasonable ads (because they get some rather than no revenue).
IIRC Adguard? Ad-Bloc? Whoever the OG ad-block extension was tried something similar to this and I believe it was the cause of their downfall. Basically they struck a deal with advertisers to let some ads through that were deemed mild. The backlash was immense.
Here is the core problem, and I promise you this is true.
Most sites want to maximize ad-revenue. Most users don't want to see a single ad anywhere.
What killed it was not the deal. The deal divided the uses into a group that abandoned it, and a group that decided to support it.
The author then decided to take money to not block the mild advertisers. Then he stopped blocking worse and worse ads. At some point at the last step, enough people left that he stopped developing and sold the extension.
and then, the buyer decided to use the extension to gather user data to sell to advertisers. At this point it still had enough users to be worthwhile.
> Most users don't want to see a single ad anywhere.
I don't actually mind seeing ads. I actually long for magazine ads. It was (mostly) obvious they were ads, they had to actually advertise a thing, and they didn't try to take me outside of the magazine. There was also a strong correlation between the type of content in the magazine and the ads themselves. Some ads were very creative or visually appealing so the point I still remember them years and decades later.
What I do mind is advertisements trying to pull me away from the content I'm currently reading, tracking me all over the web, and showing me ads based on their tracking rather than related to the content I'm reading. I don't want a fucking video overlayed on a text article I'm trying to read. I don't want to be tracked everywhere on the web. If a site collects data about me, especially data I enter willingly into their system, I want a say in the governance of that data.
The major problem I see with modern web advertising is a lack of informed consent. Just throwing up a boilerplate "we'll share with partners" is not sufficient for me to make an informed decision to consent to data collection. People can't make informed choices and that data sharing with partners means they're sharing that information with their partners and so on. All of that transitive sharing is done without express consent by the end users.
It's not the ad I'm opposed to seeing but all of the bullshit behind the ad I can't see.
Well it has opt-out so you can turn it off to support a site. I wouldn't be surprised if it has a toggle somewhere to reverse the behaviour.
But I personally never make an exception for anything ever. So I'm really happy with the default. I do pay a subscription to a few sites but I would never allow ads, even when they are tracking-free.
> I wouldn't be surprised if it has a toggle somewhere to reverse the behaviour.
I checked and I'm pretty confident it doesn't. There are lots of people asking for this feature and the conclusion says that allow by default and opt-in to blocking isn't available.
I understand why advertising and marketing exists. What I wish for were people in that world who took an approach that was more respectful of users: both their privacy and experience as a user. I expect that most people (“regular” users, not tech savvy ones) use ad blockers to make the internet tolerable. Is it really that big of an ask to respect the people who you ultimately want to sell to? (Ok, that’s a dumb question: 30 years of watching the internet evolve, I think I know the answer sadly..)
The problem is that it is an arms-race, and if you don't engage in chumbox style shit, then others are going to kill you in the market.
It worked on Google, because nobody was allowed to do anything but text ads.
As for respecting the customer? That requires having something worth selling in the first place. Unfortunately, since 99% of everything is crap, 99.9% of ads are for things that should not be sold in the first place.
Being "respectful" is less optimal and you get outcompeted/eliminated by those that aren't "respectful". The reason is because users indirectly/subconsciously tolerate/support those that aren't "respectful".
If you want change, try convincing everyone to actively invest effort to support those that are "respectful". Good luck though, I don't think you'll get anywhere.
This has got to be one of the most out-of-touch comments I've ever read on HN. Most users of the internet aren't tech saavy and should not be preyed upon because of it.
Isn't that sort of victim blaming? This post kind of says "people are getting wise" and the solution is "make sure everything and everyone on the internet is a fake influencer"
No? Because the "victims" are voluntarily choosing what businesses they patronize. No one is forcing them to choose "bad business" instead of "good business" and thus causing "good business" to go out of business.
Protip: the good businesses tend to be more expensive and harder to find, and customers aren't willing to spend the extra time and money for the "good business".
Which is why you need regulation, to make sure there's a level playing field where the "bad business" can't out-compete the "good business" using methods that harm consumers.
> Back then, we could say: “Oh, this piece of content, this advertisement, this PR investment, this word-of-mouth effort is worthwhile because it turned into this trackable, perfectly attributable series of events in our analytics.” It doesn’t work this way anymore.
Wow. I'm really happy to read this. I've been fighting marketeers with adblockers, third party cookie blockers and other methods for years but I thought it had little effect. I'm really glad that they are having a much harder time tracking us now. I thought we were being much less effective in this battle.
Clearly some of the reasons he cites, like the app ecosystems trying to keep you engaged on their own app, is one thing we as privacy-conscious users didn't cause. But some like the adblockers we surely did. Also, whenever I do get an ad in an app that does interest me, I never click on our directly, I will always search for it (using a privacy shield, SearXNG). Just to make sure they don't get this attribution. I guess I'm not the only one when I read that many people here don't ever click on ads as a rule.
I'm very happy to learn that their work has become a lot harder because that was what we needed to achieve. The only reason it was so easy was because we were tracked everywhere.
On the Marketer side, the people who took individual effort to block ads & cookies were always too few to make an impact.
I think the turning point was European legislation, and the current war on cookies (I.e. requiring clear consent for tracking). Also, the way in which Apple is fighting google by removing utm + gclid parameters in more browsing sessions, and their move to eliminate "email open tracking".
What I'm saying is: I think most recent progress is due to privacy legislation & anti-monopoly enforcement that's encouraging the big platforms to fight each other. Not due to a critical mass of individuals choosing to block ads.
(OK, one more pet theory: the end of ZIRP put a lot of pressure on publishers to "grow" revenue by increasing the number of ads they show. That indeed has pushed the annoyance factor above some sort of threshold...)
I know some local tech sites are really struggling with this because they are of course bearing the brunt of this due to their technically inclined community that is much more likely to install adblockers. One site I visit a lot recently moved to untracked ads in an attempt to sway visitors to make an adblocking exception. But they were unsuccessful due to low advertiser interest.
But I think this is on desktop, not mobile. If you're focused on mobile it's probably different as only Firefox supports true adblockers there (the others are only domain based and not nearly as effective)
> What I'm saying is: I think most recent progress is due to privacy legislation & anti-monopoly enforcement that's encouraging the big platforms to fight each other. Not due to a critical mass of individuals choosing to block ads.
Well when I see those figures of 30-50% adblockers I can't imagine it doesn't have an impact tbh.
But I'm sure Apple's third party blocking and the ad ID removal really helped too yes. Because those would have had pretty instantly near 100% adoption on those platforms.
There is barely any content left of any value that isn't on walled garden platforms, because it was too profitable for folks to turn the open Internet channels into the lowest form of spam which is what everything degraded to.
The decline of advertising's effectiveness has led to the paywalls everywhere. I much preferred the days when links took me to content that I could read.
People were putting content on the web long before you could make any reasonable money from it. Before a small number of people could make a large amount of money with “content” and a large amount of people could make almost nothing trying… people shared stuff because they could and built little communities out of it.
Sucks for the industry, but most things mentioned as a cause so far sounds like it's great for actual users:
> Apple’s cookie changes absolutely had a big effect when they pulled back on third party cookies inside safari that took a huge hit. Anti tracking and privacy laws in California, Canada, New York, and the EU, and many of those cookie permissions and do-not-track protocols have rolled out globally.
> Then there’s the massive adoption of ad blockers. We’re talking about a third to half of all Internet users using an ad blocker on one or more of their devices. And and ad blockers don’t just block ads, they block all of the tracking that we do as well.
> Multi device journeys mean that tracking someone, even with fancy browser fingerprinting (illegal in many parts of the world, but still technically allowed in the US), is rendered impossible unless they log in with the same credentials on all those devices.
The part about Google just giving answers, instead of linking, and social networks penalizing links is probably bad for different reasons (AI summarizing things is certainly a problem, since it somewhat disincentivizes people from, you know, actually writing about things online), but overall... I can't gather up much sympathy for this industry.
If you shit in my well, you don't get to complain that bottled water is killing your industry.
Yeah, it's hard to feel bad for adtech. Contextual advertising worked perfectly fine on print media: put sports ads in sports magazines read by sports fans. There's no need to follow individual readers around and sniff their farts to try to figure out what they had for breakfast.
Can't really agree here. Sports Illustrated's most frequent ads were for cigarettes, beer and cars. Even today, sports telecasts have tons of ads for insurance, finance and enterprise tech comapnies.
If you shit in my well, you don't get to complain that bottled water is killing your industry.
And you don't get to complain when they stop making their "water" free because they can no longer afford to do so, and the internet returns to the days of AOL and Compuserve.
Vastly prefer commercial enterprises that are upfront about how they make money. It would be so sweet if internet businesses charged money for things instead of creating a massive surveillance machine that is also the most advanced annoyance generator ever conceived by mankind, and slowing down every goddamn website to a crawl despite being able to fit a processor that eats anything I could get my hands on in the 90s for breakfast in my thermostat due to all the telemetry devs mindlessly cram into their frontends
I want free to be a usable signal for something being not intended to directly make money from me. I would love to have my interactions with businesses announce themselves by charging me money and turning me away if I can't or won't pay, as I'm used to in meatspace. I would love anything that makes the strategy of trying to relentlessly insert itself into every genuine engagement I have with other human beings, including trying to flood channels with ads that mimic them
Free can still be a good strategy for drawing business if you can entice people with, for example, a freemium product, and as this article mentions businesses will still go try to advertise in embedded ways by actually thinking about where their potential customers are, so sadly my dream of being able to avoid businesses hijacking social interactions by simply refusing to pay them so that they go fuck off to find someone who will is not very realistic, but I wish you were right, that would be amazing
Paying for the technology also means you are the customer rather than the product, like how most free services work. This means the company is enticed to make the service better for the user, rather than viewing the customer as an annoyance and just plowing ahead with changes that upset customers.
On one hand, I want to believe so. I started using Kagi just because I want to put my money where my mouth is.
On the other hand, there’s cases like Amazon Prime adding ads to Video, and then charging extra to remove them. Corpos are greedy, and to them ads are free money.
On the other end of the spectrum there's companies like Ford that track and sell the driving data of every user for $1 per user per year when that user paid them $1000s of dollars. Then there's Microsoft, which charges you for Windows, and then turns around and remotely configures your system to upload your hard disk to them without your consent. Free market principles won't save us, nor will rationality, and it's because these things are actually governed by the will of technology. Since something it possible, it happens. It's not worth feeling bad about or trying to change. Instead count your lucky stars it all hasn't been integrated directly in human biology yet, since if you're afraid of this now, it'll be much much worse.
One thing in common between the companies mentioned in these comments is they are all publicly owned, and they are always looking to increase shareholder and investor value no matter what. In these cases I can see where paying for the product might not actually result in a better experience for the customer.
In the case of privately owned companies with no responsibilities to shareholders and investors, it is more likely they will respect the customers.
Most of the stuff that’s worth a damn is free and ad-free anyway.
Plenty of hobbyists and truly-free projects would get more attention and put more work into free things if the competition weren’t “free” and funded by crazy amounts of ad dollars.
This is the least-threatening threat ever. If a site must have ads, cool, please leave, we’ll all be fine.
That would be excellent. I want the incentives of sites to be aligned with me, the reader, than that of advertisers.
Anything that wrecks the advertising based model of the internet will be in the long run good for the public, despite the short term pain of losing free ("free" as in "we vomit ads into your face 24/7") access.
Perhaps a better analogy would be advertiser stop giving you coke for free so you only have water. Water and moneyless-internet doesn’t give you dopamine but you’ll be in better shape physically and mentally to build the future. Coke and ad-financed-web create wish in your hearth but only lead you to a couch.
I’d venture to say that most ad-supported content on the web (we YouTube being a notable exception) is low quality so I’m
Happy if all those shitty website go away. I’m willing to pay for good stuff, and there’s also lots of good stuff that’s truly free because the creators have other sources of income.
> and the internet returns to the days of AOL and Compuserve.
I genuinely think that would be an improvement. It would get a ton of this stuff off the open internet and still leave the good stuff on the internet for the rest of us, like it was in those days.
If the content is worth it, I will happily pay. Most content is not worth it however and I'd be even happier for that content to stop clogging up my search.
I think that's perfectly fine, do we really need more media at this point? If something isn't sustainable from a more conventional monetary model, then the solution is not shoving ads in people's faces, it's that it doesn't really need to exist in the first place.
I've been in the Marketing Technology space for over 14 years (SEO, Affiliate, Programmatic ad networks, Analytics, Email). Here are my thoughts:
* I agree with Rand that this change is happening and it heralds a big vhange. It is also worth reading his older analysis of just how few Google searches turn into a click.
* Marketers, in general, are not aware of these changes and are not planning ahead. We are still running the old playbooks of "pay for google ad, make a gated whitepaper with a form". The change is going to blindside many marketers.
* Email has been the trusty channel that just kept giving. But I think it's becoming oversaturated.
* Allocating budge to partnerships and influencer marketing: yes! The smart marketers are already doing this. Also: community building. Anything that creates an environment of trust & where people interact with experts. Communities will be the immediate place of refuge from all the GPT-generated noise that's killing search engines.
* Another traditionally smart move is to reallocate those Marketing dollars to Sales/cold outreach - but remember how I said that email is becoming over saturated? It's also impacting salespeople. When was the last time you replied to a cold email? Picked up the phone when an unknown number rang?
It's a time of massive change for Marketing, and things haven't shaken out yet. I'm curious to hear others' thoughts about what Marketing could look like in the future.
I'm also here to answer any other questions, either in this thread or through email (in profile)
> Allocating budge to partnerships and influencer marketing: yes! The smart marketers are already doing this. Also: community building. Anything that creates an environment of trust & where people interact with experts.
Ehhh... why does it always sound so dishonest when marketing people talk about these things? "community" is just a tool for you. "environment of trust" is just leverage to you. Alex Jones is an "expert" in the world of marketing, since he's selling some crap supplements.
You're just finding ways to pry open our brains, and everything is on the table. This post reads like an ad. Maybe it is? Maybe that's how you talk on daily basis?
With the caveat that I _don't_ have any particular insights into the solving the problem...
> I think they understand the situation and insights better than anyone.
> The current set of incentives and technology are why we are here.
> If there is a good alternative, they are also the ones likely to know it.
This reads a lot like "lets get the drunk drivers together to figure out how to make the roads safer". I mean, sure, they may have more knowledge about the causes.. but they've also made it very clear they don't care about making things better.
I think it's a big assumption assume an entire industry of professionals doesn't want to make things better. It's obvious they have multiple interests pulling at them from different sides. I'm sure quite often they have to make a compromised decision because the CEO wants something extremely stupid or invasive.
> I think it's a big assumption assume an entire industry of professionals doesn't want to make things better.
The industry has been making it very clear and overt for years now that what they consider "making things better" is directly opposite of what normal people consider "making things better".
The marketing industry only makes money by making things worse for us all. They are concerned, though, with finding out exactly how much worse things have to be before it starts interfering with their income streams.
>an entire industry of professionals doesn't want to make things better
Their industry is marketing. That's their profession. If they want to make it better, they should quit. They do not quit, ergo, they do not want to make it better.
I think that is a pretty simple caricature of how people operate. People have multiple competing desires and various incentives. Various definitions of better, which may not align with your own.
Given a offer of same pay and the ability to use the same skills, I think people would choose to to make things better instead of worse. That means they would like to make it better.
You are making a different absolutists claim, that any desire to make things better doesn't count if someone wont sacrifice everything for it.
This is by its nature a comparison, and not a statement about one things.
Keep in mind that this all in question of if people in marketing might have knowledge or insight about changes in advertising.
This is a very hostile, almost childish view. Online ads make it possible for many services to be essentially free or even possible in the first place.. I and many others gladly accept being shown ads in return for something we desire. Personalization is great too, It might be as well relevant to me.
There is nothing inherently bad in this situation. I've been watching youtube long before I had any money to spare on it.
This is a very hostile, almost childish view. In a great many cases (but not all) the free service with online ads outcompetes one that is provided without any income whatsoever, with someone's voluntary spare resources. By displacing the better service, the one with ads makes the world worse, and if it couldn't exist, the world would be better.
Im not sure that I directly attribute that to advertising itself, as much as upstream SEO choices.
I dont mind at all if a recipe includes commission links or ads. I hate that the optimal SEO format is to waste as much of the readers time as possible.
That said, I also see your point in how SE results have an incentive to bury valid non-commercial results.
Sure, they may or may not care. However, if you care, talking to them would be the best place to start.
There is a big difference between seeking the knowledge where it exists, and expecting the subject matter experts to solve the problem. This is doubly true when it is something you perceive as a problem and not them.
To me what's really changed is all the screenshots. Especially with phones it is very easy to just zoom to how you want the image, then press the buttons to capture and press share.
I think Twitter should have a QR code in the top right of each tweet. It'd make it possible to verify a screenshot of a tweet immediately and also join the "discussion".
It seems like such a no-brainer to me that I wonder if they have some good reason against it. People share tweets as screenshots all the time.
It’s fairly easy to search for the user and text of the tweet if you want to verify a tweet that’s still live. But much of the time the original tweet has been deleted so the QR code would be a dead end too. Maybe it would be good on a third party service to screenshot and archive tweets though.
Didn't Elon kill Twitter's search feature though? He probably didn't want reporters abusing the platform to write smear pieces. Now thanks to Elon and journalists being terrible, everything gets flushed down the memory hole a week later, unless you've bookmarked it. The search feature is effectively useless now.
Well, I for one like to put the source URL, date accessed, and if available and applicable license of the source. I think the crux of the problem is people not /wanting/ to take tbe time to attribute, rather than being unable to.
Users themselves don't benefit from attribution, and when they are aware of it they generally feel hostile that someone wants to know how they've been browsing.
People screenshot twitter specifically to break the link, because you can't click through a screenshot.
First thing I noticed is that YouTube does not display video description immediately. It hides it behind a user click. Some videos provide useful details there that most probably most users do not read. Like video sources.
If details "were working" people would write about sponsors there, and often description is entirely blank.
So that's that. Most users will not care to go to description to see links.
Then I noticed that if some sources were in video description, were using URL shorteners. I hate URL shortener services. Btly, and stuff. I hate clicking on one. You do not see where you will be transported to. I watch various videos on youtube, some more controversial than others. I really prefer to see where I am going to. I was suspecting, maybe incorrectly, that sometime those links were used to hide real destination from YouTube algorithm, to not be demonetized immediately.
That's the second thing. I rarely click on URL shorteners.
I do not see any YouTube comments leading outside of the platform. This seems weird. I know there are a lot of bots, and a lot of bad actors. This would certainly open some flood gates. I remember though that ThioJoe created a program some time ago, a cleaning script that was receiving some traction. One person can fix video comment section, what a big corporation can't. This is a proof for me that YouTube/Google does not care about comments. Maybe there could be a way to have a comment section, where you can post links to anywhere, and your comments will not be hidden from other users (HN proves it is possible).
Videos are YouTube power. They will not care about description, thumbs down, or comment section. Certainly they will not show you a way out of their ecosystem.
Clicks were also always a little bit broken. There were always farms that sold upvotes, view counts. Relying on IT system to count goats is always flaky.
I hope clicks will die. Maybe this will make space for personal web pages that do not try to monetize every your mouse move.
I think marketers will never admit that attribution is dying. There was always some mental gymnastics around grasping for attribution: "they clicked an ad last month once and made a purchase today, that counts!". Folks have careers and budgets based around attribution working as intended.
Yes, there are anecdotes about shutting off ad platform X and seeing Y revenue decline, but I highly doubt that decline == their calculated attribution amount.
IMO, attribution was always a pseudoscience used to grossly inflate the cost of online ad space.
Somewhat related, what percentage of people click ads? I assume it is something like 60% of people never click, 38% do when it is incredibly relevant, and 2% lizard people who click everything they see, ruining it for the rest of us.
I run statistically-sound AB tests on Meta* and can tell you that people click, click more than you think and buy more than you think from clicking on ads!
The same goes for email and Whatsapp marketing. People love these messages.
* We do not use their built-in ab test tools of course...
Incredible. I can't imagine what it must be like to live inside their skulls. In all my life I have clicked maybe one or two ads on purpose, misclicked (either by honest mistake or through malicious design) probably five times, and never bought anything because of an online ad. The one ad that made think that I might use the service in question was a sponsor read for a PCB fabrication company.
I clicked and bought something via an online ad once. I needed a new jacket and the one in the ad was exactly what I was looking for. I overpaid because the jacket fell apart after a couple wears. The experience has definitely soured me on ads, even more than I was before. If marketers weren’t selling me overpriced junk I might have a more favorable view.
I have to say Instagram ads are incredibly well targeted to me. It's been like that for maybe a year, I think (I remember noticing it). I've clicked on a bunch of them, much more then elsewhere.
Yea, not immediately, but yes. E.g. specialty coffee an chocolate. Other ones were interesting job offers, which usually check and make note if the place is interesting
There's two kinds of things here, which I will call "push ads" and "pull ads".
Push ads we hate. I don't want your random ads shoved in my face. The harder and more intrusively you shove, the more I hate it. No, I'm not going to look at it to see if I'm interested; I just want it gone.
Pull ads are different. Let's say I'm on a business trip, and I get out of some meeting at 5 PM. Well, what is there to eat around here? What do I get in response to that? Ads! But in how they interact with me, it's completely different, because I actually want to eat.
Or let's say I'm going on a trip, and I search for "lodging in location X". Well, some of what comes back is ads. Say it's from hotel.com. I probably wouldn't have gone to hotel.com as one of my choices for investigating lodging in X, but they're going to give me kind of a one-stop overview of what's there, so maybe I'll click on their ad link anyway, because it's actually interesting information for what I'm trying to do right then.
But some random Temu junk that they insist on shoving in my face every time they can? No way. Just get it out of my life.
I think pull ads are hated too. They try to short circuit your brain into making a quick decision/have a preference without doing any research. It's all manipulation.
Do you enjoy going through your mail account and unsubscribe all useless newsletters?
Use email aliases?
are wary of all ads and brand claims you see on social media and prefer doing our own research?
hate clicking on SEA results: usually the landing page is a weird, summed up version of the full website (we want the full thing)
But i guess that's a particularity of hackers and tinkerers :)
For many different reasons make people click and buy: discounted prices, FOMO, clever retargeting, funny ads, hidden ads (sponsored/influence/fake news),...
Yeah, I give a lot of newsletters a chance, but only with Firefox single relay emails addresses which I have over 300+ currently. I probably unsubscribes 95% of them, but I did give them at least a chance. I probably should have tracked the ones I did so I could delete them.
Facebook's ads in particular are very well targeted, IMO. They know I'm into gaming, so I get gaming related ads (board/card games, conventions, arcades). Other sites like NYTimes, Amazon Prime Video, etc, all do a terrible job -- they think I'm a parent with a watch fetish who can't get enough prescription drugs.
If I were an ad buyer I'm not sure I'd bother with anything but Meta at this point.
I can definitely see clicking on things in email - after all I have already prescreened your company/product and found it to be interesting/worthwhile.
As for ads, maybe it is just that marketers generally have to advertise crap (because good things tend to sell themselves?) and so I rarely if ever see ads for things worth purchasing?
It can be accurately measured if attribution is helpful or not. You create two Ad campaigns with two different landing pages, one with attribution optimization and another is without, do A/B test and see which one will bring more conversions and if attribution numbers are accurate.
Good riddance. Marketing was never meant to make customers better off. It was always a way for businesses to get better off by shoving useless products down peoples' throats. Creating needs was an effective strategy—"look, you didn't know you needed this before, but now you know you want this product!". But even that is not that effective anymore—look at Apple's failed V Pro product.
> Creating needs was an effective strategy—"look, you didn't know you needed this before, but now you know you want this product!".
That's how literally every innovation works. Do you think that fridges that save your food, home computers, smartphones, washers and dryers, garbage disposals, crocs, electric cars, e-readers, online shopping, wi-fi, and thousands of other things that make our daily lifes are useless products that have been shoved down our throats?
Why do you think apples V Pro product failed? Maybe you were just not the audience. Once they release a customer oriented version i am looking forward to it.
The way i understood the rollout for this product is to first target developers and give them time to enrich the so far empty ecosystem.
Release in US, means US will have a head start to adopt this new technology professionally.
I open the page, and it prompts me to accept or decline cookies.
That’s what killed the clicks for me, not the request, but the attempt of most site operators to cram stuff into my browser I might not want, and the mental fatigue that goes along with caring about those things.
I logged in to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tools this weekend for the first time in a decade because I wanted to figure out where some weird traffic peaks came from.
Since I front a static site on Azure Storage through Cloudflare I have very little useful analytics (I get 1 request hitting storage for each 1000, thanks to judicious caching settings), and all my referrer data is fake - just spam for Russian and Chinese sites, so yeah, web analytics is pretty much dead.
I’ve started adding UTM tags to my own outbound links just so that other people can find who is linking to them, but it all feels kludgy and broken.
The "referrer" indeed of little value these days. Customers of our web analytics platform rely on either UTM_ or custom tracking parameters. These work well and folks are happy and claim they can finally see representative data.
The amount of sniffy disdain on HN for anything involving marketing, advertising, SEO or trying to promote a business digitally is laughable.
A very large percentage of you who comment and submit here regularly work directly with or in the worst offenders for building the technology behind today's surveillance tracking ad-driven internet. The salaries so many on this site's comment threads "subtly" brag about are directly paid as the fruits of these industries, but oh, how nasty anyone is for marketing their digital wares.
I completely understand disgust with the nature of the prying, spying, constantly tracking, click-baiting modern boom in churned SEO content and all that comes with it, but if you're working for the very companies largely responsible for creating that world, have a bit of humility before throwing shit on any smaller players doing what the system has pushed them into doing to pay their bills.
EDIT: Also, to those of you who say you just use chatGPT or some other major AI to get your content needs settled, congratulations, you're making the content siloing by parasitic ad/digital media companies even worse.
You're handing your eyeballs over to an even smaller group of would-be (or existing) megacorps that don't even at least create any of what they serve you. They snatch a copy of it from others without permission and regurgitate it for you with zero attribution and all the special filters they feel like passing it through for whatever bullshit reason takes their fancy. This will actively make the internet, for all its current flaws, even more centralized, even more controlled and generally even worse. If you thought Google search was getting shitty, just consider how internet search filtered through the prism of chatGPT and a couple others will be. No wonder those same companies are lobbying so fiercely for moat-like regulations in their favor for the sake of "safety"
Even if somebody works in big tech, what is wrong with that? Where should I work? Would that change anything? Can't I criticize big tech, if I work for one? Can't I try to change big tech from inside?
Next: What wrong with "criticizing small players"? I do not have to worry about their bills. This is not my business, it is theirs. They have their own business models, these are their bills. Maybe they have incorrectly positioned their business plan? Do not play victim the card here.
It is right that mega corporations were created using our hands, but it was not our decision. Most people do not know what they are doing "using services", but you cannot blame people for using big tech, if there is really nothing else that matters. We may be forced to use some solutions, but it does not have to close our mouths!
"Multi device journeys mean that tracking someone, even with fancy browser fingerprinting (illegal in many parts of the world, but still technically allowed in the US), is rendered impossible unless they log in with the same credentials on all those devices."
1. Need to use fancy browser, and
2. Need to log in, and
3. Need to use same credentials
Too many requirements. I can never get to #3 because I fail to comply with #1, let alone #1 and #2
> Then there’s the massive adoption of ad blockers. We’re talking about a third to half of all Internet users using an ad blocker on one or more of their devices. And and ad blockers don’t just block ads, they block all of the tracking that we do as well.
Hell yeah. Death to all of this shit.
Or, to put it in marketer terms, “Attribution is dying, clicks are dying, and here's why that's a GOOD thing!”
I agree with the lost. Unfortunately interactions on the internet is dying. I would say the internet as it is is dying. Or maybe, being transformed into something so bad that you will need to pay for an AOL portal to be able to have something useful.
I have trouble trusting this author is really part of the ad industry when he talks about "all of the tracking that we do". The ad industry NEVER calls itself tracking, or spyware, or anything negative. But he's got data, so he must be.
I agree with the premise that attribution doesn't work. But it's not dying - it's been dead for a long time (maybe always). All the points of the article have been true since the inception of the WWW and before.
Corporations impose things like attribution due to their need for legibility[1]. Everything must be formulaic and calculable. Attribution is a simple concept, and nobody is checking it as long as it looks good - it's all theater, like the TSA, the story of spreadsheet bond yields[2], or the AI hype wave. Not even the free market checks it, since your competitors don't have an accurate model either. If anyone believes capitalism is efficient, here is a (or yet another) counter-example.
Coming from another angle, I notice that attribution-less marketing has been winning and losing political elections for at least a decade now. Somehow, political campaigns (overt and covert) don't seem to need it. Maybe the ad industry can find out how they operate and copy their model.
i hope all you cookie tracking scumbags fail and never succeed in recapturing the audience you seem to feel entitled to. you do not own my time, my vision, my hearing, and marketing has been one of the largest problems in our society since before i was even born. hawk your wares in the market, stop invading my home like a door to door salesman.
It's especially sad because I find that properly targeted and relevant advertisements are sometimes actually useful. Proper marketing like that is rarer than a snowball's chance in hell these days, of course.
agree, I first started using the internet in the 90s, and I really love the www. I've never installed an ad blocker, if there are too many ads I just close the window. Heh I'd probably have to get instructions on how to even install an ad blocker. I still don't have an ad blocker installed even when I'm limited to a few gigs a month for browsing, if a site starts draining my internet through lousy ads, in the hosts file it goes to keep x and twitter company.
There are bad actors everywhere, but advertising is not an inherently evil thing, I buy advertising for my little pet projects, and its my hope that it still remains an option in the future.
I wonder if this will lead to greater emphasis on targeting. If you can't prove that they clicked the ad, at least you want to be in front of the right people.
> How do you prove you're putting the ad in front of the right people?
You can just make it up. That's worked for a really long time now. There's innumerable ways to put one's hand on the scale without it being outright fraud. It's especially easy when ad buyers (people in marketing departments) are invested in the status quo.
I think eventually that's gonna have ads injected. Assume you're asking it to summarize a page on Pasta, and might inject an ad for Barilla. Which your adblocker will block.
But in the future I see native ads, where they inject a string as part of the LLM's output.
While not explicitly about your chosen tool chain, monetizing user data is absolutely going to happen in the LLM space.
While there may be some holdouts, Wall Street is already questioning the payback and as some big players are over promising on things that they will most likely never be able to deliver on, investors will start to pressure for any revenue stream.
As even subscription services breach the trust of their users, there is little leverage to hold that model today and deflect activest investors etc...
It is totally possible that AI just isn't monetizable and that they can't figure out a way to suck valuable user data out of it and resell it for profit. In that case, we have another dot-com bust where all the blow-hards and made-up-business-plans go bust and we end up with some decent tech that works for people for a decade or so before someone figures out how to turn it into garbage to make a few cents.
I am actually working on a project where I have scraped ~400k recipes, and now am in the process of wrapping them in a little search engine.
The idea is to have a little python/node script + sqlite file that you can use to search locally for recipes offline. Then all you'd need to do is write a plugin for the notes app of your choice.
The worse the web becomes, and the worse the stability of internet access becomes due to climate change, I will probably be doing more archival projects like this for offline access.
> I’m going to tell you every one of the major search, social, and content platforms has an incentive to keep you there. LinkedIn wants to keep you on LinkedIn. Twitter wants to keep you on Twitter.
Let me throw out another one. People have learned that they'll regret clicking. The incentive to get as many clicks as possible and no incentive to have anything there for them once they do click, except a bunch of in-your-face ads that make it impossible to read the "content", has perhaps made us all pause before clicking.
I click the comments on Reddit to read the full text of the article copied and pasted instead of clicking on the actual link and dealing with the website at the other end.
Ads are just the beginning. Paywall kvetching, loud Autoplay videos, cookie banners, mailing list pop-ups and all manner of dark patterns and anti features that hijack a simple reading experience are enough to just keep me off of those sites unless I can help it.
Yes, ublock origin can probably be configured to take care of a lot of this, but it's a manual process and a moving target.
It’s a but ironic since the above user is doing so on Reddit, the place that blares ads at you, funnels into mobile app, has increased number of walls to access content, messed up comment threading, etc.
It's not that bad, just select more filter lists like the 'annoyances' ones. I also use a lot of custom CSS rules that remove big pictures from sites (so they look a lot more like hacker news) though the latter does cause me to keep up sometimes, true
In addition to what the other post says, even a relatively light website will take a moment to load which can cause loss of mental context and focus, even if the target page supports reader mode and you can automatically load it. If all you want is text I really think having everything in the one app is more comfortable.
I can barely visit a page without having to dismiss a cookie banner.
And then "You're using an adblocker!" and hunt for the "Continue without disabling" link.
And then "Sorry, this story is paywalled" for some local news site I have never visited before and will probably never visit again.
Or another big popup asking me to sign in with Google, that I have to dismiss.
Or an autoplaying video with an impossibly tiny X close button that takes 10 taps on mobile to finally get rid of.
Or a font so large it's impossible to read, and I have to hunt down the "Text Zoom" feature of mobile Chrome that's way down the list in the hamburger menu.
Or the "Read more" button that you don't even notice because it's in between an image and "related content", so the article seems to just mysteriously end because the remaining 80% is hidden.
Someone should make a "bullshit blocker" that's like an adblocker but it extracts the article text, disables everything that isn't the article text and just shows you the text. Firefox's Reader Mode does this on some websites, but I suspect not on recent websites.
Reader mode does exactly this at 90% of websites that I visit.
I sometimes wonder what sites people use that they have such a profoundly broken experience
I can see this. I didn't really think about it until I switched to Kagi search. Being able to block (or deprioritize) sites because I find them abusive in advertising practices has been great. I would love to see an old netflix-like algorithm that tells you if you'll like a site based on your site rank choices. Almost all of my block/lowers are enshitified websites, so I'd love to pre-block what others have found :-)
No, it's also mads (malvertisements, aka malicious advertisements), several solar systems worth of cookies, and a few galaxies worth of JavaShit wasting our CPU/RAM and power.
This is, 100% exactly, why I primarily come to HN to get commentary on the articles and don't click on the articles. I don't want to have to deal with the onslaught of ads, or the passive-aggressive guilt-tripping, or even just the janky page that's left behind when my adblockers remove 80% of what took up space on the page.
This. And for example, that is why I'm just using ChatGPT to get recipes to cook; it is so much better, right to the point, no ads, follow-up questions, etc. I know the moral argument about ChatGPT being trained and monetizing other people's work, but it is just so easy and has better UX.
And regarding "The way forward is to go where your audience is being influenced," that this marketer says, for my case and the his “best rice to make risotto.” case, they can't do SEO on ChatGPT (at least for now). ChatGPT doesn't even show/link to sources like Gemini; they are screwed.
I have lots of recipe books. An entire (small) bookshelf of them, the most recently purchased one was probably at least 10 years ago. Since then I've just been looking up recipes online because it was more convenient. Now, however, I find that I'm getting off my ass to go look through a book because I'm so irritated with online recipes.
I don't need your family history, or how excited you are to make this, or why it has that "special importance" to you, or whatever you wrote to get more clicks. I really don't need to scroll through pages of irrelevant ads or dismiss 10 autoplaying videos just because it's been a while and I forgot how wet a pita recipe should be.
I just want to read the fscking recipe!
And that is where paper books excel! And the funny thing, is I like reading the recipe intros there, or the sidebar 400 year-old original version of the recipe because it's interesting, and not just another attempt at eking some micro amount of ad revenue from me.
I don't know... I have to wonder how google et al got all this money from advertising in the first place. Do you really think it's because people are getting smarter?
Yeah, these days clicking on a link on a mobile phone sadly means putting yourself at risk of an ugly, slow loading page with a paywall or login banner and big ugly ads and a prompt to sign up for a newsletter.
I still link to things, and I try to make sure that the things I link to are non-frustrating such that people learn to trust my links over time - but that's a pretty optimistic position I'm taking there!
If only there existed a program that could do the clicking for me, then clean the resulting page from cruft I'm not interested in, and present the useful bits to me! It would be a joy to use, and should it become popular, it might kick the internet back to 1998 when Google was supremely useful. (Oh, that would ruin most of the "economy of attention" though...)
> The way forward is to go where your audience is being influenced.
This article made me feel dirty. My condolences to anyone who has to work in advertising or SEO to support themselves or their families. I think this whole industry is a net negative to the world.
What’s there to be torn by? If you don’t have access to the source, you don’t own it no matter how you pay. Subscriptions are just a way to make that more clear. Ads are a way to defer your payment through adprofiles and your purchase elsewhere (assuming functional ads and not Googles ad network obfuscation).
The internet was built on non tracking (although sometimes garish) ad banners.
You just need to tone down your expectations of revenue to run something on moral ish ads.
For example you could fire most of the marketing and "engagement" experts since you won't need them any more if you stop spying and trying to making your users addicts.
The reason we assume these are the only two options is the real culprit here, but we rather stick to a broken system we know instead of trying something different.
I often need to buy products, and I would like to know which ones are available for me to buy. This is not dirty, this is necessary.
I prefer that people who are selling products talk to the outlets that are connected to me and my needs rather than writing their product's names on every available surface and stalking me like assassins.
Isn't that what consumer organisations and comparison sites are for? Independent advice that doesn't just tell the story the advertiser wants you to hear but also the drawbacks, and which product would suit your needs best.
The problem is that most of them are also crooked and their recommendation simply reflects the highest bidder. But I did manage to find them for most types of items. Even for simple things like flashlights there's big rabbit hole sites like candlepowerforums and 1lumen.
I prefer reading real reviews from users with a reputation than just plain advertising.
First, didn't realize this was Rand Fishkin writing it. He knows his stuff. He also has another linked article in there that is more prescriptive on incrementality measurement being all that matters and how to think about it at a high level and I completely agree it is all the matters.
https://sparktoro.com/blog/how-to-measure-hard-to-measure-ma...
That in turn links to another respected analytics leader, Avinash Kaushik:
https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/marketing-analytics-attribut...
That is also a must read.
The bottom line is what used to work no longer does, and marketers (and finance and leadership) need to get used to having less fidelity and availability than they were used to. It also means marketing teams who are thrashy trying a new low impact tactic every week instead of constructing experiments likely to deliver statistically significant results on incremental lift are going to be spinning their wheels and wasting dollars. And that's something to watch out for.
Unfortunately, setting up proper experiments, controlling for bias, getting clean data, etc. are material challenges that require skills, scale (to get a read on bottom of funnel especially), and resources/budget.
There aren't great options out there for that now if you're a smaller or mid size company that I'm aware of, though if anyone is aware of them I'd love to have them on my radar.