I recently took someone to go and watch a hockey game. Been a little while but I personally played as a goalie myself.
The person kept making the comment that she couldn't see/find the puck and it made it frustrating to watch.
As a goalie, not being able to see the puck is pretty normal (especially with big bodies trying to screen you).
What I told her was that what matters a lot more than where the puck is, is where it's going to be in about two seconds. But the next best thing is to know where the puck is now.
If you can't see the puck then look at the players and as a last resort, look at the ref. 99% of the time they will be looking at the puck. Look where they're looking and soon enough it will appear.
I think this applies very much to this whole Google question.
The puck is gone (or on the way to the other side of the rink) and everyone is confused where it is or where it's going.
Look where everyone is looking and you'll find your answer there. It may not be in the same form as Google adwords, but the game is the same. Leveraging attention.
The tactics were different during the phonebook days (it was having your business start with the letter "A") as opposed to Google and will be different for the next thing as well.
From what I can tell, everyone seems to be looking at chatbots and vertical, shortform video. Not sure how that plays out in terms of advertising, but in terms of the answer to this article's question, that seems like a good place to start.
In my anecdotal experience, it's moved to private, trust-based channels: iMessage, WhatsApp, email, face-to-face interactions. Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring the public and the private has finally ended: people don't want to be online, don't trust social media, don't really trust any media, and are living simple local lives with a small circle of friends that they get together with regularly in person.
But then, my anecdotal experience may not be representative of most of the world. Most of my friends have money, houses, kids, friends - all of which are, by the numbers, rarities these days.
It's an interesting thought experiment to explore what it means if that actually is the new normal, and people are not consuming media or much of anything, or even if the people who are still addicted to social media are now tapped out and don't have any more disposable income left to spend. Probably economic depression. If everybody bought only what they needed and ignored all the advertisements, our present level of economic activity would plunge.
I had a very interesting discussion with a friend today, where I was talking to her about the /r/golang thread about Rob Pike's comments to OpenAI and how the thread was full of bots talking with other bots. No idea why the density of bots was so high in that thread, it was kind of absurd to see.
Then she said: "I know nobody that comments on online forums. Nobody would ever comment to strangers on the internet. It's too dangerous."
Took me a while to grasp what she meant with that, but I think she's right. Trust has eroded so much over the last two decades that most forums are either full of bots or full of annoyed and toxic people. It's very rare to find welcoming communities to newbies, and most of the ones I have discovered were offline connections.
She also mentioned that all of her friends use private profiles only, because having public profiles is too dangerous because of stalkers.
To me this sounded a bit absurd at first, but maybe that's a different perception on "how to use" the internet from a different younger generation that grew up post-socialmedia? My first contact with the internet was MIT opencourseware, her first contact was receiving dick pics at the age of 10 from assholes on the other side of the planet.
I miss the old phpbb forum days when the most toxic comment was someone being snarky and derailing the discussion into "did you use the search function?"
No idea how to fix the internet, maybe it's time to move to gopher or another protocol :-/
Thats just what the internet of the mid to late 90s was like. People rarely used their real name, there were hundreds of forums, some private. You could have different nicks on them.
Nobody knew you were a dog on the internet[1] until the rise of Facebook and linking your real identity with an online identity.
> No idea how to fix the internet, maybe it's time to move to gopher or another protocol :-/
Fido and Usenet are still around. Kind-of. IMO google virtually killed that, too, when they started peddling google groups and did the classic embrace-extend-extinguish on the Usenet.
BTW, I don't explicitly disagree with what you're saying, but it would be good to look at actual data instead of anecdata to know for sure, and the people who have the data are not telling ...
Absolutely this. I recently got a nice photo taken with my kids and for the first time I... didn't post it on Facebook. I sent it to my family group chat. Yesterday I posted on Facebook for the first time in months and it was about the power being out for an hour in the ice storm. I haven't posted travel photos to FB in years.
I'm mostly still on FB at all for the acquaintance-level connections to things like neighbourhood, church, and hobby communities. All the people I actually care about are in private group chats.
I was reflecting recently that Google Plus actually had the right idea back in 2011 with "circles", but at the time we all said it was too hard figuring out which circles we wanted to share a particular message or thought with. Hmm, maybe they were ahead of the game all along?
Everyone who was on Livejournal before G+ “invented” “Circles” had absolutely no problem with locking posts to “friends” (people they followed) or various “friends groups” that were subsets of their friends. It was fucking hilarious to see everyone say it was too hard on G+. Just two dropdowns right there on the new post page next to the main text field. Super simple. Creating and editing the groups was a pretty simple task with its own page.
Now that I look back at that I wonder what kind of theories suggest that abilities like that will result in reduced ad impressions, since I feel like every decision made by social sites makes much more sense when viewed through that lens.
Yeah LiveJournal (my username there is lightfixer) really came close to replicating how we actually social. Deciding who is able to see what I posted on an individual level was great. Could create groups etc.
I still mourn G+. It was clearly put together by somebody who thought first and foremost about privacy. It made deciding who to share what with the central, most visible part of how it worked. And that's probably part of why it failed. Was it hard to choose? Nope. But I guarantee you that if Facebook added a little "hey, are you sure you want to share this post publicly with the whole world under your real name? Yes/No" popup, organic content would drop 50% overnight, and not because of the difficulty of clicking "Yes." G+ died in part because it looked like a ghost town to a visitor, and it looked like a ghost town because everything was being done in private. And that was a great thing!
Mind you, G+ also made some insane and boneheaded decisions. I think at one point they tried to make all Youtube comments also be G+ posts under your real name, or something like that? That was fucking stupid.
People will make frequent mistakes if you put the privacy decision at a per post level. (And not just average users: see stevey's Google Platforms rant)
Having different apps, chats (Discord servers), accounts (at-a-push) for each privacy circle is much clearer to average users. Migrating a whole group of any size to another platform is hard, hence many of us are stuck with Facebookk in case we get invited to something we don't want to miss on it, but new platforms will continue to emerge and some will succeed.
Another mistake is that they had a significant presence in Brazil through Orkut, but they didn’t bother to integrate and migrate the users in.
Orkut’s user base was already degraded through Facebook but it was not inexistent, as some features of Orkut were unique. One was that it allowed people to use alt accounts to participate on anonymous discussion, not much different from Reddit, I’m sure with some creativeness G+ could have benefited from extra users.
> It was clearly put together by somebody who thought first and foremost about privacy.
Except that they worked for a company that clearly wants all of your data. Privacy and Google are often at odds with each other… and for the folks that understood privacy at the time, it was a hard sell unless they worked at Google.
Privacy to me means that even Google doesn’t get to peek in whenever they feel like it.
The biggest boneheaded decision from my perspective was their taking over the + prefix in Google search (to filter for results that have this term verbatim). That just positioned G+ as my enemy and I had a strong desire for it to die. Unfortunately, they didn't bring back the prefix even after it died. Quotes around a term do something similar, but I am still angry.
G+ copied some features and design work the open source federated social media, particularly Diaspora. So yeah, a lot of the features were developed in context of privacy protections.
yeah they made a lot of mistakes, the biggest one was not iterating on making it a good product. they just dumped it into the world, mostly formed and did nothing with it.
it had a lot of good ideas like you said it just needed to make it simpler to use, maybe even make the circles stuff not default though i didn't have much trouble with it
forcing everyone to use something that still had teething issues was the biggest screw up, if they wanted to integrate youtube they should have started with making G+ popular so people would actually want that, and yeah real names so dumb.
blizzard tried that as well lol. then some guy rang up blizzard hq and told one of the higher ups where his kids went to school and they suddenly realised full name is actually too much information
+ also got a bad rap due to what happened to Youtube - merged accounts - and yeah Google acted in some awful ways in more than one way but they were also trying to solve a problem of Zuck's shifting views on privacy (or rather the same view, that it shouldn't exist)
It probably wasn't the worst thing ever to try to leverage some of the existing social networking going on on YouTube, but combining it with a real name policy and making the actual posts/comments into first class global content for the G+ feed? Idiotic, and completely undermined the whole premise of safely walling off your content to its intended audience.
(See also: nice how reddit now makes it possible to curate the list of which subs you participate in whose comments and posts appear on your global profile page)
Reddit is fucking miserable. I don't want to claim they profited solely off the work of Swarz, because his involvement wasn't... total, I mean he left, but it feels like one of these things where mediocre people get control over something which was initially made by people who actually know what they're doing
One of the things I hope will come from the Trough of Disillusionment in cloud computing will be families running redundant file servers hosting the family photos instead of doing everything on IG.
Your three tech savvy family members should all have redundant copies of the photos of memaw’s wedding and Uncle Jim when he was 2 and looked exactly like your cousin’s second kid. I don’t need to see those. Your stalker ex boyfriend definitely doesn’t need to see those. It’s none of our goddamned business.
Someone, I think WD? Already made a play at this but I think it fell on deaf ears and will have to be tried again after the hype cycle calms tf down.
My very vibes-based take is that setting up home servers is the dad jeans of tech hobbies. It's kind of arresting how bewildered many young people are when confronted with anything below the UI layer. I think peak tech savviness happened a bit younger than me: maybe mid-late millennial. After that you start getting into the iPad-from-birth generation for whom tech was rarely a challenge. Tech savviness among young folks feels more like it was in the mid-90s. They're infinity more online-savvy, no doubt, but when it comes to knowing anything about how that works, they're cooked.
I do know some non-developer Gen Z folks that would set up minecraft servers on DO droplets, but I don't know of any that actually made their own and hosted it on their own network.
Aside from more exposure to raw tech, the technology making the internet happen was a lot simpler back then, where servers were actually physical servers,and such. I was able to adopt the complexity progressively as it came into existence which is a lot easier with the base knowledge of how the building blocks worked.
I just set up a little cube server with a Mini-ITX board I had lying around. Overall I'm very happy with it, but right now it's basically just Unraid with the built-in containers running for Deluge, Jellyfin, and the Crafty minecraft server.
I'd love for it to also be a backup of my whole Google Photos account (eg https://github.com/JakeWharton/docker-gphotos-sync) but honestly I can't imagine trying to maintain an app on there that would actually be the first class storage/sync/presentation layer for my family.
> I can't imagine trying to maintain an app on there that would actually be the first class storage/sync/presentation layer for my family.
Immich exists. It really is missing only some editing functionality and some nice-to-have features from GPhotos like automatic panoramas. Other than that, it's superior to Google.
It's interesting to see how much of a behemoth Discord has become. Seems like there's a Discord for everything - from open source projects to hobbies and games to individual groups of friends/family.
It's occupying the segment that subreddits historically have. However, it's perhaps-intentionally search-opaque. You can't Google to find a message/link/download that's gated by Discord. And it also gives a sense of community, where someone who had more attention and time on a computer than a sense of what to do with those things can go have casual conversation with… someone.
Discord is really where it is at these days. Discord servers with 50-100 people form the new social fabric of the internet where real community lies. In theory Reddit was supposed to be this but
1. Reddit communities tend to get too large
2. Subreddits overflow into each other too much through cross posting and brigading
3. Post history being public meant that you could get banned/brigaded for your comments on a totally different subreddit (i.e. bots autobanning you on one subreddit for posting on another subreddit).
The magic of discord is that everyone in the server I frequent I either know personally or they are known by someone I know personally. It creates a nice fabric of community and trust. Literally zero moderation over the past 10 years as everyone knows each other and behaves like normal adults and we also don’t get all up in arms when someone says something controversial.
As someone with two teenage kids, I would wager that this is highly age-dependent, and that it is exactly reversed the younger you go. My guess is 99% of the under-25 population uses Discord daily and has never had a Facebook account.
In which country? The young adults in my UK family aren't using Discord. They don't use Facebook (except to keep up with older family/associates) either though.
I think the only people who don't know what discord anymore is the 50+ crowd. Atleast 50% of the randos I talk with online have discord as their preferred method for texting and voice communication and immediately want to switch to it if possible. And if older people actually cared about doxxing themselves with every conversation they would probably have a higher percentage too.
I don't know what the right way to handle intersecting identities is.
Most of my online identities were started when I was in college and was happy to have them tied to my real name. (This is also when Facebook was popular, still good, and college-kids-only.) Since then, cancel culture et. al. has made me more wary of having my identity-adjacent usernames show up in hobbies like gaming.
If I want to be myname in some Discord servers and anonoguy in others, is there a safe way to enforce that boundary? What about if I want to work on gaming-related open source projects or 3D prints?
As the internet moves to logged-in-and-social-by-default, it's hard to know which identity to use for which service. Moreover, when things are constantly leaking/being hacked, I don't know that I want any service to know that anonoguy and myname are personas of the same individual.
And as LLMs become the standard, I'm not sure any of this is defensible. I imagine in a decade's time, it will be trivial for an LLM to go "this account and that account have similar interests/references/ways of typing - they must be the same person."
In the US this is likely a wildly high overestimate because a huge percentage of the population plays video games at least casually and it has a very large mindshare (if not necessarily daily use for everyone) in that domain.
Moving into things like sports and what we would've called the "general blogosphere" in 2010 quite rapidly too.
I kinda hate it since it's hard to discover, but at least Google can't direct a million bots to it either that easily yet...
Given that I recently joined a leatherworking Discord comprised of individuals pretty much the exact opposite of my demographic, I believe this is just plain wrong.
My guess would be near half, probably a 60/40 split.
> 3. Post history being public meant that you could get banned/brigaded for your comments on a totally different subreddit (i.e. bots autobanning you on one subreddit for posting on another subreddit).
You can make it private now. Personally I think this is a bit of a misfeature since it ends up helping all the low-activity users showing up to post political agitprop in local subreddits, thinly-veiled advertisers, etc., but they changed it.
I wonder if the act of switching between discord servers works better with our homo erectus brains. You visit your sister who moved to the next village over, and you hang out in that context until it’s time to go home. You go hang out with the stone shapers because you’re a Neolithic nerd and you think rocks are cool but you have the find motor skills of a dying walrus.
Having all of your social circle mashed together on the internet is like a family reunion at a convention in the same room as your high school reunion. It’s… a lot.
I think this is almost certainly true. People aren’t built to be acceptable to an audience the size of a football stadium, they’re built to be acceptable to a hundred or so people at a time. If you can comfortably context-switch, it’s probably a much easier lifestyle.
I know that for me, at least, I like having one server where the comedy is not PC, one server where people seem to be a little more philosophical, one server for my real life friends, one server full of leftoids and one server full of rightards, etc.
Why doesn’t Signal have the same mindspace that these (imo) marginal apps have? It’s actually private. I wonder if people find it hard to use or something…
Until recently, I think the only way to join a Signal was to be explicitly added by a member. It doesn't have all the channels etc. of something like Discord.
It doesn't have enough mindshare by normies either. In San Francisco, my entire social graph was on Signal. In NYC, I'm the weirdo that uses Signal for everything. Most locals seem to only use it for things that they explicitly want to be private. Among Euro friends, only the ones with ties to the US/tech industry use it.
Or just not a buggy piece of crap. It’s more stable than it used to be, but I still run into random problems here and there. Much more often than with any other piece of software I use regularly, but I suppose most are becoming web apps anyways…
Subreddits ultimately took over when Usenet moderation failed to keep up. I had chat groups before the Web was really even a thing and they lived on until things like Slashdot and Digg took the reins.
One thing that's having a little comeback is the email newsletter (see Beehiiv). There's something nice about being able to get exactly what you signed up for and nothing more. No ads, no recommended content, no infinite scroll.
I wonder if there are any old school protocols out there to create a huge business around by just centralizing them and offering features people have been asking for decades.
Slack had the ability to be Discord, but they explicitly decided they wanted to be business-only.
React was the first open-source community I knew of that outgrew/got kicked off of Slack and moved to Discord. Now, it seems Slack is only used by companies, and occasionally by smaller groups (apartment buildings, school parents, etc) where someone in the group knows Slack from work and doesn't know it's hostile to non-businesses.
Discord was the opposite. I was working on an open source initiative at Google at the time, and the Discord folks openly welcomed us. They even gave us someone's contact info, in case we had needs they weren't addressing. This was when it was still targeted just for gaming, but they were very welcoming of OSS projects using it too!
As I write this, I realize that Discord is what "Google Apps for your Domain" was and Slack is the "Google Workspace" it became.
> Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring the public and the private has finally ended
I wish you were right. We took our kid to a stage show she really wanted to see. People round us kept checking their phones. They weren’t even really checking them. They held them and would turn the screen on and off, lighting the place up.
They couldn’t be without them for more than 5 minutes. This, after 30 mins of painful selfies before the show. It’s awful.
I don't think the vibe shift they're describing has fully taken place yet, but I think the foundations have been laid and it's started. It's probably going to be a while and take further societal changes to fully come into fruition, though.
AR glasses coupled with a sophisticated input device (fingertap? tounguetap?) will eventually be able to fully replace a touchscreen interface. And from then on it'll eventually become dated and rude to resort to pulling out touch screens during a social event.
Mind you, inconsiderate people will be as distracted as ever, and will continue to halfheartedly pretend they're listening to those around them. They'll just need to find a new method to achieve maximal obnoxiousness.
Many people are simultaneously sharing to the broader internet less (the claim you're responding to) AND more addicted to media shared by the ones who DO share stuff then ever (the claim you're making).
None of the numbers I've seen on web usage, platform usage, etc. indicate people are significantly pulling away from online lives. Though, there has been a slight dip in daily social media browsing time in the last couple of years (of course, it also follows the end of the pandemic, and it hasn't ceded back to where it was prior).
That does sound like a rather charmed life though. Could also be a sign that people are reverting to using the social internet apart from their irl acquaintances as well.
Linking up with all of our irl acquaintances through the public web was a terrible mistake imo. Seeking privacy can mean many different things.
I think the platforms have changed. FB used to be 100% posts by people you know. I opened it today, and maybe 1 out of 50 posts were by someone i know, the rest was "trending" content.
Its essentially an entirely different website now.
Would it show up in the numbers on web usage, platform usage, etc? People who do this drop out of the sample - they don't show up in the numbers. As far as your stat gathering is concerned, they don't exist.
If you're actually doing a census of people and asking about their web usage and social habits, it'd show up. So maybe Google or Facebook has the data if they were to do say cohort analysis on Google Analytics or Chrome History or Facebook beacon logs, counting specifically the number of total unique Internet users that used to visit social media but no longer do. But such an analysis would require SVP-level privacy approval (because it joins together personal, non-anonymized data across multiple products), and why would an executive commission a study that potentially tells them that their job is in danger and their employer is making a mistake by employing them? And if they did, why would they ever publicize the results?
AFAIK, most of the major public-facing analytics platforms work by sampling their users. If their users are voluntarily choosing not to engage with the platform that their sampling runs on, they by definition cannot measure that change. They just become a biased sample that excludes specifically the population they're trying to measure.
But they still READ. So, if you 'interact' (and by that I mean do any write-like action, like commenting, posting, liking, whatever) less, that's gonna show up.
They don't, at least not necessarily. I look at my HN history and it's 13 hours ago, 6 days ago, 8 days ago, 13 days ago. Fifteen years ago I was #2 on the leaderboard (itself now gone, it listed users by total comment karma) and would post about 4-5 times a day. Now when I'm not posting, I'm actually not on the site and not reading replies. I just don't have time.
I think a decent-sized subset of Millennials have basically aged out of the time-surplus years of the early 20s and are now busy with kids and careers and families. And they aren't being replaced by the new 20-somethings, at least not on social media of the same form. The kids are still on text messages and Whatsapp and Discord and Roblox and Google Docs (!!), but they aren't interested in getting on the public Internet, and if they are, their parents won't let them.
People didn’t leave social media, social media left them. Instagram used to show your friends, not it shows algorithmic content. Same for the other networks. People are still there but it’s now the new tv.
Everyone should be simply posting algorithmic content to Facebook. Screenshots, etc not giving them your own life stuff imo. We need to push back on personalized feeds. Share a high percentage of what you see so that there is a digital commons and not just some island for each person.
Social media platform used to be less about passive consumption.
My two kids absolutely do not trust open social media (thankfully). My 16 year old has a IMessage group with his friends as well as a discord and that’s it. My 13 year old just uses iMessage with his friend group. My wife and I have taught them the risks of social media but never to the degree of their current distrust. They seem to have picked it ip on their own and want no part of X, insta, TikTok or anything else. They just want to talk to the friends they know.
I'd say it was much shorter than 30 years. Facebook opened to the public in 2006, and I was surprised to learn Myspace (the first "normie" space on the Web) isn't much older. And before that your digital persona was separate from your offline persona, unless you were one of the grognards with a faculty .edu address.
It's the people with money, houses, and kids that departed the 'simple local' lifestyle when the Internet and social media become large. It's them that are re-discovering the joys of the simple local lifestyle.
The simple local lifestyle is that which was lived by all of humanity for all of history up until the last ~75 years (give or take).
I’ve known a lot of neurodivergent and LGBT people, and I was in my late teens when The Internet happened and a young adult when the Web happened.
If you’re not within a couple standard deviations of boring, local living is isolating. Al Gore gave a mea culpa speech at one point because he thought, as a Senator, that legislating to give everyone the Internet would halt the rural brain drain but it had the opposite effect. People learned that they weren’t alone, they were just surrounded by (my words, not his) idiots and so they moved to where their people were. They voted with their feet in droves.
Ultimately, the Internet is good for support. It lets you find people who have the same obscure cancer your child has. Who are dealing with the same sort of neuroses your mom has. Who are being defrauded by a corporation in the same way. Who have the same feelings that the people around you ridicule you for even the hint of having. It lets these people find the patterns, see other people are feeling the same things they do, stop being gaslit.
Everything else has become about dopamine and money. And for those parts we should definitely unplug. But without forums or chat threads that same feeling of being The Other comes back.
This one is on its way to becoming part of the social media ecosystem. That's what the "Updates" feature is.
To get an idea of what it will look like, check out Instagram users who use it for both 1:1 messaging and social media (1:many) features. Which (again anecdotally) is widely used in younger generations.
Few of my friends use Instagram or TikTok, but I think we're just outliers. I see many (young) users, all the time, whenever I'm on the train.
I am a gen-z and most of my peers look at me weird when I express the same. It was once cool to have social media and presence -- I was only 8 when I made a facebook account. But now, things are different. I actively avoid social media and don't like to show myself online anywhere other than my personal website.
The brief period where I could check Facebook and reliably find someone's name I forgot or figure out how to contact people or invite them to a gathering was pretty nice. Now everyone's on fifty apps I don't use, or installed but never remember to check. Oh well. Sorry, too stimulating for me to join your Discord and get hundreds of notifications, most of which don't concern me at all.
Meta appears to believe this, and so is pushing chatbot integration into private chats on Messenger and WhatsApp; presumably that will be the vector by which they push product advertisements.
What’s really interesting to me is how this coincides with a larger push to break up more and more ties that kept our society going for the last 30–50 years. Look at what’s happening to globalization and the push to near-shore. Look at the fragmentation of media into private channels and closed groups, the erosion of shared narratives, and the growing skepticism toward institutions that used to act as connective tissue.
Individually, many of these shifts make sense: resilience over efficiency, trust over reach, local over global. But collectively they point to a world that is becoming more segmented, less interoperable, and harder to coordinate at scale. If fewer people participate in shared public spaces, economic, cultural, or informational, it’s not just advertising models that break, but the assumptions underpinning growth, politics, and even social cohesion.
That doesn’t necessarily mean collapse, but it does suggest a lower energy equilibrium: slower growth, fewer mass phenomena, more parallel realities. The open question is whether we can rebuild new forms of shared infrastructure and trust at smaller scales—or whether we simply learn to live with a more fragmented, quieter, and less synchronized society.
That doesn't really sound bad to me. I think we expanded our social reach too far and need to scale back to where we can feel like we have an impact and our voice matters.
100% this. I remember when I took advantage of being online and not really competing in SEO, it was simply a matter of being real. At the time, I didn’t realize it was just arbitrage: I was naturally in a space with fewer participants and most organizations didn’t even know the rules yet.
Now that advantage is completely gone, and I have to build business the way it’s always been done in history: walking the streets while the online "broadcasted" world is a massive distraction.
> The person kept making the comment that she couldn't see/find the puck and it made it frustrating to watch.
Lifelong hockey fan, I never understood this complaint. I believe it was FOX that did the 'highlight the puck' thing for a few years in the 1990's.
You can't see the ball in American football, either.
But you don't need to. The guy that's running and everyone is trying to tackle? He has the ball. Just like the guy skating across the ice with his stick on the ground? He's got the puck.
When you CAN see the puck/ball, either someone lost control of it, or they're shooting/throwing/passing it.
You're right - it was called FoxTrax, it's a fairly interesting piece of engineering.
It's pretty wild they were able to convince the NHL to use a modified puck with a battery and PCB inside, all so American viewers could better follow the action.
As a gamer this seems obvious to me. It's long been clear to me that our eyes are very adept at processing high-speed motion. Even the first 120Hz LCD gaming monitor, as sucky as it was, was miles bette than the 60 Hz on the market.
So while technically our eyes might not discern individual frames higher than 25 FPS or so, our brain can absolutely process data from a much higher effeice framerate. The motion blur fast thing naturally produce for example, provides critical context clues.
In gaming, sure 240 Hz won't help you see more as such, but it allows your eyes to do what they naturally do and give a much improved experience of fluidity and superior motion prediction.
I find this interesting - before we switched from 5/4 aspect ratio, it was hard to find the puck because the camera was always chasing - but if you know hockey (e.g., watch enough of it) there are a lot of cues about where the puck is or will be, now that we have a wider aspect ratio.
pretty common with my crowd of fans to even get a little giddy when the play is so deceptive that it fakes out the camera man and they dont realize theyre focused on the wrong player until a second or two passes
I'd go a step further and say the ball/puck is not the interesting thing to watch.
Imagine if you couldn't see the players, and just saw the puck. Would that be interesting at all?
Think about tennis. There is the trope of people's eyes going back and forth following the ball, but I don't think they are following the ball directly. They are going back and forth looking at the person who is going to hit the ball.
I think you might be conflating knowing where the puck is with being able to fix your eyes on the puck at all times. The complaint is usually about the former. People are complaining that they don't know where the puck is.
> ...vertical, shortform video. Not sure how that plays out in terms of advertising...
I have seen a comment about them being terrible for advertising, it looks like a "good" idea but it is not.
The problem is that the attention of people watching these videos drop to almost zero, too much is happening in a too short amount of time, and as a result nothing is remembered, including the ads. It is a very good deal for whoever is monetizing this content, they show a lot of ads, plenty of revenue, but not for those who are paying for the ads. It is like subliminal messages, "good" idea, but not very effective. For ads to work, people need to pay attention.
I don't know how ads in chatbots will turn out and what form it will take, but I think it is inevitable.
They are probably going to make them obvious at first, like with Google search.
But they can also make it more pernicious. For example by having companies pay them so that they can train their AI on their products, with regular updates. Not technically an ad, but the AI will be more aware of their products so that they are more likely to be recommended to the user. In other words, that's paying for the right to advertise to the AI rather than to advertise to consumers directly.
Why would they ever make it obvious? It makes no sense. google just had the luck of political inaction, and eventually enshitified it further to the point where you might not know it was an ad.
One rough heuristic I use is people-watching on the subway. Just a quick glance from a distance at their phones. What are they actually looking at? (Yeah I know it's a bit nosy...)
I see: short-form video, WhatsApp/Messaging, YouTube long-format - in that order.
> The tactics were different during the phonebook days (it was having your business start with the letter "A") as opposed to Google and will be different for the next thing as well.
And to add to this, the dark pattern of the time was to register in the Phone Book as “AAA Your Real Business Name” which was exactly what my first job did.
Bang on. It's advertising, so literally looking at where people are getting their info from is the way to go.
Google searches don't produce good results these days. The enshittification has become too extreme. Google openly admits as much (and further intensifies the enshittification) by placing a huge AI summary above those results.
The answer is self evident. If, before, you were relying on clicks resulting from google searches, today you need to be what an AI recommends when somebody uses an AI like they used to use google. (Users will eventually become more sophisticated though!) Lots of people are using AI like a search engine and getting better results than google gives simply because massive resources are currently being put into training AI, while mere neglect is insufficient to explain how fast Google search results are getting worse.
Is this how AI companies plan to cash in? Accept money from advertisers to promote their products in interactions with their LLM's? Were I an advertiser, I'd be trying to get Anthropic to take my money instead of giving it to Google. AI might be what finally makes it impossible to tell content and ads apart. That's great for advertisers... I guess. Not so great for the rest of us.
> Google searches don't produce good results these days. The enshittification has become too extreme. Google openly admits as much (and further intensifies the enshittification) by placing a huge AI summary above those results.
I haven't asked Google a question it has failed to provide a more than adequate answer to in ... months? years?
And on all my devices, I run google search with &udm=14, so I am not talking about AI summaries. I also have search personalization disabled.
I see a lot of people complaining about this on HN. It simply doesn't match my experience at all, in any way.
Maybe because you have the personalization disabled. My complaint isn't the SEO stuff; that hits me when I search on a tech item I want to learn (I get slammed with crappy vendor blogs), or food recipes (long story about a Sicilian Grandma before the recipe at the end). My complaint with Google is it fights me on keywords, and I have to constantly add quotes, add minuses, and it seems to silently override it.
It's easier to add Reddit at the end to get a more accurate question repeated, and skip the sponsored SEO crap.
Google seems relatively good at never giving me SEO crap near the top of most of my search results.
And a list of links to original sources or close to it is precisely what I do want.
If you want an LLM to generate an answer from its training data, that's fine, but go use a different search engine instead of demanding that the one many of us have relied on for decades has to do that.
My experience was quite the opposite, and the reason why I switched to Kagi: any search that was anywhere adjacent to a product would be almost nothing but SEO garbage. Non-product related searches were better, but I also think they had noticeably degraded over the past several years to a decade.
And I actually agree with the last point. While there are entire categories of questions that I now prefer an LLM to to any search engine, when I want a search engine, I specifically do not want LLM summaries, which is another thing I like about Kagi: they allow me to choose when I want to see an LLM summary and to turn off summaries altogether.
(this is really not meant to be an ad for Kagi, I presume that most HN users are familiar with it already and don't need yet another random endorsement, but I honestly don't know how to talk about my experiences with search over the past several years and my dissatisfaction with google without talking about it)
I don't believe I was demanding anything of the sort. If you're happy with Google, enjoy. I am adding my own anecdotal experiences to other's (who appear also to have found search lacking for some time now).
You stated that you did not want a list of links. I am not sure what other alternatives there are, but AFAIK, they will all involve LLMs in some way and be a quite different way to present the results of a "search" than traditional search engines.
First you need agriculture so people tend to settle in one place. After ag comes more specialization, farmers need houses, graineries, and as society grows social specialists in which we'd call government.
These things in an area typically cause the area to grow because of their stability. As they grow you get more than one person/business doing the same line of work and you get more people than fit in ones monkeysphere. At that size you may not know a person that knows what you need to know and start looking further. This is why as cities grow advertising itself becomes an emergent property. Just go to a Roman city and look for dick pavers for example. Then someone will think "Hey, I can give some poor kids a board with a message on it and have them cry out to go to the place that people pay me to advertise" and suddenly you have an emergent property of humanity.
The recent Acquired ep on “Alphabet Inc” put it aptly: social media moved into Google’s space, video (reels, “pivot to video”), and social media for socialising moved to message groups, iMessage/Whatsapp/Discord.
Revenue-wise, video ads have always been the sun to print ads peanut m&m.
Look where the pucks going then:
Implication: ChatGPT as a realtime video avatar will hit the jackpot with ads, but not before. Count on the ChatGPT device having a screen for that reason
"AI" is the next advertising frontier, no question.
People are throwing themselves to feed you personal data. You no longer have to come up with sneaky ways to collect it, or build out their profile from inferred metadata. Less work for you, more accurate profiling, and less risk getting fined by pesky regulation.
Ad campaigns can be much more personal and targeted. You can push them at just the right moment to optimize the chances of conversion. They can be much more persuasive, since chatbots and assistants are deeply trusted. You can dial the sensitivity knob to make them very subtle, or completely blatant, depending on your urgency and client.
If I as someone outside of this hostile industry can think up these scenarios, the world is not ready for what advertising geniuses are cooking up as we speak.
> the world is not ready for what advertising geniuses are cooking up as we speak.
Advertising directed towards AI models, at the very least. If you can get into ChatGPT's weights that McDonalds is the cheapest and tastiest hamburger, how many millions of people would ChatGPT tell that to?
>Look where everyone is looking and you'll find your answer there. It may not be in the same form as Google adwords, but the game is the same. Leveraging attention.
The chill that ran down my spine when I realized that you and TFA think that the part people care about is Google as an ad platform, and not as a way to access websites.
I don't know why people are down-voting it. You might not like it, you may not think it's good. But this is absolutely happening and there's a lot of data out there about it.
It's unnatural to search an LLM for a product. It's why Alexa never became a shopping portal.
Best way to get the word out about a product now is through an influencer in the space.
-- Edit:
Show of hands for anyone using ChatGPT to shop. Be honest.
People don't even use Google to shop. They try to find something either (1) by brand name, eg. "iphone" or (2) generically by category, eg. "best cold weather tent".
In the former case, Google used their enormous, antitrust flaunting power and 90% browser marketshare to turn the URL bar into a competitive trademark bidding dragnet. Apple pays out the nose for the iPhone spot. For every click. And every other major corporation selling to business or consumer does the same. This is the source of Google's enormous wealth. Google is a middle man. You cannot conceivably get to a brand or product without paying the Google tax.
In the latter case, when people try to look up blogs and reviews and Reddit posts to compare products, Google gets in the way and inserts themselves into the flow. If LLMs make this experience even shittier, there won't be upstream content to source as no reward will reach the people providing the value. It will naturally atrophy over time.
As a new sales channel, young people are buying content off of TikTok and Instagram directly now. When they see influencers using products they like, it leads to massive sales volume. New unicorn consumer businesses are being minted regularly from this.
Alexa never became a good shopping portal because voice interfaces regularly mishear you, so there was always a lot of doubt about what it might be ordering, and also has anyone except the obscenely rich ever gone "yes, the first result, that's always fine, no I will not bother looking at any of the prices on any of the results"? Hence the joke about the reason why Amazon bought Whole Foods being that Bezos said one day "Alexa, buy me something from Whole Foods" and Alexa mishearing it as "Buy Whole Foods".
LLMs are not limited to voice interfaces. You absolutely can use ChatGPT as a search engine if you want to: it does give you results you can compare, telling you about pros and cons of various options, and you can discuss with it what your end-goals are and have it turn a vague idea into a shopping list (that may or may not be complete for your project).
I don't have any reason to think these are the best, ChatGPT is not a storefront and OpenAI does not have a long history as a search engine, but it absolutely can be used this way.
Wow - than at least my behavior - and that of quite an impressive amount of non tech people in my circle of acquaintances - are "unnatural".
I know people who took a photo of their car's driver side mirror cap (the thing that is on the opposite of the drivers side mirror and often colored like the rest of the car) - and asked chatGPT to search for the part. Because they were not able to navigate the respective auto parts portals.
I myself had perplexity generate a comparison report for different electric cars in a specific price range to get a first rough understanding of the used eCar market. Including links to respective models in used car sites.
Using Kagi for the few regular searches I need to do nowadays, Claude Code on the commandline for any other extended research/searches, I actually only use Google nowadays when I use the Google song detection function. Like Shazam - I just find this thing to be on my phone, so no need for an additional app.
I could give you a lot of additional examples from acquaintances and family - esp. from the not so tech people. Google is catching up, though. So - I think, with habits being hard to break, most people find Google good enough for quite a long time to come.
> and asked chatGPT to search for the part. Because they were not able to navigate the respective auto parts portals.
I do that, 10 years already, using Google, on a specific website. Website owners are just so very, very bad at making search working. Haven't even tried using ChatGPT for it.
Searching with llms is the single best use case for it.
It is some form of natural language apropos.
Ask it what is the best way to have a beautiful and modern website, Vercel will make money and tailwind will receive a visit and gain one more consuming application.
Ask it how to be safe, rust will gain more power and influence no matter what originally was your intent.
It doesn't need to be justified. Chatgpt said so therefore true (the audience vulnerable to this has established that generative technology==chatgpt)
I used ChatGPT to find a bike for me. It asked good questions, recommended good results, linked me to options and the websites I needed to further research things. I don't do a lot of shopping though so this is one tiny example. If I was looking to actually shop again though I'd use it again. Most of my shopping these days is the grocery store. I don't have a lot of needs.
LLMs are honestly rather amazing for product search and comparison.
Here's a use case for me last week: I'm re-organizing my bathroom sink/vanity, and I want a few counter top organizers to keep things neat and tidy. I have a low mirror, low medicine cabinets, and generally tight spaces to work with and want to maximize storage.
So, I have a 10" wide space and I can't have anything over 16". I want to find a drawer organizer as close to 16" tall without going over, and as close to 10" without going over. Given a choice between the two, I want to bias for more height.
Go to Google or Amazon and try finding that. You're going to be trying permutations of 10x16 and 9x16 and so on, and digging through pages looking for something approximate.
In theory maybe there's some filter options on Amazon that might work, but they're usually incomplete, wrong, or absent. It's a terrible experience even when it's supported.
ChatGPT (or even Amazon's kind of janky Rufus) immediately finds top near-perfect matches for me to choose from. 15-20 minutes of aggravating digging turned into 90s of letting ChatGPT think and search while I was off grabbing a coffee.
> LLMs are honestly rather amazing for product search and comparison.
True, LLMs are quite good in things where I have limited knowledge. It shortens exploration phase considerably. Before, I would need to go to web pages, compare parameters (somewhere), think out why this, not that.
> It's unnatural to search an LLM for a product. It's why Alexa never became a shopping portal.
There is plenty of evidence that people are increasingly turning to AI chatbots for that too. And it's entirely possible that ChatGPT and others are already being trained to mention some products first or to present them in a more positive light.
I’d suggest that the title should be, “Competition for Google AdWords is so strong that unsophisticated advertisers can no longer get a good return. Where do I promote my business now?”
As someone who leads large parts of ad tech for TikTok and worked at Google for 10 years, it’s the K shaped economy that is pressing SMBs out. Pure and simple
Everyone can make up some complex theories but I see it in the numbers every day. Spend distribution is now k shaped and SMBs simply can’t compete at top end performance levels.
This seems one of the more important comments here - a K shaped economy (Rich get richer up the rising arm of the K and the rest of us are on the down arm)
dominates everything (ie asset price inflation means if you had assets in 2020 you probably still do else good luck) and this just is one of many ways the playing field has tilted towards the richest.
And it is always a choice - we choose platforms and regulations and spending priorities. If “we” choose a different set of tech regulations the K shaped economy can be put back in its box.
For me the problem was most clearly outlined by Cory Doctorow “developers did not unionise or rebel in time because they thought of themselves as temporarily embarrassed entrepreneurs”.
SMBs broadly spend 200-400 dollars a month on ads and see marginal to negative returns against 10 million in spend for large clients. Even 1000-5000 see marginal returns at best unless the target small demo high return (local premium services). They lack the budgets for learning and optimization let alone optimal price per placement.
This combined with SMBs targeting everyday joes with increasing less demand availability for anything it leaves them crushed on both sides.
Wow so 10,000-100,000x spend difference. That is a wide K.
Do you think there’s any hope for SMB? Eg I’ve seen some companies tout AI advertising optimization for SMB but when I looked into one for investment the numbers weren’t very compelling.
> Also, In my own experience for my business ( also entertainment) I have found reddit ads to be useful.
Reddit is very hit or miss depending on your target audience.
Depending on your Reddit target audience, a lot of people could have adblock installed. They might be loyal to communities that have approved vendor lists where everyone parrots the same vendor recommendations back and forth in every thread, so not being part of that game means you're left out. In some niches, the subreddit moderators have a financial relationship with vendors and they'll put their weight into swaying every conversation away from competitors.
For other niches, none of this applies and Reddit can be a good ad destination. It really depends
It's been some years since I've had to put ads on the web, but I found Reddit ads insanely effective. Really, Google ads have been dead for a long time. I found them hardly effective at all since maybe 2011.
A surgeon in our family got basically all his (private) clients from Google. Spend was multiple k per month. If you consider that one surgery brings in 7k in revenue, then those numbers actually make sense. He's retired now but did this up to 2y ago.
> Really, Google ads have been dead for a long time.
For you perhaps. I work with a huge amount of businesses whose profits are still driven almost entirely by them, who have seen not even a blip and make money hand over fist.
Reddits been building up its user base in India the past few years.[1]
I’m permabanned on Reddit so I only consume via the default not logged in feed and I run into some comments in what I assume is Hindi(might be marathi or one of the multiple other languages on the continent) or posts from subreddits explicitly about some aspect of india
Hm good point but if one were to try to reach visibility via let's say contacting the creators themselves or making reddit showcases themselves?
I am not sure what might work better, sponsorships or Ads. Of course some are definitely icky sponsorships but if one were to align with small youtubers who develop their own things and you enjoy their content and there might be an overlap etc.
I personally have an ad blocker so I don't really know what might work for. I guess organic marketing? But how does one achieve it?
Any good books / ideas on more sustainable forms of marketing aside from paying the large corporations a sort of land tax basically?
AI is not and cannot be search. Search is dead and has been for a few years now. Search has seemingly been subsumed into the LLM monster, considering how "fuzzy" queries have become (probably because they're not hitting the search algorithm without being massaged by "something else"). Significant portions of the web have been purged from Google's index, which means that neither Gemini nor Search can present those pages to users.
When people say "search is dead", I feel like you and I live on different planets.
If I have a Google idea of what I want, Google search works great. On the rare occasion I don't know the specific thing I'm looking for, Gemini points the way.
It had never ever been easier for me to find what I'm looking for on the internet, since 1993-1994.
Google considers the consumer's side, not just the publishers. Users often don't want to visit someone's website (and then dodge ads and cookie/newsletter/notification popups). If the query can be answered without veer visiting a website, so much the better.
Instead sites adds Gemini integrations, which are targeted based on prompts. When you pay enough, Gemini recommends your shop and AI buys the stuff for the target audience.
Google search ain't dead at all: it became so good something silly like 99% of all the queries have to be answered by the Google AI before the very first "result". And for those who want more, there's the "continue this discussion with Gemini".
Now this may not be great for Google Ads (dunno about that) but Google search now works better than it ever did.
Surprised to see this upvoted because the takeaway is completely incorrect, and based on the anecdotal evidence of one advertiser.
As someone who spends seven figures every month on Google ads, what’s much more likely to be happening here is that the individual advertiser is either getting outcompeted or they’re executing ads poorly.
Google ads revenue in the US continues to grow every quarter. And, since advertisers will generally invest in ads until the last dollar is break even, it’s likely that the total value advertisers unlock through Google ads is growing as well. Whether that’s true or not, the notion that value generated for advertisers is “dead” is absurd.
Your experience is 100% compatible with the linked article: the seven-figure spender is presumably running a much higher margin business and can scale narrowly profitable ads much more effectively. The natural equilibrium for a perfect ad market is for the ad spend to be exactly equal to increase in revenue: a perfectly efficient market with no profit for the advertiser. Google (and Meta et al) are so good that for many SMBs they are completely cornered at the zero-point: spend as much as you can just to stay in the same place financially.
> The natural equilibrium for a perfect ad market is for the ad spend to be exactly equal to increase in revenue
Not quite, the equilibrium is when marginal ad spend results in no change to profit. The ad spend at equilibrium should result in increased profit compared to no ad spend.
The question is, why has this post been massively upvoted?
It contains zero useful information. Just somebody struggling with AdWords and they don't know why. Not helpful.
I have to assume the vast majority of upvotes are based on the title alone, assuming it's about Search? A large proportion of top level comments are about Search too. Depressing.
I am fairly confident that the answer is that most people vote based on the title/headline without ever clicking through. I am likely guilty of this as well sometimes. It takes discipline to avoid this behaviour.
> We find that most users do not read the article that they vote on, and that, in total, 73% of posts were rated (i.e., upvoted or downvoted) without first viewing the content. [0]
In this case, my guess is that people are noticing less and less utility from Google search, and that was why they voted like they did.
This same phenomenon is what gives newspaper editors far more power than the journalists, as it is the editors who not only decide the stories to be covered, but even more importantly, they decide the headline. Most people just scan the headlines while subconsciously looking for confirmation of their own biases.
I tried to find that paper via google search first, and I failed after 3 different searches. I then opened my not-important-stuff LLM, chatgpt.com, and found it in 3 interactions, where in the 3rd I made it use search. Chatbots with search are just so good at "on the tip of my tongue" type things.
Google is in such a weird position because of their bread and butter legacy UX * scale. This has to be the biggest case of innovators dilemma of all time?
Google.com has the "AI mode," and it tries to intelligently decide when to suggest that based on a search query. I could have likely used that to find the same thing. But, I instinctively just went to chatgpt.com instead. I am not a total moron, I use gemini, claude, and gpt APIs in the 2 LLM enabled products that I am working on...
However, just last week I noticed that the AI mode default reply for some queries was giving me just horrible AI mode replies. Like gpt-3.5 quality wrong assumptions. For the first time I saw google.com as the worst option. I cannot be the only one.
I think I understand the problem. Google has the tech, but as a public company they cannot start to lose money on every search query, right? The quarterly would look bad, bonuses would go down. Same reason ULA can't build Starship, even if they could and wanted to. However, OpenAI can lose money on every query. SOTA inference is still not cheap.
Massively? I can't know. I read the article and upvoted 1) because it suggests a rocky road ahead for Google and 2) because, as you may have guessed, I dislike ads, dislike Google's complicity in ads, and so am happy to discuss.
I happen to in fact think we have reached an inflection point. Whether "Google is dead" depends probably a good deal on where they go now.
I run a small software business and I know various other people who run small software businesses. We are all pretty much agreed that that Google Ads have been less and less profitable, year or year. Most of us have now given up on PPC ads.
And equally I know many people running non software businesses whose experience is the complete opposite of yours and Google ads has and continues to drive the majority of their revenue.
I expected them to start seeing a hit or significant decline by now, and even told them as such but in what I honestly find surprising, it’s not come to pass.
> Surprised to see this upvoted because the takeaway is completely incorrect
It's the standard actually. Hot takes get more votes and hot takes are usually wrong. Experts have non-controversial opinions, which are boring (so no impulse to upvote), and there are 1000x more non-experts with blogs. Add to that HN culture which values contrarian-ness. So HN front page blog posts are almost entirely incorrect, but spicy
I love knocking on Google, and have been doing so for longer than it was cool, but this sounds more like the business is no longer attractive than Google having become suddenly wildly ineffective.
My anecdotal evidence is the smarter normies are increasingly allergic to screens. They only use them to watch stuff they hear about by some other means, but parents, for example, look for any excuse to keep their kids off the Internet, and largely they're better for it.
If you've been around longer than internet advertising you realize the basics of demand have changed pretty considerably.
Let's go back to 1980 and say that you have widget X that person A would absolutely buy if they saw/heard it advertised. They live in Podunk Minnesota that had coverage by 3 radio stations, 3 TV stations, and 2 newspapers. But you have no idea what media they actually consumed to target the right one.
Right now you're at the point you would have to contact at least 8 different media companies for ad spend if you wanted coverage. Most likely you'd cut it down to one of each, and maybe a billboard. This said, the cost for just this little area is going to be wildly expensive! Ads were huge money, and this is just for one little town.
These costs were slightly lower for large corporate buyers, but not that much because as you go back farther and farther you were typically dealing with more companies before consolidation. Being an SMB was great in this market in a local area because you weren't competing with the world.
Fast forward to now and you compete with the entire world at any given moment. In the West we've forgotten about competition and allowed a huge portion of our economic product to consolidate to a small number of companies. This is very apparent in advertising as the old media entities are dead or far more expensive than you'll ever recoup with the competition out there. Instead you're looking at Google/Reddit/Facebook style ads, but with that kind of ad you again, complete with the entire world. If your ad actually does good and drive business, then Google metrics will feedback to players watching the market and they will advertise products in the same space driving up competition and the base costs for ads. The supply from your competitors is practically unlimited which will drive your profits to almost zero unless you happen to have something very special.
Welcome to the K shaped economy, where the big get bigger and the small die.
Glad to see I'm not the one that sees the similarity in "zapping" or channel surfing to what people do nowadays with those shorts...
I remember my brother loving to do channel surfing in the 80s when we were young. I've always hated it! maybe that's why I cannot stand the current Tiktok media format (so sad that Youtube is pushing more and more the same format).
Also, remember when telephones started and people who took vertical video where seen as sinners? How times change!
It's what Americans call non free to air television. You're probably being downvoted because it's intrensic there and they assume you must know about it.
The way people get information online is changing rapidly.
I run a local makerspace. It is not quite the same thing as a local entertainment business, but there are certainly some similarities. We are local, and we are very event-based.
For the last 10 years, the way we would get new members was to host Meetups. Meetups are slowly bringing in fewer members. When I ask tour guests how they found out about us, they recently started saying that they found us on ChatGPT. They did not know what a makerspace was but they explained their problem and ChatGPT presented our space as a local solution. This has been good for us because we offer something useful to the community but struggle to explain it. In the old days of search, this was a problem because many people were not using the correct phrase to describe what we are. That doesn’t matter anymore.
How does a local business optimize for this though? I am not sure.
One of two ways. Yes, by scraping, even it it requires users to 'sell' their own browsing data to the AI companies because places like Discord lock them out.
Or, the other way is for particular event organizers to pay directly for their services to be advertised/incorporated into the LLM itself. Those that don't pay get more and more of their data erased from the LLM maybe?
Are you using "Meetups" to mean Meetup.com or just events in general? Meetup.com has completely gone to shit. Trying to find an event is super frustrating. They show the same events over and over. They don't enforce categorization. People mark online only events as in person and the platform doesn't care. They also started trying to charge users (people looking to attend events) instead of only planners (people hosting events) so it drives people away.
Sadly I don't know any better platform but it seems ripe for a new entry.
It’ not Google that’s dead. It’s the economy in North American markets. I am finding conversion way down, clicks and impressions I’m still getting. People are just being way more fussy before handing over cash.
Everyone i talk to is quoting the same time line, this started in September and it hasn’t returned to normal.
Push advertising sucks, but we can make pull much better by giving the user more control.
Imagine a protocol to publish commercial offers for any given fragment of content addressable by URI. It would describe the details of some product or service and a set of proposed terms. We could surf the web looking for relevant content and publishing related offers. Various repositories would subscribe or not.
A browser (extension or native) would optionally pull offers from selected repositories and have UI for the user to solicit/pull offers for any given piece of content styled to signal their existence, and to filter and sort them. To make it sustainable there needs to be revenue sharing with the content source(s).
Are there existing projects like this?
The same protocol could be used for independent commentary and other annotation.
As others said, most users don't care or don't want to see them.
This leaves the people that care being the ones who are providing the ads, and they will game the system with bots and other methods of bad acting that will make the system useless.
The Brave/BAT experiment was similar to what you're describing. I think it failed to live up to its dreams of revolutionizing advertising because for the most part there are two kinds of people.
- I try not to think about ads
- I think about ads because I aggressively block them
I'm sure somebody out there represents a middle ground, but I think it's a pretty small demographic.
I hate ads until I need them, then I complain that the algorithms still suck. My wife recently reminded me I have to give Shopee time to surface good options when I don't have the exact words. I expect this to improve as their models improve.
I think Google’s search and ad business are at risk. Search has become such a mess that it’s become harder and harder to use to find quality results. It reminds me of Yahoo before Google in a way.
I’m using ChatCPT or equivalent for 60% of my searches. The remaining 40% is just muscle memory. Of that 40% about half the time I regret using Google search due to the difficulty of finding the relevant result.
I can see search users moving to ChatGPT or such and Googles Ad business suffering as a result and a general downward spiral of Google search.
This is a temporary situation. Think of it like how Napster let you download any song for free for a few years. For a while, all you heard was how the Internet was going to put all musicians out of business. Obviously that didn't happen.
The same will happen here. It's not like OpenAI has built a search engine; every time they need a live search they hit Bing (please correct me if I'm wrong) and get the results from there. No matter how you slice it, search companies who actually supply the data are going to get reimbursed, and since most users don't pay $20 / month, that likely means ads everywhere.
Also, Google's AI overviews are getting very good. Initially it was pretty inaccurate, but now it's basically 95% as good as ChatGPT, and faster. Most normies I talk to think it's good enough.
You don't think putting ads in Gemini output has crossed Google's mind?
I've never understood the "AI is eating search! Google is dead!" theory. The specific mechanism (whether that be keyword search, LLM conversation or something else) by which users describe their needs to a company doesn't matter, all that matters is that (a) the company makes that mechanism available for free, (b) it does a good job of satisfying the user's need and (c) ads can be smuggled into it.
Business momentum goes a long way, especially with Google being near monopoly status in their advertising. If you're flying at 50,000 feet and the engines fall off the plane it may be a long time before you the customer feel the impact. We can only guess Google is in a panic trying to figure out how they'll make their numbers next quarter and looking for something else to enshittify to increase profits in the meantime.
It wasn't really AI. Fundamentally, building a website the "traditional" way (hosting agreement, apache install, your favorite way to convert data formats that don't hate you into HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) was always a learned and quite technical skill; most people weren't doing it for fun, they were doing it because it was the only way to be on the web.
What killed the open web was Facebook, Twitter, and their ilk replacing that whole mess with social media profiles, networking connections, and templated, pre-fabricated organization home pages. When social networks became dominant enough that businesses could use it to get their info out there without having to author a webpage, the balance tipped (at least for business-motivated web content).
- Build FAQ section (LLM can help write a lot of it, if you let it load the content of your site)
- Write news on your site (LLM can help you to find ideas what to write about)
There are other networks as well: X, Meta, YouTube, LinkedIn, Amazon ads. It depends what’s your target group. But all networks have targeting tools so you can test them with minimum budget just to see what works and what doesn’t.
For sure, you have some personalized landing pages with CTA (Posthog script included so you can see what works).
good riddance seriously i used to pay like $1~2 a click back in 2010s and remember feeling like a total scam. no way of knowing if those clicks were bots and any campaigns would always have inflation somehow even long tail words that shouldn't.
AI should equal the playing field and promote businesses based on merit and capacity not how much they can spend.
I will say I have no experience in the ad space, but surely the SEO/ad companies will figure out how to game LLMs to make their sites more likely to be picked up by it, no? Or OpenAI would just directly sell ads themselves.
Yes - we're in what I like to call the Socialist Phase of AI (user acquisition). We were once in this phase with Google. Eventually we'll move into the as-yet-unnamed-by-me phase that Google (and search in General, also the internet) have been in for quite some time, where they try and squeeze out all the money that they put in during the Socialist Phase.
The classic pairing is explore/exploit - where you allocate resources towards serendipity in the former, and lock down into only doing the profitable thing in the second.
I don't even think this golden age actually exists today. Aask Google AI mode for the best product in some category - say, the best kitchen range - and it cites... a bunch of spammy "review" websites and a YouTube video.
If you're shopping around, an LLM you control can work for stuff like summarizing customer reviews or compiling a list of products with specific features (if you don't mind them being randomly wrong). But for general shopping advice / "plan my vacation" kind of queries, it's already firmly in the land of SEO-garbage-in-SEO-garbage-out.
they won't be in a separate panel you can ignore, either
the product promotion text will be integrated into the responses
'your prompt is insightful and refreshing. reminds me of the refreshing taste of organic coconut-cinnamon water. here's a QR code coupon for $1 off a 48-ct pack you can use at your local HoleFoods.'
"Fantastic! It's great that you care about what you should feed your children. A bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch is a great way to start your kids' day with the energy they need, and it's something they're sure to love! It's also fortified with vitamins to give them the nutrition they need! If you don't have any, I can start a DoorDash order right now."
Or "It's great that you want to find a way to earn some extra money for holiday presents for your family when you don't have anything left over after paying your bills. You're so thoughtful. You're an avid sports fan, so you've got the knowledge to have an edge in sports betting. DraftKings has a $10 credit when you bet your first $15 on tomorrow's game. You're automatically a winner!"
One mustn't forget that propagandists are frequently just straight malicious.
I would be that Openai and Google will find a way to boost the embedded ad in the llm result to you based on an auction on how valuable you and your query are
If you believe markets to be a future discounting mechanism, then they're sure as hell saying Google "figured something out" in the last year, even vs OpenAI [1]
Just trying to find out what this guy actually does is hard. It’s a page of links linking to another page of links, repeat. Where is the thing? The content? The product? It just feels a bit disconnected from patterns users expect and delivery mechanisms users are comfortable with in 2025. It’s almost a 1995 style pastiche of intent with no payoff.
?? There is one link that takes you to his business. It’s kids parties (birthdays, etc) entertainment (Or corporate events). Think performers doing magic acts, juggling, comedy, balloons, etc. it really wasn’t that difficult to find out.
Please go anywhere but the platforms I use. Go fill Tiktok up with ads. Any of the "mainstream" platforms inbuilt ad posts are a good bet. Or a marketing agency that will disguse it as organic content.
Lol wish I could afford to "fill up Tiktok with ads"! Seriously though, I always felt like Google AdWords (we only used the search network) are the most honest way. Someone searches for what you offer and they see your ad. With these other platforms it's more about relying on the algorithm.
Google ads are the cheapest yes, but depending on your audience they may not be looking on Google now.
For ChatGPT (and similar) you need to have a strong FAQ page and lots of content marketing to increase the likelihood of being the suggested answer when a user asks ChatGPT a relevant question (it's a highly probabilistic system, look up AEO/GEO).
CloudFlare for example offers an option to block AI scraping bots by default. If you are in the services business, this is the opposite of what you want because having AI crawlers scrape your site would drive traffic down the road when users ask a related question.
I would also suggest having accounts with major chatbot companies and enabling the "allow training on my conversations" option and then talk to it about your services. Ultimately you just want to get your brand into the training data corpus, and the rest is just basic machine learning statistics.
Facebook ads were the cheapest for me ten years ago.
We were marketing a product that many people were happy to know existed. The dashboard gave us tools to really delve into demographics. Of all the ridiculous personal data Facebook collected, the best demographic filter was allowing me to narrow in on pages someone liked or interacted with. We were selling things related to cruising sailboats, and we could target an audience within 30 miles of Fort Lauderdale who also liked Sailing Magazine. Moreover, we could use a pixel so that only people who had also visited our website saw the ads.
Facebook had a policy of rewarding high-quality ad content. If people clicked the ad, or better yet left positive comments and discussion or shared, the price drastically decreased to fractions of a cent per impression and click-through. We were able to get ads shared a lot with people tagging other people about the product suggesting they might be interested in it. That was the holy grail for copy that we always strived for.
Of course, they got rid of all that. But at the time, it was a great way to target an audience based on third-party pages they liked, giving them ad content about products they were generally interested in—and products they were happy to know they could purchase because they had value.
Ads configuration is like gambling in Las Vegas, in that the easier the game, the worse the odds—like slot machines—and the more the player has to interact, like Blackjack, the better the payout. When done well with good configuration, we were getting 1000s of click-throughs for dollars. It was amazing.
The point is that Facebook rewarded ads that people positively interacted with, as it meant the quality of the news feed wasn't hurt by the ad.
There was a time when ads benefitted everyone, the buyer, the seller, and Facebook.
>when ads benefitted everyone, the buyer, the seller, and Facebook
As others have stated in this thread, it's called the acquisition phase. Get people hooked, build the network, make it be the place that people have to be at.
After that comes the exploit phase where said network effects make it hard to leave. You can rake in billions (trillion?) of dollars this way. Who cares if it eventually kills the company, you've made more money than god at this point.
Google Search Ads are usually the most expensive on a CPC basis out of the big platforms, but usually the CPA is much lower (even though Bing Ads can often be better value). This is usually because of 2 reasons:
1. You can target a specific part of the funnel (informational -> purchase intent) in search ads. Targeting on social networks is more about overall user profiles rather than their immediate state of mind.
2. People going to a search engine expect to leave that search engine to go to another website. Whereas people on a social network expect to stay in that portal. So clicking on an ad then doing something after is a more natural flow (and better value for advertisers).
NO that's a side project - my product is my juggling/magic shows here in Durban (also good for video though). I made the poi for myself and open sourced it, now people are selling them in Brazil, and Australia. Sometimes I get a bit of cash from it but not a lot.
I see. Not sure if TikTok is the best plattform then as you want a very local audience (but I never used TikTok, just watched family members do).
I rather would try to get an entry on google maps. Meaning when people browse the area, they see your thing. I certainly like to discover new stuff like this in new areas and some things I find are clearly there because of ads, but other got there by other ways. Making a entry by hand, publishing a picture there with further info ..
Its not specific on him Ads just drive me insane. I haven't really formed enough strong reasoning(to me) to say they shouldn't exist. So I'm at a halfway point of "advertise somewhere that isnt in front of me".
The platforms I use are very NOT local so it'd be pointless. Mainstream platforms are invasive with their data collection that would allow his ads to be specifically targeted and do well there, getting put in front of people who might actual use his service.
You mean the physical world where businesses are signing up with companies to put AI enabled cameras all over their properties and sell your data? Why not some nice dynamic pricing on their digital price bars next (oops, we are already there).
Oh no, adtech is dying. I guess we'll all have to compete through quality of products and services and not gaming a rigged system designed to reward anything that maximizes the profit of the global surveillance adtech machine.
This gives me warm fuzzy feelings. It's nowhere near good, but this is better than it was.
I wish that were true, but I don't think it's dying, I think it's metastasizing.
Ads will ingress deeper into what were trusted layers -- embedded in text and video in a seemingly organic way. GenAI tools make this possible -- to splice a 20 second mention of something into a stream, or rewrite a paragraph injecting a subtle product placement.
We will develop new mental antibodies for this, we always do. Silver lining of sorts -- while short-form video content is making people illiterate, perhaps literacy will become a calm refuge once again.
The biggest problem is platform scale, imo - platforms grow so big as to make the network effects confer an invulnerability to regulation or moderation, and then get exploited to squash competition, either through legal action, acquisition, suppression, or sometimes simple inertia. Ubiquitous reach and total control over the platform made it irresistible to bad faith operators, politicians, activists, and rent-seekers. AI has a good shot at completely fragmenting those technologies at a fundamental level.
We should be resisting any ad injection into ChatGPT, Claude, etc maintaining a firewall between what's acceptable in a paid product and what's not, and as long as open source Chinese models roughly keep parity, the big US labs can't pivot hard into exploiting users for ad revenues. Private hosting and bots are almost as good as ChatGPT with UI and UX, within a few percentage points as good in capabilities, and the pressure to go elsewhere is minimal. If they drive off a whole lot of independence minded users, they risk creating a community of people who'll create a very slick, workable alternative, while paying only a tenth or less what the frontier labs charge. As long as that dynamic cripples the efforts of big labs to enshittify, there's a good shot that the entire ecosystem fundamentally evolves to something better. I hope, anyway - it could just explode into a grotesque mess of user exploitation and yet more of the same.
I think at some point you'll be able to have good-enough AI on your phone to carry everywhere you go, and it'll do all the ad filtering and opsec and digital hygiene for you - everyone will have a high quality competent tech nerd in their pocket looking out for their best interests, and it won't just be a niche rebel nerd thing anymore.
>good-enough AI on your phone to carry everywhere you go
Eh, if Google/Apple allows you to put it on your phone, which is highly doubtful at this point. Google would outright directly ban that kind of competition in the name of security. Apple would just ban an AI like that in the name of security even though it doesn't actually compete with them.
I love your vibe but unfortunately I don't share your optimism.
The interregnum between monopolies gets exponentially shorter as the money printing gets exponentially faster. What was maybe 20 years of "OK-ish" after say WW2 got down to a few years in the 90s when internet was worth browsing, from Google to AI could be just months..
Might this not also be the fact that given the cost of living the world over, being able to afford a fancy party with entertainment like the poster provides is a luxury few can afford now?
We used to eat out a lot more (Saturday lunch at a cafe I mean) and also used to get HelloFresh and other such services, but as the cost of them has gone up way faster than our salaries, we've had to reign them all back.
I agree with the "Google is dying" sentiment for sure, but I also wonder how much is just being unable to afford nice things anymore.
Say they drop 100bn on search revenue. How well are they positioned to convert their user platform and search crawling infrastructure onto Gemini, and introduce an advertising platform into LLMs to replace what they had? I imagine they are as well positioned as OpenAI.
I would lose a lot of sleep if I paid out for puts on them.
Perhaps catering towards TikTok experiences, help them make the videos that they then share with their friends.
‘Pic or it didn’t happen’ has now been replaced by ‘TikTok or it didn’t happen.’ Is it possible to enjoy something without there being video evidence of it? According to my gf and her female friends the answer appears to be no.
Reminds me of the whale oil business being replaced by petroleum. Except the ad-based economy was effectively a google monopsony. I'm surprised the OP managed to make ad revenue for a decade, but to me at always seemed about casino-ish and snake-oily. A decade is impressive but I think we all knew where this was going. I think the question is: will another monopsony for ads arise or will it be content based only? It seems YouTUbe is poised to be the next google since more people watch YouTube than cable, so the audience is captive since there's no alternative (yes I realize Google owns YouTube). But that's still a parasitic economy sucking from google. "Where to go now?" depends on if another ad server can gain dominance, otherwise the answer is "nowhere".
I sometimes think people really don't understand the value-add of AI (and I say this as someone on the less hyperbolic end of the "AI-hype" spectrum). If your service to me can be accomplished by AI "very fast"... I don't need you anymore. AI provides a generic problem solving interface where non-experts can leverage the power of the AI to solve a task they previously couldn't have so long as they can describe it well.
I've had multiple cases at work or other places where I've been presented with something as the stakeholder and been told "I used AI to make this!" Great! Next time I'll use AI to make it and save myself the overhead/cost of having work with someone else. I don't see a lot of value in explaining a problem to you so that you can then re-explain it to an LLM.
When people show me they've used AI to complete a task I used to have to do I'm delighted, and, more often then not, proven my value when they come back weeks later asking for help untangling the mess they've made. But, I'm equally delighted in the cases where they are successful using AI to replace things I used to be tasked with. Despite the AI hype, I find myself busier than ever.
I think this article title misled me a bit... Google seems to be fine but it's no longer driving traffic through Ad Words. I think that in particular is really getting messed up by AI since people often don't go to any Web site once an AI agent answers their question.
Google Ads started charging me $5 per click on low traffic search keywords this week, meanwhile YouTube ads are still 20 cents a click (presumably to keep up with Meta)
They're having a laugh if they think we'll keep paying that for no actual leads.
“Research shows” Lool!! Ask anyone in their teens or 20s even 30s. They’ll all answer what you did in the article. Short attention spans are ruling and so are those social media applications you mentioned.
Sorry in advance if this comes off as hostile, that's not my intent. I am genuinely wondering: You're in the business of advertising? And you're upset that Google isn't your golden goose anymore?
This feels like one of the most surreal things I have read in a while, believing that the blog is authentically written by a real person. I can't put my finger on why.
I think it's time for a new way of discovering products. My ideal would be some sort of site that I can go to, to find services and products in my local area. There could also be national and international sections, with user ranked news of new interesting products in given categories.
For example, with video games I can go to sites like www.rockpapershotgun.com or others, or forums related to games, to see what the new products coming out. That's perfect in my world. No ads in my search, no ads in my email, no ads in youtube or whatever. But when I'm interested in seeing what's new, I can, on my terms, go and check out the new products.
Is there such a thing as a good ad? I've always blocked them on all platforms.
Looking at instagram where I don't block anything, most of what it suggests to me are soft porn or soft scams (generic chinese dropships marketed as a unique innovation).
I mean, you mean "I've always tried to block 'obvious' ads in the places I expect obvious ads to be".
The thing is the world of ads is far larger and more complicated than that. Just think of product placement in movies? That is an ad, have you stopped watching most movies?
What about content that is a thinly veiled ad? What about a set of bots that follows everything you post on line, and when it's little AI core figures out you are looking for something makes a suggestion under a post where you're asking questions?
Anecdotally, this article seems to match with what I am witnessing regarding browsing habits. I am planning a big trip with others and everything is being found via social media apps; destination ideas, experiences, cafes, accommodation, etc.
I know very little about online marketing, but my Googler marketing friend told me that just 6 months ago everybody would Google search three word terms: “best Chinatown dumpling”
But now people Google search: “my boyfriend is coming to town for the holidays and we are going to Chinatown and I want to have delicious dumplings with him because it was what we had on our first date, where should we go?”
So he now works to sell AdWords properly in that environment. I am wondering how or if OP took that into account with their new spend. What are other people doing?
I’ve also heard (probably via post+comments here on HN) that the new SEO is making tons of AI slop info pages on the site, not for humans but for AI crawlers to slurp, and then refer from prompts.
It wouldn't surprise me if physical advertising, as mentioned in the post, makes a comeback. Especially coupled with magazines etc apparently making a comeback too.
Also, a lot of ads now have QR codes so you can tell which physical ads are driving versus traffic versus those that aren't.
e.g. the "half of my advertising is a waste but I don't know which half" is not true anymore if you are using specific QR codes per location/advertisement.
I assume physical still works. LIDL closed their shop in our neighborhood, so we stopped going unless their paper ads were interesting. Then they decided with a lot of fanfare to go all-in on digital, and as they decided we should want their ads we should install their app. Well, naughty us, we didn't. We simply stopped shopping there completely. A few months later, the paper ads are back (with a lot less fanfare), and no other shop followed their lead, so I assume LIDL was hurting hard.
Google never sells your data to anyone. Why would they sell the primary data that they themselves use to determine how to show you ads? Doing so means a deep-pocketed new advertising platform can just buy data from Google and get started with competing against Google on their primary revenue source. It’s like having a goose that lays golden eggs and selling the goose. It’s corporate suicide. I’m surprised anyone on HN even believes Google will sell your data. It takes five seconds of thinking to dispel that notion.
One anecdote, but I have a brick and mortar business and Adwords leads have fallen off a cliff year over year. Since AI stuff started getting pushed harder we've gotten fewer impressions and fewer conversions. Some of it is economic headwinds but also Google is just a black box we throw money into and pray it will send us business.
psa, "is comprised of" is almost never correct. "comprises" means "is composed of". so when people say X is comprised of Y they really mean "X comprises Y" or "X is composed of Y"
Apparently you should be getting ready to buy ad campaigns from LLM companies because they are going to inject ads into the responses soon. Young people are using LLMs like crazy in my experience.
Try contacting YouTube creators in your area. Much more cost efficient than any other kinds of ads especially if you pick channels with your target audience IF you can actually get creators to promote you (most won't reply).
Google isn’t dead, but it’s no longer the single answer. Even Mark Zuckerberg recently acknowledged how fast Google is improving, which explains why Meta is pushing AI harder. Still, competing shouldn’t mean replacing what already works.
They'll presumably monetize their AI (more) on both ends: getting you to pay for more access and getting advertisers to pay to be mentioned more often in the outputs. I mean that isn't really a bad position for them if you "using the Internet" degrades into you just sitting there typing queries in their Web app and never going anywhere else.
The mainstream leaving Google search and the general web would be a chance for both getting better again. A new equilibrium will establish itself one way or the other.
It's a chance.. But which for-profit environments are not going to do whatever is necessary to try to win that role and how will the worst of them not have the most profitable model?
Is this really about Tiktok or about AI and how people are consuming the web? Used to be all web, then web+Tiktok,etc, now only AI+Tiktok, etc? I think I go to normal websites way less than I used to. Maybe everyone is doing that?
I work in private events and the answer is definitely Facebook. Facebook ads have been better for quite some time. Targeting is a harder but also the CPCs are a lot lower so you can spray and pray a bit more.
Thanks, we tried them before but many years have passed and things have changed. Our new Instagram campaign just bore fruit in the first hour (4 WhatsApp enquiries with $1.50 spent!), will be looking at FB also
Kagi is building their own index. There are also other open indexes. Over time these can replace the big corporate indexes. The hard truth is that the big players in search are dead. They are now the yahoo of search, with landing pages full of ads and results that are primarily ads.
See their revenue (number of paid users is not a secret): something around $7M annually? It was half of that not so long ago (glad, that the userbase is growing).
With their current pricing they are out of their league of having any full-blown index, crawlers, people, what have you.
I would say year ago I was amazed how they are alive at all (unless I am missing something in their funding).
A little over 15 years ago you could index the web with a small cluster. I remember people doing doing it with Cassandra or Elasticsearch. I'm sure you'd need a much bigger cluster, but outside video and images I imagine it's still doable even for a small organization, especially if you're filtering out content farms. Plus, there are many organizations interested in having access to an index, and I'm pretty more than a few currently running their own index and selling to analytics firms.
Search engines can usually search the closed web as well.
Also, incentives are super high for businesses to create quality content for the open web to drive business. For example a car tire manufacturer could publish reliable restaurant reviews in order to encourage driving.
Where do you go know - maybe realize that ads make everyone around miserable and with this bitter understanding go through painful but necessary process of finding other means of earning money.
I'm glad as hell not to run a business and never plan to, but it's interesting to think as a consumer where I would try to get information like this. Guy's running a service that provides in-person entertainment for events and parties, seemingly things like clowns and magicians, maybe small-time bands or what-not.
Seemingly you don't want to target children directly. If they ask their parents for specific entertainment at a party, they're going to ask for entertainers they know, not companies acting as brokers and middlemen. They might want a particular clown (but probably not) but will never want a particular local vendor of clowns. You need to target the parents for that. If it were me doing the buying, I'd probably prioritize word of mouth recommendations if anyone had such, and otherwise for a large enough event like a wedding or graduation party, I'd look to professional planners. Assuming that's any kind of widespread pattern, you'd want to target strong relationships with planners rather than trying to advertise directly to consumers.
Did people really ever search Google to find party entertainment, and then ignore the search results and use the ads instead? Let alone Tik Tok videos? I guess I'm out of touch enough that the answer can be yes and I'm just that clueless about how small businesses work, but all the comments talking about LLM chatbot services are tripping me out. Y'all would ask ChatGPT who to hire for your kid's party?
Though, that doesn't really conflict with the story. He increased his ad spend before he figured out it wasn't working. Which would be more $$ for Google.
is super ineffective, indeed. if you need to pay 20$ to get s.o. to pay you 50$ for a service/product, well in all honesty calling people one by one and giving them 10$ is more likely to result in sale.
- Google, the company, is doing pretty well in the stock market.
- Google, the advertising company, isn't generating good ROI for its advertising customers.
From Google's point of view, they've been very gunshy about having ads be their only revenue stream for years; I wouldn't be surprised that the consequence is the value there is drying up.
Advertising revenue being up is also consistent with the linked article, since the writer had to increase ad spend to get any results before giving up entirely.
Judging by the post this guy advertises his kids entertainment business to young people. With recent crackdowns on age verification etc. it could be his ads are no longer reaching the audience they used to.
I don't know what click fraud is but it's a very small entertainment agency market in Durban, South Africa's 3rd largest city. We only advertised locally (specified in AdWords)
Click fraud is malicious activity where someone runs bots that click on ads for specific category keywords. For example, if this is a villa rental website, someone like competitors or a large platform, might use ad agencies that perform click fraud against the villa rental website to exhaust their budget and therefore get more traffic themselves. In the case of an entertainment agency, it might be other competitors interested in your traffic.
The first step you might take is to check that you are not advertising with AdWords partner networks, as they might be the reason for the clicks on your ads.
Second, you can check your server logs and verify clicks from Google Ads, especially the geolocation of those clicks. If they are not from your region and the visitors perform no action after viewing the first page, this is most probably click fraud.
I use our own open-source security platform (I'm a co-founder) for this purpose (1), as it's server-side and works even if bots aren't running JS. However, your website analytics might also be useful if they can collect events without JS.
Shockingly, I did not consider malicious intent as a possible reason. I will look into it. Never did trust the partner networks though, it's not that anyway, just used plain old search network
Click farms that we had been dealing with for our clients did not render images on webpages during visits, therefore we put tirreno on the backend of the platform, plus added a 1px image that sends the same request to tirreno to spot the difference.
Here's the business model in a nutshell: If you want AI to recommend your business for some purpose, you must pay to have it included in the training corpus. And you will pay fees every time those vectors get used for outputs. And if you don't pay, you don't get mentioned.
Contextual ads is the answer. You sell shoes, go and advertise on fashion related sites. I don't want to see a shoe ad while I'm browsing a gaming site just because I did some relative search a week ago. It's so fucking annoying and I never understood why Google never bothered to try some alternative too. I don't mean completely replace behavioral targeting but at the very least try some contextual one too.
A few things to determine if what you're experiencing is actually Google "being dead"
1. Check your search volume. Use Google Trends or the method I will share below.
2. Check how you spent in December vs how you spent during a previously great time. Understand if it's a volume issue or a conversion issue
3. See if anyone new entered your auction. If they did, find out what they're saying
-- 1a) Search Volume
Checking search volume: In the era of broad match, this is one of the most underrated approaches to diagnosing issues. Take a look at your `search exact match impression share` relative to your impressions on a few of your top keywords. Then measure out if search volume for your business is actually decreasing. Then, use the following rubric to diagnose futher:
1. Not decreasing. Move on to the next item
2. 5-10% decrease and competitive auction. If you have a decrease AND a competitive auction, a 20% drop in efficiency could be explained.
3. 5-10% decrease and a not-so-competitive auction. If this is the case, the drop in volume may not be what's causing your issues.
-- 1b) Click volume
Check your exact match impression > click rate. Similar to the last approach, this helps diagnose if there are SERP feature changes which could decrease the amount of clicks you're receiving despite demand remaining flat.
If this is the case, take a look at the SERP and find the new winners.
-- 2) Segment comparison
Compare December YOY and see what changed. Are you serving to a different age range? Different search term mix? Increased spend to search partners? Are the headline combinations which are serving different?
-- 3) Auction changes
Have you checked your auction insights? Are new competitors being more or less aggressive? If so, what are their headlines? Are they offering an easier booking experience than you are?
And... if Google is actually dead, you might try:
1. Meta ads. Turn off audience network, make sure you've got the conversions API set up, and see what happens. Expect leads to be lower intent. Make your creative dead simple. "If you're looking for kid party entertainment in Northdene..." Start with $20/day optimizing for leads.
2. Improve your form. I see typeform-style-forms do better than the long one you have.
3. (Maybe) If you don't already track `closed (won)` conversions into your google ads account, that could help. I find when I start tracking which searches turn into deals, I can restructure my account to de-prioritize the junk leads.
4. (Maybe) Add a soft form to each of your service pages. Basically an embedded form which starts by asking people softball questions like "How Old Are The Kids At Your Party." Once people start a form they're much more likely to complete it, even if the questions are very basic.
5. (Maybe) Add a way to give a phone call. Phone call leads convert 30-50% better in my experience. But, this isn't an option for every
Can we also talk about how dogshit YouTube Search has been the last 2 years? Some videos have turned to shorts, but they're not searchable through their search API, making the feature pretty useless.
Now I wonder how long until AI chat tool are riddled with ads, and with shitty content because of people trying to game them just like they've been gaming search engines.
The jump from the op's "i screwed up my google ads campaigns" to "Research shows that many young people are getting their information from short video platforms like TikTok"....
Another explanation is that when the cost of living is high, people reduce their spending on entertainment. If that's the case, no amount of advertising will materially shift your bottom line.
let's take back the interwebs and have a single account where all apps store their data about you, which you can move around and also swap out clients for any data without companies blocking you
Look, the 90's Internet isn't cool anymore. Sorry. Things are cool for a while and then they're not.
Franchises die. It's still cool to say "The originals were really cool", and always will be, but now we're talking about now. Star Wars is uncool. There are people who sort of automatically praise it and subtly put down those who don't like they're aligned with a magnetic field, sure, but they're in their own world. Indiana Jones and Ghostbusters are uncool now. Star Trek is almost there. AI is not cool and never will be. Tiktok is cool, but soon everything that is uncool will descend upon it.
Sorry. Bananas blacken and apples get spots. Time moves on.
I don't know why people are so aggressively downvoting this. It's the honest truth.
I grew up before Google, I remember when it was just a useful search tool. Then an industry grew up around exploiting it in various ways and ads became a major revenue source for Google, completely changing the platform. I witnessed this entire online marketing/ad industry come into existence.
I have friends who worked in SEO for years. Very talented, smart people. But that industry is gone now. Likewise Google ads is clearly not long for this world as Google will probably get a lot more money leveraging their AI for product recommendations/sales etc.
People used creative thinking to create this industry, so the answer to "where do we go now?" is find the next one. It won't just be the same thing repeated, just like SEO and ad optimization where fairly major departures from the previous world of advertising and marketing they came from.
Did you read the page? The context is very clear: a small business that had for years gotten a lot of its leads/customers from Adwords is seeing that Adwords ("Google" in context) is not working. They are then asking (other small businesses in the same situation, "where do we go now?").
There nothing about nostalgia, no real concern for Google as a company, or how the web used to work, etc. Just a small business trying to stay afloat.
This is actually the most legit thing I can think of that could be behind an ad. It looks like an actual small business that is using ads as a replacement for the yellow pages, presumably when people are searching for party entertainment. I had assumed that basically all online ads were just straight up scams.
That said, I don’t ever want to see ads for it either. If I lived in Durban and wanted a juggling act, I’d like to be able to find it, as I’m sure all their clients would. I wonder if the market is just very competitive, or if they don’t show up on regulular searches for some reason.
I agree, that site looks like the owners lack basic self-awareness. Surely they must use the modern internet and recognize the difference?
And if they’re unable to invest in their site or they’re simply shut out of the modern world, I’d assume the same applies to other aspects of their business as well.
I recently took someone to go and watch a hockey game. Been a little while but I personally played as a goalie myself.
The person kept making the comment that she couldn't see/find the puck and it made it frustrating to watch.
As a goalie, not being able to see the puck is pretty normal (especially with big bodies trying to screen you).
What I told her was that what matters a lot more than where the puck is, is where it's going to be in about two seconds. But the next best thing is to know where the puck is now.
If you can't see the puck then look at the players and as a last resort, look at the ref. 99% of the time they will be looking at the puck. Look where they're looking and soon enough it will appear.
I think this applies very much to this whole Google question.
The puck is gone (or on the way to the other side of the rink) and everyone is confused where it is or where it's going.
Look where everyone is looking and you'll find your answer there. It may not be in the same form as Google adwords, but the game is the same. Leveraging attention.
The tactics were different during the phonebook days (it was having your business start with the letter "A") as opposed to Google and will be different for the next thing as well.
From what I can tell, everyone seems to be looking at chatbots and vertical, shortform video. Not sure how that plays out in terms of advertising, but in terms of the answer to this article's question, that seems like a good place to start.
In my anecdotal experience, it's moved to private, trust-based channels: iMessage, WhatsApp, email, face-to-face interactions. Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring the public and the private has finally ended: people don't want to be online, don't trust social media, don't really trust any media, and are living simple local lives with a small circle of friends that they get together with regularly in person.
But then, my anecdotal experience may not be representative of most of the world. Most of my friends have money, houses, kids, friends - all of which are, by the numbers, rarities these days.
It's an interesting thought experiment to explore what it means if that actually is the new normal, and people are not consuming media or much of anything, or even if the people who are still addicted to social media are now tapped out and don't have any more disposable income left to spend. Probably economic depression. If everybody bought only what they needed and ignored all the advertisements, our present level of economic activity would plunge.
I had a very interesting discussion with a friend today, where I was talking to her about the /r/golang thread about Rob Pike's comments to OpenAI and how the thread was full of bots talking with other bots. No idea why the density of bots was so high in that thread, it was kind of absurd to see.
Then she said: "I know nobody that comments on online forums. Nobody would ever comment to strangers on the internet. It's too dangerous."
Took me a while to grasp what she meant with that, but I think she's right. Trust has eroded so much over the last two decades that most forums are either full of bots or full of annoyed and toxic people. It's very rare to find welcoming communities to newbies, and most of the ones I have discovered were offline connections.
She also mentioned that all of her friends use private profiles only, because having public profiles is too dangerous because of stalkers.
To me this sounded a bit absurd at first, but maybe that's a different perception on "how to use" the internet from a different younger generation that grew up post-socialmedia? My first contact with the internet was MIT opencourseware, her first contact was receiving dick pics at the age of 10 from assholes on the other side of the planet.
I miss the old phpbb forum days when the most toxic comment was someone being snarky and derailing the discussion into "did you use the search function?"
No idea how to fix the internet, maybe it's time to move to gopher or another protocol :-/
But your friend is wrong. She does know at least one person who comments on online forums. I bet she knows more too.
Most of the internet users are passive content consumers, and it’s been the case since a long time ago. There's a post about it from 2019:
https://bewilderbeast.org/2019/08/16/most-of-what-you-read-o...
I know I self-censor a LOT.
Thats just what the internet of the mid to late 90s was like. People rarely used their real name, there were hundreds of forums, some private. You could have different nicks on them.
Nobody knew you were a dog on the internet[1] until the rise of Facebook and linking your real identity with an online identity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
They don't write on forums but they like or share a story. It's just more passive/consumer-minded.
> No idea how to fix the internet, maybe it's time to move to gopher or another protocol :-/
Fido and Usenet are still around. Kind-of. IMO google virtually killed that, too, when they started peddling google groups and did the classic embrace-extend-extinguish on the Usenet.
And yet, here you are, posting ...
BTW, I don't explicitly disagree with what you're saying, but it would be good to look at actual data instead of anecdata to know for sure, and the people who have the data are not telling ...
Absolutely this. I recently got a nice photo taken with my kids and for the first time I... didn't post it on Facebook. I sent it to my family group chat. Yesterday I posted on Facebook for the first time in months and it was about the power being out for an hour in the ice storm. I haven't posted travel photos to FB in years.
I'm mostly still on FB at all for the acquaintance-level connections to things like neighbourhood, church, and hobby communities. All the people I actually care about are in private group chats.
I was reflecting recently that Google Plus actually had the right idea back in 2011 with "circles", but at the time we all said it was too hard figuring out which circles we wanted to share a particular message or thought with. Hmm, maybe they were ahead of the game all along?
Everyone who was on Livejournal before G+ “invented” “Circles” had absolutely no problem with locking posts to “friends” (people they followed) or various “friends groups” that were subsets of their friends. It was fucking hilarious to see everyone say it was too hard on G+. Just two dropdowns right there on the new post page next to the main text field. Super simple. Creating and editing the groups was a pretty simple task with its own page.
Now that I look back at that I wonder what kind of theories suggest that abilities like that will result in reduced ad impressions, since I feel like every decision made by social sites makes much more sense when viewed through that lens.
Yeah LiveJournal (my username there is lightfixer) really came close to replicating how we actually social. Deciding who is able to see what I posted on an individual level was great. Could create groups etc.
I still mourn G+. It was clearly put together by somebody who thought first and foremost about privacy. It made deciding who to share what with the central, most visible part of how it worked. And that's probably part of why it failed. Was it hard to choose? Nope. But I guarantee you that if Facebook added a little "hey, are you sure you want to share this post publicly with the whole world under your real name? Yes/No" popup, organic content would drop 50% overnight, and not because of the difficulty of clicking "Yes." G+ died in part because it looked like a ghost town to a visitor, and it looked like a ghost town because everything was being done in private. And that was a great thing!
Mind you, G+ also made some insane and boneheaded decisions. I think at one point they tried to make all Youtube comments also be G+ posts under your real name, or something like that? That was fucking stupid.
People will make frequent mistakes if you put the privacy decision at a per post level. (And not just average users: see stevey's Google Platforms rant)
Having different apps, chats (Discord servers), accounts (at-a-push) for each privacy circle is much clearer to average users. Migrating a whole group of any size to another platform is hard, hence many of us are stuck with Facebookk in case we get invited to something we don't want to miss on it, but new platforms will continue to emerge and some will succeed.
Another mistake is that they had a significant presence in Brazil through Orkut, but they didn’t bother to integrate and migrate the users in.
Orkut’s user base was already degraded through Facebook but it was not inexistent, as some features of Orkut were unique. One was that it allowed people to use alt accounts to participate on anonymous discussion, not much different from Reddit, I’m sure with some creativeness G+ could have benefited from extra users.
I was an Orkut user from the USA for a few years. The vibe was way nicer than Facebook. I think I was with them from 2007 to 2011 or so.
killedbygoogle.com says 2004 to 2014 so a decent chunk of the service's run.
> It was clearly put together by somebody who thought first and foremost about privacy.
Except that they worked for a company that clearly wants all of your data. Privacy and Google are often at odds with each other… and for the folks that understood privacy at the time, it was a hard sell unless they worked at Google.
Privacy to me means that even Google doesn’t get to peek in whenever they feel like it.
The biggest boneheaded decision from my perspective was their taking over the + prefix in Google search (to filter for results that have this term verbatim). That just positioned G+ as my enemy and I had a strong desire for it to die. Unfortunately, they didn't bring back the prefix even after it died. Quotes around a term do something similar, but I am still angry.
I think that change happened well after G+ was dead
IMO, their biggest problem was that they made a product that was terminally uncool.
G+ copied some features and design work the open source federated social media, particularly Diaspora. So yeah, a lot of the features were developed in context of privacy protections.
The migration of YT accounts to G+ is how most of the critical mass learned there was G+. It took years to recover nicknames.
yeah they made a lot of mistakes, the biggest one was not iterating on making it a good product. they just dumped it into the world, mostly formed and did nothing with it.
it had a lot of good ideas like you said it just needed to make it simpler to use, maybe even make the circles stuff not default though i didn't have much trouble with it
forcing everyone to use something that still had teething issues was the biggest screw up, if they wanted to integrate youtube they should have started with making G+ popular so people would actually want that, and yeah real names so dumb.
blizzard tried that as well lol. then some guy rang up blizzard hq and told one of the higher ups where his kids went to school and they suddenly realised full name is actually too much information
+ also got a bad rap due to what happened to Youtube - merged accounts - and yeah Google acted in some awful ways in more than one way but they were also trying to solve a problem of Zuck's shifting views on privacy (or rather the same view, that it shouldn't exist)
It probably wasn't the worst thing ever to try to leverage some of the existing social networking going on on YouTube, but combining it with a real name policy and making the actual posts/comments into first class global content for the G+ feed? Idiotic, and completely undermined the whole premise of safely walling off your content to its intended audience.
(See also: nice how reddit now makes it possible to curate the list of which subs you participate in whose comments and posts appear on your global profile page)
Reddit is fucking miserable. I don't want to claim they profited solely off the work of Swarz, because his involvement wasn't... total, I mean he left, but it feels like one of these things where mediocre people get control over something which was initially made by people who actually know what they're doing
One of the things I hope will come from the Trough of Disillusionment in cloud computing will be families running redundant file servers hosting the family photos instead of doing everything on IG.
Your three tech savvy family members should all have redundant copies of the photos of memaw’s wedding and Uncle Jim when he was 2 and looked exactly like your cousin’s second kid. I don’t need to see those. Your stalker ex boyfriend definitely doesn’t need to see those. It’s none of our goddamned business.
Someone, I think WD? Already made a play at this but I think it fell on deaf ears and will have to be tried again after the hype cycle calms tf down.
My very vibes-based take is that setting up home servers is the dad jeans of tech hobbies. It's kind of arresting how bewildered many young people are when confronted with anything below the UI layer. I think peak tech savviness happened a bit younger than me: maybe mid-late millennial. After that you start getting into the iPad-from-birth generation for whom tech was rarely a challenge. Tech savviness among young folks feels more like it was in the mid-90s. They're infinity more online-savvy, no doubt, but when it comes to knowing anything about how that works, they're cooked.
I do know some non-developer Gen Z folks that would set up minecraft servers on DO droplets, but I don't know of any that actually made their own and hosted it on their own network.
Aside from more exposure to raw tech, the technology making the internet happen was a lot simpler back then, where servers were actually physical servers,and such. I was able to adopt the complexity progressively as it came into existence which is a lot easier with the base knowledge of how the building blocks worked.
I just set up a little cube server with a Mini-ITX board I had lying around. Overall I'm very happy with it, but right now it's basically just Unraid with the built-in containers running for Deluge, Jellyfin, and the Crafty minecraft server.
I'd love for it to also be a backup of my whole Google Photos account (eg https://github.com/JakeWharton/docker-gphotos-sync) but honestly I can't imagine trying to maintain an app on there that would actually be the first class storage/sync/presentation layer for my family.
> I can't imagine trying to maintain an app on there that would actually be the first class storage/sync/presentation layer for my family.
Immich exists. It really is missing only some editing functionality and some nice-to-have features from GPhotos like automatic panoramas. Other than that, it's superior to Google.
Too bad all of the RAM and NAND flash are going to be unaffordable for the next few years at least.
Once you include internet latency hard drive latency isn’t that much worse. It won’t help but it won’t stop it.
Hard disk drive prices are also soaring. Looking up a random WD drive: up 70% since July, a Seagate drive, up 50%
Apple has photo sharing where you can share photos privately.
It's interesting to see how much of a behemoth Discord has become. Seems like there's a Discord for everything - from open source projects to hobbies and games to individual groups of friends/family.
It's occupying the segment that subreddits historically have. However, it's perhaps-intentionally search-opaque. You can't Google to find a message/link/download that's gated by Discord. And it also gives a sense of community, where someone who had more attention and time on a computer than a sense of what to do with those things can go have casual conversation with… someone.
Discord is really where it is at these days. Discord servers with 50-100 people form the new social fabric of the internet where real community lies. In theory Reddit was supposed to be this but
1. Reddit communities tend to get too large
2. Subreddits overflow into each other too much through cross posting and brigading
3. Post history being public meant that you could get banned/brigaded for your comments on a totally different subreddit (i.e. bots autobanning you on one subreddit for posting on another subreddit).
The magic of discord is that everyone in the server I frequent I either know personally or they are known by someone I know personally. It creates a nice fabric of community and trust. Literally zero moderation over the past 10 years as everyone knows each other and behaves like normal adults and we also don’t get all up in arms when someone says something controversial.
99% of the population hasn't a clue what Discord is/does
As someone with two teenage kids, I would wager that this is highly age-dependent, and that it is exactly reversed the younger you go. My guess is 99% of the under-25 population uses Discord daily and has never had a Facebook account.
In which country? The young adults in my UK family aren't using Discord. They don't use Facebook (except to keep up with older family/associates) either though.
I think the only people who don't know what discord anymore is the 50+ crowd. Atleast 50% of the randos I talk with online have discord as their preferred method for texting and voice communication and immediately want to switch to it if possible. And if older people actually cared about doxxing themselves with every conversation they would probably have a higher percentage too.
I don't know what the right way to handle intersecting identities is.
Most of my online identities were started when I was in college and was happy to have them tied to my real name. (This is also when Facebook was popular, still good, and college-kids-only.) Since then, cancel culture et. al. has made me more wary of having my identity-adjacent usernames show up in hobbies like gaming.
If I want to be myname in some Discord servers and anonoguy in others, is there a safe way to enforce that boundary? What about if I want to work on gaming-related open source projects or 3D prints?
As the internet moves to logged-in-and-social-by-default, it's hard to know which identity to use for which service. Moreover, when things are constantly leaking/being hacked, I don't know that I want any service to know that anonoguy and myname are personas of the same individual.
And as LLMs become the standard, I'm not sure any of this is defensible. I imagine in a decade's time, it will be trivial for an LLM to go "this account and that account have similar interests/references/ways of typing - they must be the same person."
The majority of the population has no idea what the trendsetters are doing before it becomes mainstream.
But if you include other group msg platforms as the same thing (whatsapp, fb messenger, etc) i imagine most people know.
I think there's a much higher barrier to entry to Discord than Facebook. It won't become mainstream unless it significantly changes.
In the US this is likely a wildly high overestimate because a huge percentage of the population plays video games at least casually and it has a very large mindshare (if not necessarily daily use for everyone) in that domain.
Moving into things like sports and what we would've called the "general blogosphere" in 2010 quite rapidly too.
I kinda hate it since it's hard to discover, but at least Google can't direct a million bots to it either that easily yet...
Which is likely why it's so good still. The usenet before the eternal September.
You probably mean, 99% of anyone older than 25.
I am 77.
That's amazing. Wishing you well, and thank you for all your contributions!
Very kind of you.
Given that I recently joined a leatherworking Discord comprised of individuals pretty much the exact opposite of my demographic, I believe this is just plain wrong.
My guess would be near half, probably a 60/40 split.
> 3. Post history being public meant that you could get banned/brigaded for your comments on a totally different subreddit (i.e. bots autobanning you on one subreddit for posting on another subreddit).
You can make it private now. Personally I think this is a bit of a misfeature since it ends up helping all the low-activity users showing up to post political agitprop in local subreddits, thinly-veiled advertisers, etc., but they changed it.
I wonder if the act of switching between discord servers works better with our homo erectus brains. You visit your sister who moved to the next village over, and you hang out in that context until it’s time to go home. You go hang out with the stone shapers because you’re a Neolithic nerd and you think rocks are cool but you have the find motor skills of a dying walrus.
Having all of your social circle mashed together on the internet is like a family reunion at a convention in the same room as your high school reunion. It’s… a lot.
I think this is almost certainly true. People aren’t built to be acceptable to an audience the size of a football stadium, they’re built to be acceptable to a hundred or so people at a time. If you can comfortably context-switch, it’s probably a much easier lifestyle.
I know that for me, at least, I like having one server where the comedy is not PC, one server where people seem to be a little more philosophical, one server for my real life friends, one server full of leftoids and one server full of rightards, etc.
Whatsapp, viber, line and tg groups are very much a thing too. Everybody is a chat of their apartment complex and district it seems
Why doesn’t Signal have the same mindspace that these (imo) marginal apps have? It’s actually private. I wonder if people find it hard to use or something…
Does Signal scale?
Until recently, I think the only way to join a Signal was to be explicitly added by a member. It doesn't have all the channels etc. of something like Discord.
It doesn't have enough mindshare by normies either. In San Francisco, my entire social graph was on Signal. In NYC, I'm the weirdo that uses Signal for everything. Most locals seem to only use it for things that they explicitly want to be private. Among Euro friends, only the ones with ties to the US/tech industry use it.
Signal doesn’t have channels (text, voice) which I think is a big one.
If only Discord weren't so incredibly bloated and full of stupid features aimed at 14-year-old gamers.
I'd actually flip that and suggest that people stop trying to use Discord for things that aren't aligned with Discord's product UI/UX priorities!
Discord is what it is, and my teenage kids love it. However I'm constantly baffled by it LOL.
Or just not a buggy piece of crap. It’s more stable than it used to be, but I still run into random problems here and there. Much more often than with any other piece of software I use regularly, but I suppose most are becoming web apps anyways…
Ugh. Sigh.
My rugby team uses Discord for chat and announcements.
It feels…gross…inappropriate…it feels weird to use a UI covered in green gamer UI slime.
https://imgur.com/a/eoa8arH
everytime discord ask me to claim this account i just quit the app. they operate in some bs tech realm that no other service does.
Subreddits ultimately took over when Usenet moderation failed to keep up. I had chat groups before the Web was really even a thing and they lived on until things like Slashdot and Digg took the reins.
One thing that's having a little comeback is the email newsletter (see Beehiiv). There's something nice about being able to get exactly what you signed up for and nothing more. No ads, no recommended content, no infinite scroll.
It's more of a bad IRC replacement than a reddit one.
Discord is IRC, just with modern features.
I wonder if there are any old school protocols out there to create a huge business around by just centralizing them and offering features people have been asking for decades.
Probably not.
Slack had the ability to be Discord, but they explicitly decided they wanted to be business-only.
React was the first open-source community I knew of that outgrew/got kicked off of Slack and moved to Discord. Now, it seems Slack is only used by companies, and occasionally by smaller groups (apartment buildings, school parents, etc) where someone in the group knows Slack from work and doesn't know it's hostile to non-businesses.
Discord was the opposite. I was working on an open source initiative at Google at the time, and the Discord folks openly welcomed us. They even gave us someone's contact info, in case we had needs they weren't addressing. This was when it was still targeted just for gaming, but they were very welcoming of OSS projects using it too!
As I write this, I realize that Discord is what "Google Apps for your Domain" was and Slack is the "Google Workspace" it became.
finger comes to mind, LinkedIn is almost a shit version of this
> Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring the public and the private has finally ended
I wish you were right. We took our kid to a stage show she really wanted to see. People round us kept checking their phones. They weren’t even really checking them. They held them and would turn the screen on and off, lighting the place up.
They couldn’t be without them for more than 5 minutes. This, after 30 mins of painful selfies before the show. It’s awful.
The alert checking is a thing.
But I’ve noticed with my 14 year old son and his friends that they are all about Snap and iMessage. Instagram and TikTok are their public fora.
I don't think the vibe shift they're describing has fully taken place yet, but I think the foundations have been laid and it's started. It's probably going to be a while and take further societal changes to fully come into fruition, though.
AR glasses coupled with a sophisticated input device (fingertap? tounguetap?) will eventually be able to fully replace a touchscreen interface. And from then on it'll eventually become dated and rude to resort to pulling out touch screens during a social event.
Mind you, inconsiderate people will be as distracted as ever, and will continue to halfheartedly pretend they're listening to those around them. They'll just need to find a new method to achieve maximal obnoxiousness.
Many people are simultaneously sharing to the broader internet less (the claim you're responding to) AND more addicted to media shared by the ones who DO share stuff then ever (the claim you're making).
None of the numbers I've seen on web usage, platform usage, etc. indicate people are significantly pulling away from online lives. Though, there has been a slight dip in daily social media browsing time in the last couple of years (of course, it also follows the end of the pandemic, and it hasn't ceded back to where it was prior).
That does sound like a rather charmed life though. Could also be a sign that people are reverting to using the social internet apart from their irl acquaintances as well.
Linking up with all of our irl acquaintances through the public web was a terrible mistake imo. Seeking privacy can mean many different things.
I think the platforms have changed. FB used to be 100% posts by people you know. I opened it today, and maybe 1 out of 50 posts were by someone i know, the rest was "trending" content.
Its essentially an entirely different website now.
Would it show up in the numbers on web usage, platform usage, etc? People who do this drop out of the sample - they don't show up in the numbers. As far as your stat gathering is concerned, they don't exist.
If you're actually doing a census of people and asking about their web usage and social habits, it'd show up. So maybe Google or Facebook has the data if they were to do say cohort analysis on Google Analytics or Chrome History or Facebook beacon logs, counting specifically the number of total unique Internet users that used to visit social media but no longer do. But such an analysis would require SVP-level privacy approval (because it joins together personal, non-anonymized data across multiple products), and why would an executive commission a study that potentially tells them that their job is in danger and their employer is making a mistake by employing them? And if they did, why would they ever publicize the results?
AFAIK, most of the major public-facing analytics platforms work by sampling their users. If their users are voluntarily choosing not to engage with the platform that their sampling runs on, they by definition cannot measure that change. They just become a biased sample that excludes specifically the population they're trying to measure.
But they still READ. So, if you 'interact' (and by that I mean do any write-like action, like commenting, posting, liking, whatever) less, that's gonna show up.
They don't, at least not necessarily. I look at my HN history and it's 13 hours ago, 6 days ago, 8 days ago, 13 days ago. Fifteen years ago I was #2 on the leaderboard (itself now gone, it listed users by total comment karma) and would post about 4-5 times a day. Now when I'm not posting, I'm actually not on the site and not reading replies. I just don't have time.
I think a decent-sized subset of Millennials have basically aged out of the time-surplus years of the early 20s and are now busy with kids and careers and families. And they aren't being replaced by the new 20-somethings, at least not on social media of the same form. The kids are still on text messages and Whatsapp and Discord and Roblox and Google Docs (!!), but they aren't interested in getting on the public Internet, and if they are, their parents won't let them.
How about distinct public posts per day per user?
My experience is that consumption is as high as ever, but the median person's non-private sharing is down.
Are bots included in those numbers?
People didn’t leave social media, social media left them. Instagram used to show your friends, not it shows algorithmic content. Same for the other networks. People are still there but it’s now the new tv.
Everyone should be simply posting algorithmic content to Facebook. Screenshots, etc not giving them your own life stuff imo. We need to push back on personalized feeds. Share a high percentage of what you see so that there is a digital commons and not just some island for each person.
Social media platform used to be less about passive consumption.
My two kids absolutely do not trust open social media (thankfully). My 16 year old has a IMessage group with his friends as well as a discord and that’s it. My 13 year old just uses iMessage with his friend group. My wife and I have taught them the risks of social media but never to the degree of their current distrust. They seem to have picked it ip on their own and want no part of X, insta, TikTok or anything else. They just want to talk to the friends they know.
I'd say it was much shorter than 30 years. Facebook opened to the public in 2006, and I was surprised to learn Myspace (the first "normie" space on the Web) isn't much older. And before that your digital persona was separate from your offline persona, unless you were one of the grognards with a faculty .edu address.
It's the people with money, houses, and kids that departed the 'simple local' lifestyle when the Internet and social media become large. It's them that are re-discovering the joys of the simple local lifestyle.
The simple local lifestyle is that which was lived by all of humanity for all of history up until the last ~75 years (give or take).
I’ve known a lot of neurodivergent and LGBT people, and I was in my late teens when The Internet happened and a young adult when the Web happened.
If you’re not within a couple standard deviations of boring, local living is isolating. Al Gore gave a mea culpa speech at one point because he thought, as a Senator, that legislating to give everyone the Internet would halt the rural brain drain but it had the opposite effect. People learned that they weren’t alone, they were just surrounded by (my words, not his) idiots and so they moved to where their people were. They voted with their feet in droves.
Ultimately, the Internet is good for support. It lets you find people who have the same obscure cancer your child has. Who are dealing with the same sort of neuroses your mom has. Who are being defrauded by a corporation in the same way. Who have the same feelings that the people around you ridicule you for even the hint of having. It lets these people find the patterns, see other people are feeling the same things they do, stop being gaslit.
Everything else has become about dopamine and money. And for those parts we should definitely unplug. But without forums or chat threads that same feeling of being The Other comes back.
Yeah that's absolutely true that it was a lifeline for people who were isolated and that's less true with how ephemeral everything is now.
> WhatsApp
This one is on its way to becoming part of the social media ecosystem. That's what the "Updates" feature is.
To get an idea of what it will look like, check out Instagram users who use it for both 1:1 messaging and social media (1:many) features. Which (again anecdotally) is widely used in younger generations.
Few of my friends use Instagram or TikTok, but I think we're just outliers. I see many (young) users, all the time, whenever I'm on the train.
I am a gen-z and most of my peers look at me weird when I express the same. It was once cool to have social media and presence -- I was only 8 when I made a facebook account. But now, things are different. I actively avoid social media and don't like to show myself online anywhere other than my personal website.
The brief period where I could check Facebook and reliably find someone's name I forgot or figure out how to contact people or invite them to a gathering was pretty nice. Now everyone's on fifty apps I don't use, or installed but never remember to check. Oh well. Sorry, too stimulating for me to join your Discord and get hundreds of notifications, most of which don't concern me at all.
Meta appears to believe this, and so is pushing chatbot integration into private chats on Messenger and WhatsApp; presumably that will be the vector by which they push product advertisements.
This is 100% what I see too.
What’s really interesting to me is how this coincides with a larger push to break up more and more ties that kept our society going for the last 30–50 years. Look at what’s happening to globalization and the push to near-shore. Look at the fragmentation of media into private channels and closed groups, the erosion of shared narratives, and the growing skepticism toward institutions that used to act as connective tissue.
Individually, many of these shifts make sense: resilience over efficiency, trust over reach, local over global. But collectively they point to a world that is becoming more segmented, less interoperable, and harder to coordinate at scale. If fewer people participate in shared public spaces, economic, cultural, or informational, it’s not just advertising models that break, but the assumptions underpinning growth, politics, and even social cohesion.
That doesn’t necessarily mean collapse, but it does suggest a lower energy equilibrium: slower growth, fewer mass phenomena, more parallel realities. The open question is whether we can rebuild new forms of shared infrastructure and trust at smaller scales—or whether we simply learn to live with a more fragmented, quieter, and less synchronized society.
That doesn't really sound bad to me. I think we expanded our social reach too far and need to scale back to where we can feel like we have an impact and our voice matters.
> If everybody bought only what they needed and ignored all the advertisements, our present level of economic activity would plunge.
Shh! One must never question the ponzi scheme.
100% this. I remember when I took advantage of being online and not really competing in SEO, it was simply a matter of being real. At the time, I didn’t realize it was just arbitrage: I was naturally in a space with fewer participants and most organizations didn’t even know the rules yet.
Now that advantage is completely gone, and I have to build business the way it’s always been done in history: walking the streets while the online "broadcasted" world is a massive distraction.
> The person kept making the comment that she couldn't see/find the puck and it made it frustrating to watch.
Lifelong hockey fan, I never understood this complaint. I believe it was FOX that did the 'highlight the puck' thing for a few years in the 1990's.
You can't see the ball in American football, either.
But you don't need to. The guy that's running and everyone is trying to tackle? He has the ball. Just like the guy skating across the ice with his stick on the ground? He's got the puck.
When you CAN see the puck/ball, either someone lost control of it, or they're shooting/throwing/passing it.
You're right - it was called FoxTrax, it's a fairly interesting piece of engineering.
It's pretty wild they were able to convince the NHL to use a modified puck with a battery and PCB inside, all so American viewers could better follow the action.
It was not well received in Canada :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FoxTrax
As someone with low vision I loved when they added that and missed it when it was gone.
I can't see the puck at all at a game and have to be very close to a television to see whats going on.
As a result most sports are boring.
> You can't see the ball in American football, either.
The average play must be what, like 5 seconds? So if you lose where the ball is you're not going to be confused for long.
In far fewer than five seconds, one team can suddenly have the upper hand.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9O34BnFu8Kk
The effect is so powerful, it fools professionals and the camera-operator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fioVbt7eF8
Even when the technique is known, everyone remains susceptible (the victim team in the above video is the trickster here): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSNTfFg4XW0
What I’ve always found fascinating is that I could always clearly see the puck in any stadium, no matter how high up I sat. It was impossible to miss.
However, when watching hockey on TV, it’s incredibly difficult to see the damn thing.
As a gamer this seems obvious to me. It's long been clear to me that our eyes are very adept at processing high-speed motion. Even the first 120Hz LCD gaming monitor, as sucky as it was, was miles bette than the 60 Hz on the market.
So while technically our eyes might not discern individual frames higher than 25 FPS or so, our brain can absolutely process data from a much higher effeice framerate. The motion blur fast thing naturally produce for example, provides critical context clues.
In gaming, sure 240 Hz won't help you see more as such, but it allows your eyes to do what they naturally do and give a much improved experience of fluidity and superior motion prediction.
I find this interesting - before we switched from 5/4 aspect ratio, it was hard to find the puck because the camera was always chasing - but if you know hockey (e.g., watch enough of it) there are a lot of cues about where the puck is or will be, now that we have a wider aspect ratio.
pretty common with my crowd of fans to even get a little giddy when the play is so deceptive that it fakes out the camera man and they dont realize theyre focused on the wrong player until a second or two passes
I'd go a step further and say the ball/puck is not the interesting thing to watch.
Imagine if you couldn't see the players, and just saw the puck. Would that be interesting at all?
Think about tennis. There is the trope of people's eyes going back and forth following the ball, but I don't think they are following the ball directly. They are going back and forth looking at the person who is going to hit the ball.
I think you might be conflating knowing where the puck is with being able to fix your eyes on the puck at all times. The complaint is usually about the former. People are complaining that they don't know where the puck is.
> ...vertical, shortform video. Not sure how that plays out in terms of advertising...
I have seen a comment about them being terrible for advertising, it looks like a "good" idea but it is not.
The problem is that the attention of people watching these videos drop to almost zero, too much is happening in a too short amount of time, and as a result nothing is remembered, including the ads. It is a very good deal for whoever is monetizing this content, they show a lot of ads, plenty of revenue, but not for those who are paying for the ads. It is like subliminal messages, "good" idea, but not very effective. For ads to work, people need to pay attention.
I don't know how ads in chatbots will turn out and what form it will take, but I think it is inevitable.
For sure, I've been hesitantly awaiting ChatGPT's first "sponsored" reply, or at least, one that features a "sponsored" product or link.
How would you know?
They are probably going to make them obvious at first, like with Google search.
But they can also make it more pernicious. For example by having companies pay them so that they can train their AI on their products, with regular updates. Not technically an ad, but the AI will be more aware of their products so that they are more likely to be recommended to the user. In other words, that's paying for the right to advertise to the AI rather than to advertise to consumers directly.
probably, probably and more probably.
Why would they ever make it obvious? It makes no sense. google just had the luck of political inaction, and eventually enshitified it further to the point where you might not know it was an ad.
This is a great analogy and approach!
One rough heuristic I use is people-watching on the subway. Just a quick glance from a distance at their phones. What are they actually looking at? (Yeah I know it's a bit nosy...)
I see: short-form video, WhatsApp/Messaging, YouTube long-format - in that order.
> The tactics were different during the phonebook days (it was having your business start with the letter "A") as opposed to Google and will be different for the next thing as well.
And to add to this, the dark pattern of the time was to register in the Phone Book as “AAA Your Real Business Name” which was exactly what my first job did.
It's short form video for sure. My wife just got 4 WhatsApp messages from our new Instagram campaign in 1 hour. Spent $1.50 so far.
So Zuckerberg is the ref now?
Bang on. It's advertising, so literally looking at where people are getting their info from is the way to go.
Google searches don't produce good results these days. The enshittification has become too extreme. Google openly admits as much (and further intensifies the enshittification) by placing a huge AI summary above those results.
The answer is self evident. If, before, you were relying on clicks resulting from google searches, today you need to be what an AI recommends when somebody uses an AI like they used to use google. (Users will eventually become more sophisticated though!) Lots of people are using AI like a search engine and getting better results than google gives simply because massive resources are currently being put into training AI, while mere neglect is insufficient to explain how fast Google search results are getting worse.
Is this how AI companies plan to cash in? Accept money from advertisers to promote their products in interactions with their LLM's? Were I an advertiser, I'd be trying to get Anthropic to take my money instead of giving it to Google. AI might be what finally makes it impossible to tell content and ads apart. That's great for advertisers... I guess. Not so great for the rest of us.
> Google searches don't produce good results these days. The enshittification has become too extreme. Google openly admits as much (and further intensifies the enshittification) by placing a huge AI summary above those results.
I haven't asked Google a question it has failed to provide a more than adequate answer to in ... months? years?
And on all my devices, I run google search with &udm=14, so I am not talking about AI summaries. I also have search personalization disabled.
I see a lot of people complaining about this on HN. It simply doesn't match my experience at all, in any way.
Maybe because you have the personalization disabled. My complaint isn't the SEO stuff; that hits me when I search on a tech item I want to learn (I get slammed with crappy vendor blogs), or food recipes (long story about a Sicilian Grandma before the recipe at the end). My complaint with Google is it fights me on keywords, and I have to constantly add quotes, add minuses, and it seems to silently override it.
It's easier to add Reddit at the end to get a more accurate question repeated, and skip the sponsored SEO crap.
So why have personalization enabled?
I don't want a list of links that I have to then click through in a kind of Russian roulette—hoping I don't get some kind of SEO crap.
Google seems relatively good at never giving me SEO crap near the top of most of my search results.
And a list of links to original sources or close to it is precisely what I do want.
If you want an LLM to generate an answer from its training data, that's fine, but go use a different search engine instead of demanding that the one many of us have relied on for decades has to do that.
My experience was quite the opposite, and the reason why I switched to Kagi: any search that was anywhere adjacent to a product would be almost nothing but SEO garbage. Non-product related searches were better, but I also think they had noticeably degraded over the past several years to a decade.
And I actually agree with the last point. While there are entire categories of questions that I now prefer an LLM to to any search engine, when I want a search engine, I specifically do not want LLM summaries, which is another thing I like about Kagi: they allow me to choose when I want to see an LLM summary and to turn off summaries altogether.
(this is really not meant to be an ad for Kagi, I presume that most HN users are familiar with it already and don't need yet another random endorsement, but I honestly don't know how to talk about my experiences with search over the past several years and my dissatisfaction with google without talking about it)
> which is another thing I like about Kagi: they allow me to choose when I want to see an LLM summary and to turn off summaries altogether.
firefox: keyword "g" configured as google search plus &udm=14
firefox: keyword "a" configured as google search without &udm=14
works for me!
I don't believe I was demanding anything of the sort. If you're happy with Google, enjoy. I am adding my own anecdotal experiences to other's (who appear also to have found search lacking for some time now).
You stated that you did not want a list of links. I am not sure what other alternatives there are, but AFAIK, they will all involve LLMs in some way and be a quite different way to present the results of a "search" than traditional search engines.
So, if not that, then what?
Interesting way to put it!
Nice, I really enjoyed this interpretation of Jobs famous quote. Even getting into the character "I used to be a goalie" was pretty cool as well!
Skate to where the puck is going
Better to stop playing the game.
--WOPR
“The game” is an emergent property of the human species at scale
Human society cannot exist at this scale without this nested social complexity structure given the biological constraints
So something has to give
Revenue generation via advertising is an emergent property of humanity?
100%, but it's not a direct 1:1 relationship.
First you need agriculture so people tend to settle in one place. After ag comes more specialization, farmers need houses, graineries, and as society grows social specialists in which we'd call government.
These things in an area typically cause the area to grow because of their stability. As they grow you get more than one person/business doing the same line of work and you get more people than fit in ones monkeysphere. At that size you may not know a person that knows what you need to know and start looking further. This is why as cities grow advertising itself becomes an emergent property. Just go to a Roman city and look for dick pavers for example. Then someone will think "Hey, I can give some poor kids a board with a message on it and have them cry out to go to the place that people pay me to advertise" and suddenly you have an emergent property of humanity.
Whoever said that lived with their parents and didn't pay rent
The recent Acquired ep on “Alphabet Inc” put it aptly: social media moved into Google’s space, video (reels, “pivot to video”), and social media for socialising moved to message groups, iMessage/Whatsapp/Discord.
Revenue-wise, video ads have always been the sun to print ads peanut m&m.
Look where the pucks going then:
Implication: ChatGPT as a realtime video avatar will hit the jackpot with ads, but not before. Count on the ChatGPT device having a screen for that reason
"AI" is the next advertising frontier, no question.
People are throwing themselves to feed you personal data. You no longer have to come up with sneaky ways to collect it, or build out their profile from inferred metadata. Less work for you, more accurate profiling, and less risk getting fined by pesky regulation.
Ad campaigns can be much more personal and targeted. You can push them at just the right moment to optimize the chances of conversion. They can be much more persuasive, since chatbots and assistants are deeply trusted. You can dial the sensitivity knob to make them very subtle, or completely blatant, depending on your urgency and client.
If I as someone outside of this hostile industry can think up these scenarios, the world is not ready for what advertising geniuses are cooking up as we speak.
> the world is not ready for what advertising geniuses are cooking up as we speak.
Advertising directed towards AI models, at the very least. If you can get into ChatGPT's weights that McDonalds is the cheapest and tastiest hamburger, how many millions of people would ChatGPT tell that to?
If ChatGPT told you to go to McDonald’s, would you?
yeah, it's always a good time for a egg mcmuffin
>Look where everyone is looking and you'll find your answer there. It may not be in the same form as Google adwords, but the game is the same. Leveraging attention.
The chill that ran down my spine when I realized that you and TFA think that the part people care about is Google as an ad platform, and not as a way to access websites.
Jesus fucking Christ, things are bleak.
AI SEO is where the attention is going, with ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/Google AI Overviews replacing the need for people to visit websites
I don't know why people are down-voting it. You might not like it, you may not think it's good. But this is absolutely happening and there's a lot of data out there about it.
It's unnatural to search an LLM for a product. It's why Alexa never became a shopping portal.
Best way to get the word out about a product now is through an influencer in the space.
-- Edit:
Show of hands for anyone using ChatGPT to shop. Be honest.
People don't even use Google to shop. They try to find something either (1) by brand name, eg. "iphone" or (2) generically by category, eg. "best cold weather tent".
In the former case, Google used their enormous, antitrust flaunting power and 90% browser marketshare to turn the URL bar into a competitive trademark bidding dragnet. Apple pays out the nose for the iPhone spot. For every click. And every other major corporation selling to business or consumer does the same. This is the source of Google's enormous wealth. Google is a middle man. You cannot conceivably get to a brand or product without paying the Google tax.
In the latter case, when people try to look up blogs and reviews and Reddit posts to compare products, Google gets in the way and inserts themselves into the flow. If LLMs make this experience even shittier, there won't be upstream content to source as no reward will reach the people providing the value. It will naturally atrophy over time.
As a new sales channel, young people are buying content off of TikTok and Instagram directly now. When they see influencers using products they like, it leads to massive sales volume. New unicorn consumer businesses are being minted regularly from this.
Alexa never became a good shopping portal because voice interfaces regularly mishear you, so there was always a lot of doubt about what it might be ordering, and also has anyone except the obscenely rich ever gone "yes, the first result, that's always fine, no I will not bother looking at any of the prices on any of the results"? Hence the joke about the reason why Amazon bought Whole Foods being that Bezos said one day "Alexa, buy me something from Whole Foods" and Alexa mishearing it as "Buy Whole Foods".
LLMs are not limited to voice interfaces. You absolutely can use ChatGPT as a search engine if you want to: it does give you results you can compare, telling you about pros and cons of various options, and you can discuss with it what your end-goals are and have it turn a vague idea into a shopping list (that may or may not be complete for your project).
I don't have any reason to think these are the best, ChatGPT is not a storefront and OpenAI does not have a long history as a search engine, but it absolutely can be used this way.
Wow - than at least my behavior - and that of quite an impressive amount of non tech people in my circle of acquaintances - are "unnatural".
I know people who took a photo of their car's driver side mirror cap (the thing that is on the opposite of the drivers side mirror and often colored like the rest of the car) - and asked chatGPT to search for the part. Because they were not able to navigate the respective auto parts portals.
I myself had perplexity generate a comparison report for different electric cars in a specific price range to get a first rough understanding of the used eCar market. Including links to respective models in used car sites.
Using Kagi for the few regular searches I need to do nowadays, Claude Code on the commandline for any other extended research/searches, I actually only use Google nowadays when I use the Google song detection function. Like Shazam - I just find this thing to be on my phone, so no need for an additional app.
I could give you a lot of additional examples from acquaintances and family - esp. from the not so tech people. Google is catching up, though. So - I think, with habits being hard to break, most people find Google good enough for quite a long time to come.
> and asked chatGPT to search for the part. Because they were not able to navigate the respective auto parts portals.
I do that, 10 years already, using Google, on a specific website. Website owners are just so very, very bad at making search working. Haven't even tried using ChatGPT for it.
Searching with llms is the single best use case for it. It is some form of natural language apropos. Ask it what is the best way to have a beautiful and modern website, Vercel will make money and tailwind will receive a visit and gain one more consuming application. Ask it how to be safe, rust will gain more power and influence no matter what originally was your intent. It doesn't need to be justified. Chatgpt said so therefore true (the audience vulnerable to this has established that generative technology==chatgpt)
"Show of hands for anyone using ChatGPT to shop. Be honest."
I use Gemini to help with shopping decisions pretty frequently. It's been very effective and useful for that.
I used ChatGPT to find a bike for me. It asked good questions, recommended good results, linked me to options and the websites I needed to further research things. I don't do a lot of shopping though so this is one tiny example. If I was looking to actually shop again though I'd use it again. Most of my shopping these days is the grocery store. I don't have a lot of needs.
I might be unusual, I only use LLMs to shop these days.
"What is still considered a highly regarded 35mm film camera for under $400 (used)?"
Of course then I go to eBay…
LLMs are honestly rather amazing for product search and comparison.
Here's a use case for me last week: I'm re-organizing my bathroom sink/vanity, and I want a few counter top organizers to keep things neat and tidy. I have a low mirror, low medicine cabinets, and generally tight spaces to work with and want to maximize storage.
So, I have a 10" wide space and I can't have anything over 16". I want to find a drawer organizer as close to 16" tall without going over, and as close to 10" without going over. Given a choice between the two, I want to bias for more height.
Go to Google or Amazon and try finding that. You're going to be trying permutations of 10x16 and 9x16 and so on, and digging through pages looking for something approximate.
In theory maybe there's some filter options on Amazon that might work, but they're usually incomplete, wrong, or absent. It's a terrible experience even when it's supported.
ChatGPT (or even Amazon's kind of janky Rufus) immediately finds top near-perfect matches for me to choose from. 15-20 minutes of aggravating digging turned into 90s of letting ChatGPT think and search while I was off grabbing a coffee.
> LLMs are honestly rather amazing for product search and comparison.
True, LLMs are quite good in things where I have limited knowledge. It shortens exploration phase considerably. Before, I would need to go to web pages, compare parameters (somewhere), think out why this, not that.
I used Chatgpt to compare product specs. Pretty good to get a rough idea but obviously not reliable.
> It's unnatural to search an LLM for a product. It's why Alexa never became a shopping portal.
There is plenty of evidence that people are increasingly turning to AI chatbots for that too. And it's entirely possible that ChatGPT and others are already being trained to mention some products first or to present them in a more positive light.
I have used LLMs to find dozens and dozens of products when I didn't know the proper name for the solution or what to look for.
> Show of hands for anyone using ChatGPT to shop. Be honest.
Show of hands for anyone still compiling 500 Amazon reviews by hand…
This won’t necessarily work well in a year (month?),
but up through now?
Absolutely I’ve been using assistants for some shopping purposes.
I think the author intended the title to be,
"Google Ads is dead, Where do I promote my business now?"
When I hear "Google" I assume search, oof (sigh of relief).
They mention running ads on tiktok or instagram but no mention of youtube ads...
Also, In my own experience for my business ( also entertainment) I have found reddit ads to be useful.
So my next steps would be,
[Edit: Added Instagram Ads, from a different comment]I’d suggest that the title should be, “Competition for Google AdWords is so strong that unsophisticated advertisers can no longer get a good return. Where do I promote my business now?”
He had presumably used it for 10 years successfully. Surely he gained some expertise over that time period.
He probably just got a new competitor in the space. Easy to see good returns on online ad spend when all traffic just goes to you by default.
I have a feeling that it is mostly unsophisticated advertisers bidding up the price of AdWords.
As someone who leads large parts of ad tech for TikTok and worked at Google for 10 years, it’s the K shaped economy that is pressing SMBs out. Pure and simple
Everyone can make up some complex theories but I see it in the numbers every day. Spend distribution is now k shaped and SMBs simply can’t compete at top end performance levels.
This seems one of the more important comments here - a K shaped economy (Rich get richer up the rising arm of the K and the rest of us are on the down arm) dominates everything (ie asset price inflation means if you had assets in 2020 you probably still do else good luck) and this just is one of many ways the playing field has tilted towards the richest.
And it is always a choice - we choose platforms and regulations and spending priorities. If “we” choose a different set of tech regulations the K shaped economy can be put back in its box.
For me the problem was most clearly outlined by Cory Doctorow “developers did not unionise or rebel in time because they thought of themselves as temporarily embarrassed entrepreneurs”.
Presumably with apologies to Steinbeck: “Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.”
Can you share any numbers ie roughly how different the spend is? SMB spends $1k on ads but grandes spend $1M or something? Idk how it works.
I have a colleague who runs growth for a big consumer company driving value through their apps. They spend over $100m/year on install ads.
And the fact they price smbs out should be unsurprising: they're better at making money from a user; users are worth more to them; so they pay more.
SMBs broadly spend 200-400 dollars a month on ads and see marginal to negative returns against 10 million in spend for large clients. Even 1000-5000 see marginal returns at best unless the target small demo high return (local premium services). They lack the budgets for learning and optimization let alone optimal price per placement.
This combined with SMBs targeting everyday joes with increasing less demand availability for anything it leaves them crushed on both sides.
Wow so 10,000-100,000x spend difference. That is a wide K.
Do you think there’s any hope for SMB? Eg I’ve seen some companies tout AI advertising optimization for SMB but when I looked into one for investment the numbers weren’t very compelling.
Wouldn't the K shape only affect targeting of affluent users that are desirable to luxury brands?
Think through the net margins of the bottom of the K left to them. And then the spend against their own K economy on the business side.
> Also, In my own experience for my business ( also entertainment) I have found reddit ads to be useful.
Reddit is very hit or miss depending on your target audience.
Depending on your Reddit target audience, a lot of people could have adblock installed. They might be loyal to communities that have approved vendor lists where everyone parrots the same vendor recommendations back and forth in every thread, so not being part of that game means you're left out. In some niches, the subreddit moderators have a financial relationship with vendors and they'll put their weight into swaying every conversation away from competitors.
For other niches, none of this applies and Reddit can be a good ad destination. It really depends
Based on personal experience, I would be wary on spending much on Reddit ads without carefully measuring the results. Some real world data:
https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/08/11/what-i-learned-spe...
It's been some years since I've had to put ads on the web, but I found Reddit ads insanely effective. Really, Google ads have been dead for a long time. I found them hardly effective at all since maybe 2011.
A surgeon in our family got basically all his (private) clients from Google. Spend was multiple k per month. If you consider that one surgery brings in 7k in revenue, then those numbers actually make sense. He's retired now but did this up to 2y ago.
This is a Kshaped example that’s solid. Some SMBs can afford per keyword large spend in focused high reward arenas. The rest can’t do anything.
> Really, Google ads have been dead for a long time.
For you perhaps. I work with a huge amount of businesses whose profits are still driven almost entirely by them, who have seen not even a blip and make money hand over fist.
I forgot YouTube has ads, thanks.
I do occasionally post (free) on Reddit, it's not that big here though
Occasionally post reddit content or occasionally post reddit ads?
content, in r/Durban - gets a few views
for personal, I'm on lemmy now
How are you finding lemmy community compared to reddit?
By "here" I think you mean SA. Reddit is big in the U.S.
Reddits been building up its user base in India the past few years.[1]
I’m permabanned on Reddit so I only consume via the default not logged in feed and I run into some comments in what I assume is Hindi(might be marathi or one of the multiple other languages on the continent) or posts from subreddits explicitly about some aspect of india
[1] https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/catalyst/inside-reddits...
Hm good point but if one were to try to reach visibility via let's say contacting the creators themselves or making reddit showcases themselves?
I am not sure what might work better, sponsorships or Ads. Of course some are definitely icky sponsorships but if one were to align with small youtubers who develop their own things and you enjoy their content and there might be an overlap etc.
I personally have an ad blocker so I don't really know what might work for. I guess organic marketing? But how does one achieve it?
Any good books / ideas on more sustainable forms of marketing aside from paying the large corporations a sort of land tax basically?
Without search ad revenue Google is dead.
for my life, I haven't found ads useful at all, so I block them
> When I hear "Google" I assume search, oof (sigh of relief).
If Google Ads is dead/dying the search is soon to follow...
Search died ages ago [1]. Ads dying is a direct consequence of that.
[1] https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
> Search died ages ago
You might want to let Google know that, because the number of searches on Google appears to continue to be growing massively:
https://searchengineland.com/google-5-trillion-searches-per-...
Those numbers look like the exact opposite of dead or dying to me. As does Google's growing stock price over the same time period.
‘Numbers go up’ is the exact type of thinking that caused the death of search.
From a user perspective, google search results are awful and almost always a complete waste of time.
Again, this "death of search" I hear so much about, but doesn't exist in the numbers.
If search results are such a waste of time, why do people keep using Google? In ever-increasing numbers? What's the explanation there?
You should let Google know, given their business is really humming nowadays. Along with their stock price.
Google search died years ago already.
Gemini is the new search.
AI is not and cannot be search. Search is dead and has been for a few years now. Search has seemingly been subsumed into the LLM monster, considering how "fuzzy" queries have become (probably because they're not hitting the search algorithm without being massaged by "something else"). Significant portions of the web have been purged from Google's index, which means that neither Gemini nor Search can present those pages to users.
It's over. Sorry.
When people say "search is dead", I feel like you and I live on different planets.
If I have a Google idea of what I want, Google search works great. On the rare occasion I don't know the specific thing I'm looking for, Gemini points the way.
It had never ever been easier for me to find what I'm looking for on the internet, since 1993-1994.
But Gemini doesn't bring much visitors to your website. Also, optimizing for AI is even more "black magic" than normal SEO.
Google considers the consumer's side, not just the publishers. Users often don't want to visit someone's website (and then dodge ads and cookie/newsletter/notification popups). If the query can be answered without veer visiting a website, so much the better.
Instead sites adds Gemini integrations, which are targeted based on prompts. When you pay enough, Gemini recommends your shop and AI buys the stuff for the target audience.
Google ads is dead precisely because their search product is dead.
Ever since Google bought double click, their ads business has been their search business. They are the same product.
> their search product is dead
Do we have any evidence search volume is down?
Don't get me wrong, I'm an avid Kagi user. But I'm sceptical anyone outside tech is using anything other than Google.
I watch people search for PlatformName Login every single day because they don't know how URLs work.
Google isn't search. It's a crutch for people with too much time and money.
p.s. not google labs, not tpu's, but specifically search.
Google search ain't dead at all: it became so good something silly like 99% of all the queries have to be answered by the Google AI before the very first "result". And for those who want more, there's the "continue this discussion with Gemini".
Now this may not be great for Google Ads (dunno about that) but Google search now works better than it ever did.
Surprised to see this upvoted because the takeaway is completely incorrect, and based on the anecdotal evidence of one advertiser.
As someone who spends seven figures every month on Google ads, what’s much more likely to be happening here is that the individual advertiser is either getting outcompeted or they’re executing ads poorly.
Google ads revenue in the US continues to grow every quarter. And, since advertisers will generally invest in ads until the last dollar is break even, it’s likely that the total value advertisers unlock through Google ads is growing as well. Whether that’s true or not, the notion that value generated for advertisers is “dead” is absurd.
Your experience is 100% compatible with the linked article: the seven-figure spender is presumably running a much higher margin business and can scale narrowly profitable ads much more effectively. The natural equilibrium for a perfect ad market is for the ad spend to be exactly equal to increase in revenue: a perfectly efficient market with no profit for the advertiser. Google (and Meta et al) are so good that for many SMBs they are completely cornered at the zero-point: spend as much as you can just to stay in the same place financially.
> The natural equilibrium for a perfect ad market is for the ad spend to be exactly equal to increase in revenue
Not quite, the equilibrium is when marginal ad spend results in no change to profit. The ad spend at equilibrium should result in increased profit compared to no ad spend.
> and based on the anecdotal evidence of one advertiser
The author admits as much.
The question is, why has this post been massively upvoted?
It contains zero useful information. Just somebody struggling with AdWords and they don't know why. Not helpful.
I have to assume the vast majority of upvotes are based on the title alone, assuming it's about Search? A large proportion of top level comments are about Search too. Depressing.
Posting "Google is bad" will pretty much always get you to the top 5 spots on this site.
Things are upvoted because people feel like discussing the subject. The actual article is usually just a conversation starter, if it's read at all.
The "Google is dead" title in the AI age, probably.
I am fairly confident that the answer is that most people vote based on the title/headline without ever clicking through. I am likely guilty of this as well sometimes. It takes discipline to avoid this behaviour.
> We find that most users do not read the article that they vote on, and that, in total, 73% of posts were rated (i.e., upvoted or downvoted) without first viewing the content. [0]
In this case, my guess is that people are noticing less and less utility from Google search, and that was why they voted like they did.
This same phenomenon is what gives newspaper editors far more power than the journalists, as it is the editors who not only decide the stories to be covered, but even more importantly, they decide the headline. Most people just scan the headlines while subconsciously looking for confirmation of their own biases.
[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.05267
meta comment separated for its own discussion
I tried to find that paper via google search first, and I failed after 3 different searches. I then opened my not-important-stuff LLM, chatgpt.com, and found it in 3 interactions, where in the 3rd I made it use search. Chatbots with search are just so good at "on the tip of my tongue" type things.
Google is in such a weird position because of their bread and butter legacy UX * scale. This has to be the biggest case of innovators dilemma of all time?
then you have people complaining that search is no longer a keyword match when people claim to know exactly what they want...
Totally! Hence the dilemma.
Google.com has the "AI mode," and it tries to intelligently decide when to suggest that based on a search query. I could have likely used that to find the same thing. But, I instinctively just went to chatgpt.com instead. I am not a total moron, I use gemini, claude, and gpt APIs in the 2 LLM enabled products that I am working on...
However, just last week I noticed that the AI mode default reply for some queries was giving me just horrible AI mode replies. Like gpt-3.5 quality wrong assumptions. For the first time I saw google.com as the worst option. I cannot be the only one.
I think I understand the problem. Google has the tech, but as a public company they cannot start to lose money on every search query, right? The quarterly would look bad, bonuses would go down. Same reason ULA can't build Starship, even if they could and wanted to. However, OpenAI can lose money on every query. SOTA inference is still not cheap.
Because if you go to /r/ppc or /r/googleads, you will see that the experience of the majority is exactly the same.
Massively? I can't know. I read the article and upvoted 1) because it suggests a rocky road ahead for Google and 2) because, as you may have guessed, I dislike ads, dislike Google's complicity in ads, and so am happy to discuss.
I happen to in fact think we have reached an inflection point. Whether "Google is dead" depends probably a good deal on where they go now.
I run a small software business and I know various other people who run small software businesses. We are all pretty much agreed that that Google Ads have been less and less profitable, year or year. Most of us have now given up on PPC ads.
Agree, ran a business for years and I’ve seen the slow but steady decline of Google ads.
Ultimately I relied more on returning customer and mouth to mouth recommendations, kept lowering the Google ads budget.
And equally I know many people running non software businesses whose experience is the complete opposite of yours and Google ads has and continues to drive the majority of their revenue.
I expected them to start seeing a hit or significant decline by now, and even told them as such but in what I honestly find surprising, it’s not come to pass.
He's been using AdWords for 10 years, so I wouldn't assume incompetence there.
It's just as likely that people are simply spending less on entertainment due to high cost of living.
> seven figures every month on Google ads
What are you advertising?
> Surprised to see this upvoted because the takeaway is completely incorrect
It's the standard actually. Hot takes get more votes and hot takes are usually wrong. Experts have non-controversial opinions, which are boring (so no impulse to upvote), and there are 1000x more non-experts with blogs. Add to that HN culture which values contrarian-ness. So HN front page blog posts are almost entirely incorrect, but spicy
I love knocking on Google, and have been doing so for longer than it was cool, but this sounds more like the business is no longer attractive than Google having become suddenly wildly ineffective.
My anecdotal evidence is the smarter normies are increasingly allergic to screens. They only use them to watch stuff they hear about by some other means, but parents, for example, look for any excuse to keep their kids off the Internet, and largely they're better for it.
It’s googles fault no one wants my product! It certainly can’t be the basics of demand!
- most SMBs I ever work with.
> the basics of demand
If you've been around longer than internet advertising you realize the basics of demand have changed pretty considerably.
Let's go back to 1980 and say that you have widget X that person A would absolutely buy if they saw/heard it advertised. They live in Podunk Minnesota that had coverage by 3 radio stations, 3 TV stations, and 2 newspapers. But you have no idea what media they actually consumed to target the right one.
Right now you're at the point you would have to contact at least 8 different media companies for ad spend if you wanted coverage. Most likely you'd cut it down to one of each, and maybe a billboard. This said, the cost for just this little area is going to be wildly expensive! Ads were huge money, and this is just for one little town.
These costs were slightly lower for large corporate buyers, but not that much because as you go back farther and farther you were typically dealing with more companies before consolidation. Being an SMB was great in this market in a local area because you weren't competing with the world.
Fast forward to now and you compete with the entire world at any given moment. In the West we've forgotten about competition and allowed a huge portion of our economic product to consolidate to a small number of companies. This is very apparent in advertising as the old media entities are dead or far more expensive than you'll ever recoup with the competition out there. Instead you're looking at Google/Reddit/Facebook style ads, but with that kind of ad you again, complete with the entire world. If your ad actually does good and drive business, then Google metrics will feedback to players watching the market and they will advertise products in the same space driving up competition and the base costs for ads. The supply from your competitors is practically unlimited which will drive your profits to almost zero unless you happen to have something very special.
Welcome to the K shaped economy, where the big get bigger and the small die.
The web is dead, we replaced with portable cable TV where you scroll up to change channel.
Glad to see I'm not the one that sees the similarity in "zapping" or channel surfing to what people do nowadays with those shorts...
I remember my brother loving to do channel surfing in the 80s when we were young. I've always hated it! maybe that's why I cannot stand the current Tiktok media format (so sad that Youtube is pushing more and more the same format).
Also, remember when telephones started and people who took vertical video where seen as sinners? How times change!
a cable TV where anybody can poison your brain with whatever benefit them
Any state sponsored actor can pay to play.
I'd be curious to know how much cable tv content was direct propaganda or hype
on youtube most of what i see is hyped hyperbolic content, polarized podcasts, shorts.. the way and reason why "content" is produced has changed
whats a cable tv?
It's how we got our internet before the internet.
It's what Americans call non free to air television. You're probably being downvoted because it's intrensic there and they assume you must know about it.
It's like TikTok but you hit buttons instead of swiping.
that sounds like a lot of work
The way people get information online is changing rapidly.
I run a local makerspace. It is not quite the same thing as a local entertainment business, but there are certainly some similarities. We are local, and we are very event-based.
For the last 10 years, the way we would get new members was to host Meetups. Meetups are slowly bringing in fewer members. When I ask tour guests how they found out about us, they recently started saying that they found us on ChatGPT. They did not know what a makerspace was but they explained their problem and ChatGPT presented our space as a local solution. This has been good for us because we offer something useful to the community but struggle to explain it. In the old days of search, this was a problem because many people were not using the correct phrase to describe what we are. That doesn’t matter anymore.
How does a local business optimize for this though? I am not sure.
The question is how LLMs will get that kind of information in the future, if not from the web. By scraping TikTok and Discords?
>By scraping TikTok and Discords?
One of two ways. Yes, by scraping, even it it requires users to 'sell' their own browsing data to the AI companies because places like Discord lock them out.
Or, the other way is for particular event organizers to pay directly for their services to be advertised/incorporated into the LLM itself. Those that don't pay get more and more of their data erased from the LLM maybe?
I anticipate a cottage industry of “AI optimization” types similar to the current SEO crowd. I have not seen too much of it yet, though.
instead of hosting a website you host... SERVICE.md, BUSINESS.md, .... or maybe a MCP server describing what you provide /s
Are you using "Meetups" to mean Meetup.com or just events in general? Meetup.com has completely gone to shit. Trying to find an event is super frustrating. They show the same events over and over. They don't enforce categorization. People mark online only events as in person and the platform doesn't care. They also started trying to charge users (people looking to attend events) instead of only planners (people hosting events) so it drives people away.
Sadly I don't know any better platform but it seems ripe for a new entry.
I meant both, and you are correct 100% that meet up has entirely gone to shit.
Yeah that is my experience entirely with meetup these days
It’ not Google that’s dead. It’s the economy in North American markets. I am finding conversion way down, clicks and impressions I’m still getting. People are just being way more fussy before handing over cash.
Everyone i talk to is quoting the same time line, this started in September and it hasn’t returned to normal.
Winter is coming.
Push advertising sucks, but we can make pull much better by giving the user more control.
Imagine a protocol to publish commercial offers for any given fragment of content addressable by URI. It would describe the details of some product or service and a set of proposed terms. We could surf the web looking for relevant content and publishing related offers. Various repositories would subscribe or not.
A browser (extension or native) would optionally pull offers from selected repositories and have UI for the user to solicit/pull offers for any given piece of content styled to signal their existence, and to filter and sort them. To make it sustainable there needs to be revenue sharing with the content source(s).
Are there existing projects like this?
The same protocol could be used for independent commentary and other annotation.
>user more control
As others said, most users don't care or don't want to see them.
This leaves the people that care being the ones who are providing the ads, and they will game the system with bots and other methods of bad acting that will make the system useless.
The Brave/BAT experiment was similar to what you're describing. I think it failed to live up to its dreams of revolutionizing advertising because for the most part there are two kinds of people.
- I try not to think about ads
- I think about ads because I aggressively block them
I'm sure somebody out there represents a middle ground, but I think it's a pretty small demographic.
The problem is curation. People will mis-categorize in every way possible just to try to get eyeballs. I see this all over the web.
I hate ads until I need them, then I complain that the algorithms still suck. My wife recently reminded me I have to give Shopee time to surface good options when I don't have the exact words. I expect this to improve as their models improve.
I think Google’s search and ad business are at risk. Search has become such a mess that it’s become harder and harder to use to find quality results. It reminds me of Yahoo before Google in a way.
I’m using ChatCPT or equivalent for 60% of my searches. The remaining 40% is just muscle memory. Of that 40% about half the time I regret using Google search due to the difficulty of finding the relevant result.
I can see search users moving to ChatGPT or such and Googles Ad business suffering as a result and a general downward spiral of Google search.
This is a temporary situation. Think of it like how Napster let you download any song for free for a few years. For a while, all you heard was how the Internet was going to put all musicians out of business. Obviously that didn't happen.
The same will happen here. It's not like OpenAI has built a search engine; every time they need a live search they hit Bing (please correct me if I'm wrong) and get the results from there. No matter how you slice it, search companies who actually supply the data are going to get reimbursed, and since most users don't pay $20 / month, that likely means ads everywhere.
Also, Google's AI overviews are getting very good. Initially it was pretty inaccurate, but now it's basically 95% as good as ChatGPT, and faster. Most normies I talk to think it's good enough.
You don't think putting ads in Gemini output has crossed Google's mind?
I've never understood the "AI is eating search! Google is dead!" theory. The specific mechanism (whether that be keyword search, LLM conversation or something else) by which users describe their needs to a company doesn't matter, all that matters is that (a) the company makes that mechanism available for free, (b) it does a good job of satisfying the user's need and (c) ads can be smuggled into it.
Is this being on top of HN part of the writer's new non-google marketing strategy?
Please not that again, my server was down for 2 days last time! (I did join CloudFlare CDN after that)
Cloudflare seems to be sorting it out (mostly).
Thankfully there are a bunch of comments here summarising the post.
A blog post lamenting the demise of Google Adwords.
AI is built with content from the open web, but it has also killed the open web. The death of Adwords is only one symptom of that.
I don't know what comes next, I just know it will be worse.
No, google search has stopped being useful years before "AI".
Is that why it kept it's market share and usage numbers?
Business momentum goes a long way, especially with Google being near monopoly status in their advertising. If you're flying at 50,000 feet and the engines fall off the plane it may be a long time before you the customer feel the impact. We can only guess Google is in a panic trying to figure out how they'll make their numbers next quarter and looking for something else to enshittify to increase profits in the meantime.
It was still useful to advertisers and publishers.
It wasn't really AI. Fundamentally, building a website the "traditional" way (hosting agreement, apache install, your favorite way to convert data formats that don't hate you into HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) was always a learned and quite technical skill; most people weren't doing it for fun, they were doing it because it was the only way to be on the web.
What killed the open web was Facebook, Twitter, and their ilk replacing that whole mess with social media profiles, networking connections, and templated, pre-fabricated organization home pages. When social networks became dominant enough that businesses could use it to get their info out there without having to author a webpage, the balance tipped (at least for business-motivated web content).
- Build FAQ section (LLM can help write a lot of it, if you let it load the content of your site) - Write news on your site (LLM can help you to find ideas what to write about)
There are other networks as well: X, Meta, YouTube, LinkedIn, Amazon ads. It depends what’s your target group. But all networks have targeting tools so you can test them with minimum budget just to see what works and what doesn’t.
For sure, you have some personalized landing pages with CTA (Posthog script included so you can see what works).
good riddance seriously i used to pay like $1~2 a click back in 2010s and remember feeling like a total scam. no way of knowing if those clicks were bots and any campaigns would always have inflation somehow even long tail words that shouldn't.
AI should equal the playing field and promote businesses based on merit and capacity not how much they can spend.
I will say I have no experience in the ad space, but surely the SEO/ad companies will figure out how to game LLMs to make their sites more likely to be picked up by it, no? Or OpenAI would just directly sell ads themselves.
Yes - we're in what I like to call the Socialist Phase of AI (user acquisition). We were once in this phase with Google. Eventually we'll move into the as-yet-unnamed-by-me phase that Google (and search in General, also the internet) have been in for quite some time, where they try and squeeze out all the money that they put in during the Socialist Phase.
The classic pairing is explore/exploit - where you allocate resources towards serendipity in the former, and lock down into only doing the profitable thing in the second.
Value creation phase vs extraction phase.
I like to call this the candyvan phase.
Capitalist?
For now.
I give it maybe 12-18 months before AI results are polluted by advertising.
I don't even think this golden age actually exists today. Aask Google AI mode for the best product in some category - say, the best kitchen range - and it cites... a bunch of spammy "review" websites and a YouTube video.
If you're shopping around, an LLM you control can work for stuff like summarizing customer reviews or compiling a list of products with specific features (if you don't mind them being randomly wrong). But for general shopping advice / "plan my vacation" kind of queries, it's already firmly in the land of SEO-garbage-in-SEO-garbage-out.
exactly, enjoy the Golden age people, like the Internet had once...
> I give it maybe 12-18 months before AI results are polluted by advertising.
Have you been on amazon lately? We're already there. :-/
they won't be in a separate panel you can ignore, either
the product promotion text will be integrated into the responses
'your prompt is insightful and refreshing. reminds me of the refreshing taste of organic coconut-cinnamon water. here's a QR code coupon for $1 off a 48-ct pack you can use at your local HoleFoods.'
More like
"Fantastic! It's great that you care about what you should feed your children. A bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch is a great way to start your kids' day with the energy they need, and it's something they're sure to love! It's also fortified with vitamins to give them the nutrition they need! If you don't have any, I can start a DoorDash order right now."
Or "It's great that you want to find a way to earn some extra money for holiday presents for your family when you don't have anything left over after paying your bills. You're so thoughtful. You're an avid sports fan, so you've got the knowledge to have an edge in sports betting. DraftKings has a $10 credit when you bet your first $15 on tomorrow's game. You're automatically a winner!"
One mustn't forget that propagandists are frequently just straight malicious.
I would be that Openai and Google will find a way to boost the embedded ad in the llm result to you based on an auction on how valuable you and your query are
If you believe markets to be a future discounting mechanism, then they're sure as hell saying Google "figured something out" in the last year, even vs OpenAI [1]
[1] https://x.com/firstadopter/status/1993464859376468102/photo/...
Just trying to find out what this guy actually does is hard. It’s a page of links linking to another page of links, repeat. Where is the thing? The content? The product? It just feels a bit disconnected from patterns users expect and delivery mechanisms users are comfortable with in 2025. It’s almost a 1995 style pastiche of intent with no payoff.
?? There is one link that takes you to his business. It’s kids parties (birthdays, etc) entertainment (Or corporate events). Think performers doing magic acts, juggling, comedy, balloons, etc. it really wasn’t that difficult to find out.
Please go anywhere but the platforms I use. Go fill Tiktok up with ads. Any of the "mainstream" platforms inbuilt ad posts are a good bet. Or a marketing agency that will disguse it as organic content.
Lol wish I could afford to "fill up Tiktok with ads"! Seriously though, I always felt like Google AdWords (we only used the search network) are the most honest way. Someone searches for what you offer and they see your ad. With these other platforms it's more about relying on the algorithm.
Google ads are the cheapest yes, but depending on your audience they may not be looking on Google now.
For ChatGPT (and similar) you need to have a strong FAQ page and lots of content marketing to increase the likelihood of being the suggested answer when a user asks ChatGPT a relevant question (it's a highly probabilistic system, look up AEO/GEO).
CloudFlare for example offers an option to block AI scraping bots by default. If you are in the services business, this is the opposite of what you want because having AI crawlers scrape your site would drive traffic down the road when users ask a related question.
I would also suggest having accounts with major chatbot companies and enabling the "allow training on my conversations" option and then talk to it about your services. Ultimately you just want to get your brand into the training data corpus, and the rest is just basic machine learning statistics.
Facebook ads were the cheapest for me ten years ago.
We were marketing a product that many people were happy to know existed. The dashboard gave us tools to really delve into demographics. Of all the ridiculous personal data Facebook collected, the best demographic filter was allowing me to narrow in on pages someone liked or interacted with. We were selling things related to cruising sailboats, and we could target an audience within 30 miles of Fort Lauderdale who also liked Sailing Magazine. Moreover, we could use a pixel so that only people who had also visited our website saw the ads.
Facebook had a policy of rewarding high-quality ad content. If people clicked the ad, or better yet left positive comments and discussion or shared, the price drastically decreased to fractions of a cent per impression and click-through. We were able to get ads shared a lot with people tagging other people about the product suggesting they might be interested in it. That was the holy grail for copy that we always strived for.
Of course, they got rid of all that. But at the time, it was a great way to target an audience based on third-party pages they liked, giving them ad content about products they were generally interested in—and products they were happy to know they could purchase because they had value.
Ads configuration is like gambling in Las Vegas, in that the easier the game, the worse the odds—like slot machines—and the more the player has to interact, like Blackjack, the better the payout. When done well with good configuration, we were getting 1000s of click-throughs for dollars. It was amazing.
The point is that Facebook rewarded ads that people positively interacted with, as it meant the quality of the news feed wasn't hurt by the ad.
There was a time when ads benefitted everyone, the buyer, the seller, and Facebook.
>when ads benefitted everyone, the buyer, the seller, and Facebook
As others have stated in this thread, it's called the acquisition phase. Get people hooked, build the network, make it be the place that people have to be at.
After that comes the exploit phase where said network effects make it hard to leave. You can rake in billions (trillion?) of dollars this way. Who cares if it eventually kills the company, you've made more money than god at this point.
Google Search Ads are usually the most expensive on a CPC basis out of the big platforms, but usually the CPA is much lower (even though Bing Ads can often be better value). This is usually because of 2 reasons:
1. You can target a specific part of the funnel (informational -> purchase intent) in search ads. Targeting on social networks is more about overall user profiles rather than their immediate state of mind.
2. People going to a search engine expect to leave that search engine to go to another website. Whereas people on a social network expect to stay in that portal. So clicking on an ad then doing something after is a more natural flow (and better value for advertisers).
Your product are programmable LED pois?
That does seem like a very good fit for a good video that can spread on TikTok etc on its own if some performers upload videos.
NO that's a side project - my product is my juggling/magic shows here in Durban (also good for video though). I made the poi for myself and open sourced it, now people are selling them in Brazil, and Australia. Sometimes I get a bit of cash from it but not a lot.
I see. Not sure if TikTok is the best plattform then as you want a very local audience (but I never used TikTok, just watched family members do).
I rather would try to get an entry on google maps. Meaning when people browse the area, they see your thing. I certainly like to discover new stuff like this in new areas and some things I find are clearly there because of ads, but other got there by other ways. Making a entry by hand, publishing a picture there with further info ..
Why hate on the guy with the kids’ entertainment business for placing ads? I don’t get it.
Its not specific on him Ads just drive me insane. I haven't really formed enough strong reasoning(to me) to say they shouldn't exist. So I'm at a halfway point of "advertise somewhere that isnt in front of me".
The platforms I use are very NOT local so it'd be pointless. Mainstream platforms are invasive with their data collection that would allow his ads to be specifically targeted and do well there, getting put in front of people who might actual use his service.
I think they’re really hating on ads in general, not this specific person.
I hate ads too, I understand. Currently running pi-hole and ublock simultaneously. Have to use a burner phone to see my own ads
pls don't go to TikTok, I use it
TikTok's already full of ads and barely hidden sponsored posts though
The old decentralized Internet is dying out and being replaced by a few apps under the total control of a few companies.
I'm not sure much can be done about this. At least the physical world is still the same.
> At least the physical world is still the same
You mean the physical world where businesses are signing up with companies to put AI enabled cameras all over their properties and sell your data? Why not some nice dynamic pricing on their digital price bars next (oops, we are already there).
I only go to small local specialty shops within walking distance of my house, none of which has such sophisticated equipment.
Where I live, the trend has been to make spaces more walkable and with more nature and green spaces.
Isn’t it just AIs that have an agenda? That lie to you? That use a directive to persuade you to do / purchase something under the guise of authority?
ChatGPT, etc. right now is the early web where everything was free and everyone wondered how it would make money.
Soak it up because it won’t last long.
Reminds me of a quote I once read of "marketing being a game of diminishing returns".
When you find a working marketing solution, it's just a matter of time when it dries out, because of competitors and overall saturation.
I can't rule out competition here, definitely part of it - cost per click has gone up a lot over the years
Oh no, adtech is dying. I guess we'll all have to compete through quality of products and services and not gaming a rigged system designed to reward anything that maximizes the profit of the global surveillance adtech machine.
This gives me warm fuzzy feelings. It's nowhere near good, but this is better than it was.
I wish that were true, but I don't think it's dying, I think it's metastasizing.
Ads will ingress deeper into what were trusted layers -- embedded in text and video in a seemingly organic way. GenAI tools make this possible -- to splice a 20 second mention of something into a stream, or rewrite a paragraph injecting a subtle product placement.
We will develop new mental antibodies for this, we always do. Silver lining of sorts -- while short-form video content is making people illiterate, perhaps literacy will become a calm refuge once again.
The biggest problem is platform scale, imo - platforms grow so big as to make the network effects confer an invulnerability to regulation or moderation, and then get exploited to squash competition, either through legal action, acquisition, suppression, or sometimes simple inertia. Ubiquitous reach and total control over the platform made it irresistible to bad faith operators, politicians, activists, and rent-seekers. AI has a good shot at completely fragmenting those technologies at a fundamental level.
We should be resisting any ad injection into ChatGPT, Claude, etc maintaining a firewall between what's acceptable in a paid product and what's not, and as long as open source Chinese models roughly keep parity, the big US labs can't pivot hard into exploiting users for ad revenues. Private hosting and bots are almost as good as ChatGPT with UI and UX, within a few percentage points as good in capabilities, and the pressure to go elsewhere is minimal. If they drive off a whole lot of independence minded users, they risk creating a community of people who'll create a very slick, workable alternative, while paying only a tenth or less what the frontier labs charge. As long as that dynamic cripples the efforts of big labs to enshittify, there's a good shot that the entire ecosystem fundamentally evolves to something better. I hope, anyway - it could just explode into a grotesque mess of user exploitation and yet more of the same.
I think at some point you'll be able to have good-enough AI on your phone to carry everywhere you go, and it'll do all the ad filtering and opsec and digital hygiene for you - everyone will have a high quality competent tech nerd in their pocket looking out for their best interests, and it won't just be a niche rebel nerd thing anymore.
>good-enough AI on your phone to carry everywhere you go
Eh, if Google/Apple allows you to put it on your phone, which is highly doubtful at this point. Google would outright directly ban that kind of competition in the name of security. Apple would just ban an AI like that in the name of security even though it doesn't actually compete with them.
I love your vibe but unfortunately I don't share your optimism. The interregnum between monopolies gets exponentially shorter as the money printing gets exponentially faster. What was maybe 20 years of "OK-ish" after say WW2 got down to a few years in the 90s when internet was worth browsing, from Google to AI could be just months..
They recently changed the max results per page from 100 to 10 and they're suing serpapi. They've basically killed their google newspaper archive.
Not happy with google.
And it's become clear to me how little of the open web, and top 100k sites they've fully indexed, I used to have a lot more faith in them.
Might this not also be the fact that given the cost of living the world over, being able to afford a fancy party with entertainment like the poster provides is a luxury few can afford now? We used to eat out a lot more (Saturday lunch at a cafe I mean) and also used to get HelloFresh and other such services, but as the cost of them has gone up way faster than our salaries, we've had to reign them all back. I agree with the "Google is dying" sentiment for sure, but I also wonder how much is just being unable to afford nice things anymore.
Googles Search Ad revenue is dead, but the business is diversified and positioned for change. As of 2024:
Search Ads and Partner Revenue = 230bn Youtube = 36bn Cloud = 40bn
Say they drop 100bn on search revenue. How well are they positioned to convert their user platform and search crawling infrastructure onto Gemini, and introduce an advertising platform into LLMs to replace what they had? I imagine they are as well positioned as OpenAI.
I would lose a lot of sleep if I paid out for puts on them.
Your business seems well suited to advertising through short form content so I wish you lots of success with transitioning away from Adwords.
Thanks, yeah I see lots of video editing in my future
Perhaps catering towards TikTok experiences, help them make the videos that they then share with their friends.
‘Pic or it didn’t happen’ has now been replaced by ‘TikTok or it didn’t happen.’ Is it possible to enjoy something without there being video evidence of it? According to my gf and her female friends the answer appears to be no.
Tell me about it - my mother was a librarian, I prefer text content, but have to face facts now I guess
Reminds me of the whale oil business being replaced by petroleum. Except the ad-based economy was effectively a google monopsony. I'm surprised the OP managed to make ad revenue for a decade, but to me at always seemed about casino-ish and snake-oily. A decade is impressive but I think we all knew where this was going. I think the question is: will another monopsony for ads arise or will it be content based only? It seems YouTUbe is poised to be the next google since more people watch YouTube than cable, so the audience is captive since there's no alternative (yes I realize Google owns YouTube). But that's still a parasitic economy sucking from google. "Where to go now?" depends on if another ad server can gain dominance, otherwise the answer is "nowhere".
Hugged to death right now, therefore: https://web.archive.org/web/20251229204141/https://www.circu...
His actual entertaiment bussiness is down,
https://bigtop.co.za/
They are a circus for hire (events) https://web.archive.org/web/20250424004511/https://bigtop.co...
Located in Durban, South Africa. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durban
He got too much exposure by stating Adworks no longer works?
Because everyone asking AI to do websearch for them
> I am AI assisted, very fast!
I sometimes think people really don't understand the value-add of AI (and I say this as someone on the less hyperbolic end of the "AI-hype" spectrum). If your service to me can be accomplished by AI "very fast"... I don't need you anymore. AI provides a generic problem solving interface where non-experts can leverage the power of the AI to solve a task they previously couldn't have so long as they can describe it well.
I've had multiple cases at work or other places where I've been presented with something as the stakeholder and been told "I used AI to make this!" Great! Next time I'll use AI to make it and save myself the overhead/cost of having work with someone else. I don't see a lot of value in explaining a problem to you so that you can then re-explain it to an LLM.
When people show me they've used AI to complete a task I used to have to do I'm delighted, and, more often then not, proven my value when they come back weeks later asking for help untangling the mess they've made. But, I'm equally delighted in the cases where they are successful using AI to replace things I used to be tasked with. Despite the AI hype, I find myself busier than ever.
I think this article title misled me a bit... Google seems to be fine but it's no longer driving traffic through Ad Words. I think that in particular is really getting messed up by AI since people often don't go to any Web site once an AI agent answers their question.
Google Ads started charging me $5 per click on low traffic search keywords this week, meanwhile YouTube ads are still 20 cents a click (presumably to keep up with Meta)
They're having a laugh if they think we'll keep paying that for no actual leads.
There is always chaos when a central authority fails, and the "main home page for the Internet" model has definitely failed. AI killed it.
How long before we see sponsored ads placed alongside prompt answers?
That site loosing revenue mentioned in the post (https://bigtop.co.za/) doesn't even load for me.
If it's loose then you might want to screw it on.
Sorry, couldn't resist! The correct word here is lose, when something is loose it means that it's not fastened or constrained, like a loose knot
“Research shows” Lool!! Ask anyone in their teens or 20s even 30s. They’ll all answer what you did in the article. Short attention spans are ruling and so are those social media applications you mentioned.
Sorry in advance if this comes off as hostile, that's not my intent. I am genuinely wondering: You're in the business of advertising? And you're upset that Google isn't your golden goose anymore?
> I am AI assisted, very fast!
This feels like one of the most surreal things I have read in a while, believing that the blog is authentically written by a real person. I can't put my finger on why.
I do feel like it's maybe time to rewatch BSG.
lol I meant coding, can't stand AI slop web content myself. I wrote all the words - what's BSG?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica_(2004_TV_...
We fought the toasters, and the toasters won.
I think it's time for a new way of discovering products. My ideal would be some sort of site that I can go to, to find services and products in my local area. There could also be national and international sections, with user ranked news of new interesting products in given categories.
For example, with video games I can go to sites like www.rockpapershotgun.com or others, or forums related to games, to see what the new products coming out. That's perfect in my world. No ads in my search, no ads in my email, no ads in youtube or whatever. But when I'm interested in seeing what's new, I can, on my terms, go and check out the new products.
Is there such a thing as a good ad? I've always blocked them on all platforms.
Looking at instagram where I don't block anything, most of what it suggests to me are soft porn or soft scams (generic chinese dropships marketed as a unique innovation).
I mean, you mean "I've always tried to block 'obvious' ads in the places I expect obvious ads to be".
The thing is the world of ads is far larger and more complicated than that. Just think of product placement in movies? That is an ad, have you stopped watching most movies?
What about content that is a thinly veiled ad? What about a set of bots that follows everything you post on line, and when it's little AI core figures out you are looking for something makes a suggestion under a post where you're asking questions?
Anecdotally, this article seems to match with what I am witnessing regarding browsing habits. I am planning a big trip with others and everything is being found via social media apps; destination ideas, experiences, cafes, accommodation, etc.
I don't know if Google is dead, but what I know is this:
For the first time since 1995 my default method to research information on the web does not involve any traditional search engine anymore.
As it should be with all things.
I pivoted away from google search (duckduckgo instead primarily) but even then, the majority of "information" I'm looking for goes instead to chatgpt.
Maybe someone should tell Google.
I know very little about online marketing, but my Googler marketing friend told me that just 6 months ago everybody would Google search three word terms: “best Chinatown dumpling”
But now people Google search: “my boyfriend is coming to town for the holidays and we are going to Chinatown and I want to have delicious dumplings with him because it was what we had on our first date, where should we go?”
So he now works to sell AdWords properly in that environment. I am wondering how or if OP took that into account with their new spend. What are other people doing?
I’ve also heard (probably via post+comments here on HN) that the new SEO is making tons of AI slop info pages on the site, not for humans but for AI crawlers to slurp, and then refer from prompts.
It wouldn't surprise me if physical advertising, as mentioned in the post, makes a comeback. Especially coupled with magazines etc apparently making a comeback too.
Also, a lot of ads now have QR codes so you can tell which physical ads are driving versus traffic versus those that aren't.
e.g. the "half of my advertising is a waste but I don't know which half" is not true anymore if you are using specific QR codes per location/advertisement.
I assume physical still works. LIDL closed their shop in our neighborhood, so we stopped going unless their paper ads were interesting. Then they decided with a lot of fanfare to go all-in on digital, and as they decided we should want their ads we should install their app. Well, naughty us, we didn't. We simply stopped shopping there completely. A few months later, the paper ads are back (with a lot less fanfare), and no other shop followed their lead, so I assume LIDL was hurting hard.
If google is dead, I sure hope they won't sell my gmail and google drive data to the highest bidder.
Google never sells your data to anyone. Why would they sell the primary data that they themselves use to determine how to show you ads? Doing so means a deep-pocketed new advertising platform can just buy data from Google and get started with competing against Google on their primary revenue source. It’s like having a goose that lays golden eggs and selling the goose. It’s corporate suicide. I’m surprised anyone on HN even believes Google will sell your data. It takes five seconds of thinking to dispel that notion.
Google gets given significant tax breaks in many countries. Maybe it is selling it to agencies who could not obtain that info legally
Google shares your data with ad-tech companies via its real time bidding.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/google-says-it-doesnt-...
this post is title-gore. Gmail and drive aint going anywhere.
Already did.
One anecdote, but I have a brick and mortar business and Adwords leads have fallen off a cliff year over year. Since AI stuff started getting pushed harder we've gotten fewer impressions and fewer conversions. Some of it is economic headwinds but also Google is just a black box we throw money into and pray it will send us business.
Trying something different myself. Enough is enough, I have said goodbye to AdWords for good now I think
The author should try Google Local Services Ads instead of Google Ads. I think Google cannibalizes Google Ads with LSA.
Thank you I will look it up, never heard of those
psa, "is comprised of" is almost never correct. "comprises" means "is composed of". so when people say X is comprised of Y they really mean "X comprises Y" or "X is composed of Y"
Apparently you should be getting ready to buy ad campaigns from LLM companies because they are going to inject ads into the responses soon. Young people are using LLMs like crazy in my experience.
Try contacting YouTube creators in your area. Much more cost efficient than any other kinds of ads especially if you pick channels with your target audience IF you can actually get creators to promote you (most won't reply).
Google isn’t dead, but it’s no longer the single answer. Even Mark Zuckerberg recently acknowledged how fast Google is improving, which explains why Meta is pushing AI harder. Still, competing shouldn’t mean replacing what already works.
But what's the endgame? What if Google has the "best" AI offering if most of their revenue that comes from ads is gone?
They'll presumably monetize their AI (more) on both ends: getting you to pay for more access and getting advertisers to pay to be mentioned more often in the outputs. I mean that isn't really a bad position for them if you "using the Internet" degrades into you just sitting there typing queries in their Web app and never going anywhere else.
> Even Mark Zuckerberg recently acknowledged how fast Google is improving
AI. I thought he was referring to how fast Google is improving their AI.
Search though?
The mainstream leaving Google search and the general web would be a chance for both getting better again. A new equilibrium will establish itself one way or the other.
It's a chance.. But which for-profit environments are not going to do whatever is necessary to try to win that role and how will the worst of them not have the most profitable model?
Is this really about Tiktok or about AI and how people are consuming the web? Used to be all web, then web+Tiktok,etc, now only AI+Tiktok, etc? I think I go to normal websites way less than I used to. Maybe everyone is doing that?
I work in private events and the answer is definitely Facebook. Facebook ads have been better for quite some time. Targeting is a harder but also the CPCs are a lot lower so you can spray and pray a bit more.
Thanks, we tried them before but many years have passed and things have changed. Our new Instagram campaign just bore fruit in the first hour (4 WhatsApp enquiries with $1.50 spent!), will be looking at FB also
Wait I know Google search to content sites is largely dead, but I thought Google ads still worked fine.
Genuine question: how is Google not losing a tons of money yet?
Kagi
Kagi will be dead if google and alike are dead.
Buying access to web search indices is not the same as having one.
(I love them but this is the hard truth)
Kagi is building their own index. There are also other open indexes. Over time these can replace the big corporate indexes. The hard truth is that the big players in search are dead. They are now the yahoo of search, with landing pages full of ads and results that are primarily ads.
See their revenue (number of paid users is not a secret): something around $7M annually? It was half of that not so long ago (glad, that the userbase is growing).
With their current pricing they are out of their league of having any full-blown index, crawlers, people, what have you.
I would say year ago I was amazed how they are alive at all (unless I am missing something in their funding).
A little over 15 years ago you could index the web with a small cluster. I remember people doing doing it with Cassandra or Elasticsearch. I'm sure you'd need a much bigger cluster, but outside video and images I imagine it's still doable even for a small organization, especially if you're filtering out content farms. Plus, there are many organizations interested in having access to an index, and I'm pretty more than a few currently running their own index and selling to analytics firms.
Index is one thing, great search over it is another.
A competitive, general-purpose web search engine with its own full index is _brutally_ hard and expensive.
This is the reason there are only a few world-class like russian yandex, chinese baidu (to not state the obvious names like google).
Kagi depends on their being an open web to crawl. The incentive to publish on the open web is gone though.
Search engines can usually search the closed web as well.
Also, incentives are super high for businesses to create quality content for the open web to drive business. For example a car tire manufacturer could publish reliable restaurant reviews in order to encourage driving.
Please read the article before commenting. It's not about what you think it is
In case you didn't read the article, it's about Google Adsense no longer being an effective way to advertise.
How long have you lived in Durban? Nice surfing pics.
Where do you go know - maybe realize that ads make everyone around miserable and with this bitter understanding go through painful but necessary process of finding other means of earning money.
PS. Seriously.
-to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.
An instant drop in 50% means something else is off. The shift to llm's has been happening already for the last years.
Its more likely their your ranking dropped. Or a competitor got ahead of you. Google is still main source of leads for service businesses.
If you are old & previously ranked well the LLM's will also mention you similar to how Google did.
I'm glad as hell not to run a business and never plan to, but it's interesting to think as a consumer where I would try to get information like this. Guy's running a service that provides in-person entertainment for events and parties, seemingly things like clowns and magicians, maybe small-time bands or what-not.
Seemingly you don't want to target children directly. If they ask their parents for specific entertainment at a party, they're going to ask for entertainers they know, not companies acting as brokers and middlemen. They might want a particular clown (but probably not) but will never want a particular local vendor of clowns. You need to target the parents for that. If it were me doing the buying, I'd probably prioritize word of mouth recommendations if anyone had such, and otherwise for a large enough event like a wedding or graduation party, I'd look to professional planners. Assuming that's any kind of widespread pattern, you'd want to target strong relationships with planners rather than trying to advertise directly to consumers.
Did people really ever search Google to find party entertainment, and then ignore the search results and use the ads instead? Let alone Tik Tok videos? I guess I'm out of touch enough that the answer can be yes and I'm just that clueless about how small businesses work, but all the comments talking about LLM chatbot services are tripping me out. Y'all would ask ChatGPT who to hire for your kid's party?
Google Adwords just shows your ad at the top of search results. Someone searches for a clown and I'm on top - worth paying for! (when it worked)
I consider ads to be a cancer I hope it will die in every possible way.
Same. This blog post is actually good news
OK, but the poster is a party clown. How is he supposed to get business? He can't just show up to kids' birthdays when he hears them down the street.
GOOG +65% YTD. Opposite of dead.
Though, that doesn't really conflict with the story. He increased his ad spend before he figured out it wasn't working. Which would be more $$ for Google.
is super ineffective, indeed. if you need to pay 20$ to get s.o. to pay you 50$ for a service/product, well in all honesty calling people one by one and giving them 10$ is more likely to result in sale.
The article is specifically about the decline of Adwords, not the company as a whole.
Both of these things can be true:
- Google, the company, is doing pretty well in the stock market.
- Google, the advertising company, isn't generating good ROI for its advertising customers.
From Google's point of view, they've been very gunshy about having ads be their only revenue stream for years; I wouldn't be surprised that the consequence is the value there is drying up.
Let's answer the question. Hard trending data on ads says everything is normal.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-reven...
Advertising revenue being up is also consistent with the linked article, since the writer had to increase ad spend to get any results before giving up entirely.
It's also not broken out -- for instance, if people move to advertising on YouTube instead of AdWords that's still revenue for Google.
unfortunately, google is better than ever
AI Bubble
whats that?
Judging by the post this guy advertises his kids entertainment business to young people. With recent crackdowns on age verification etc. it could be his ads are no longer reaching the audience they used to.
Perhaps, click fraud?
Is there any new powerful platform/aggregator in your market?
I don't know what click fraud is but it's a very small entertainment agency market in Durban, South Africa's 3rd largest city. We only advertised locally (specified in AdWords)
Click fraud is malicious activity where someone runs bots that click on ads for specific category keywords. For example, if this is a villa rental website, someone like competitors or a large platform, might use ad agencies that perform click fraud against the villa rental website to exhaust their budget and therefore get more traffic themselves. In the case of an entertainment agency, it might be other competitors interested in your traffic.
The first step you might take is to check that you are not advertising with AdWords partner networks, as they might be the reason for the clicks on your ads.
Second, you can check your server logs and verify clicks from Google Ads, especially the geolocation of those clicks. If they are not from your region and the visitors perform no action after viewing the first page, this is most probably click fraud.
I use our own open-source security platform (I'm a co-founder) for this purpose (1), as it's server-side and works even if bots aren't running JS. However, your website analytics might also be useful if they can collect events without JS.
1. https://github.com/tirrenotechnologies/tirreno
Shockingly, I did not consider malicious intent as a possible reason. I will look into it. Never did trust the partner networks though, it's not that anyway, just used plain old search network
I tried to visit your website to get a better idea, but found `Connection timed out Error code 522` by Cloudflare.
unlikely but they should check their invalid click rate to be sure
Invalid click rate is not always a reliable metric.
I've been dealing a lot with click fraud on Google Ads, and it's usually hard to detect it without special tools.
What’s your experience?
Off the shelf click fraud software (for search) has never been ROI-positive for me when I run in A/B tests.
Fou analytics is a fun tool though for social/native etc
Click farms that we had been dealing with for our clients did not render images on webpages during visits, therefore we put tirreno on the backend of the platform, plus added a 1px image that sends the same request to tirreno to spot the difference.
Page loading + no image loading = blacklist API.
maybe the issue is that you site bigtop.co.za literally does not load
Your campaign on Google is dead.
Here's the business model in a nutshell: If you want AI to recommend your business for some purpose, you must pay to have it included in the training corpus. And you will pay fees every time those vectors get used for outputs. And if you don't pay, you don't get mentioned.
Contextual ads is the answer. You sell shoes, go and advertise on fashion related sites. I don't want to see a shoe ad while I'm browsing a gaming site just because I did some relative search a week ago. It's so fucking annoying and I never understood why Google never bothered to try some alternative too. I don't mean completely replace behavioral targeting but at the very least try some contextual one too.
the site is loading forever now. hn crashed it hehe
A few things to determine if what you're experiencing is actually Google "being dead"
1. Check your search volume. Use Google Trends or the method I will share below. 2. Check how you spent in December vs how you spent during a previously great time. Understand if it's a volume issue or a conversion issue 3. See if anyone new entered your auction. If they did, find out what they're saying
-- 1a) Search Volume
Checking search volume: In the era of broad match, this is one of the most underrated approaches to diagnosing issues. Take a look at your `search exact match impression share` relative to your impressions on a few of your top keywords. Then measure out if search volume for your business is actually decreasing. Then, use the following rubric to diagnose futher:
1. Not decreasing. Move on to the next item 2. 5-10% decrease and competitive auction. If you have a decrease AND a competitive auction, a 20% drop in efficiency could be explained. 3. 5-10% decrease and a not-so-competitive auction. If this is the case, the drop in volume may not be what's causing your issues.
-- 1b) Click volume
Check your exact match impression > click rate. Similar to the last approach, this helps diagnose if there are SERP feature changes which could decrease the amount of clicks you're receiving despite demand remaining flat.
If this is the case, take a look at the SERP and find the new winners.
-- 2) Segment comparison
Compare December YOY and see what changed. Are you serving to a different age range? Different search term mix? Increased spend to search partners? Are the headline combinations which are serving different?
-- 3) Auction changes
Have you checked your auction insights? Are new competitors being more or less aggressive? If so, what are their headlines? Are they offering an easier booking experience than you are?
And... if Google is actually dead, you might try:
1. Meta ads. Turn off audience network, make sure you've got the conversions API set up, and see what happens. Expect leads to be lower intent. Make your creative dead simple. "If you're looking for kid party entertainment in Northdene..." Start with $20/day optimizing for leads.
2. Improve your form. I see typeform-style-forms do better than the long one you have.
3. (Maybe) If you don't already track `closed (won)` conversions into your google ads account, that could help. I find when I start tracking which searches turn into deals, I can restructure my account to de-prioritize the junk leads.
4. (Maybe) Add a soft form to each of your service pages. Basically an embedded form which starts by asking people softball questions like "How Old Are The Kids At Your Party." Once people start a form they're much more likely to complete it, even if the questions are very basic.
5. (Maybe) Add a way to give a phone call. Phone call leads convert 30-50% better in my experience. But, this isn't an option for every
Thanks for the info. Will definitely be doing a post mortem after I finish scrambling for new work opportunities
Can we also talk about how dogshit YouTube Search has been the last 2 years? Some videos have turned to shorts, but they're not searchable through their search API, making the feature pretty useless.
You become a trusted source of data for AI chatbots (hopefully in somewhat ethical way for end users). Look into generative language optimization.
Now I wonder how long until AI chat tool are riddled with ads, and with shitty content because of people trying to game them just like they've been gaming search engines.
Google and Google Ads are not one and the same.
The jump from the op's "i screwed up my google ads campaigns" to "Research shows that many young people are getting their information from short video platforms like TikTok"....
i mean, c'mon
If Google Ads was cut off from Google, would they still be profitable?
Great, now my server is crashing again. I thought Cloudflare was supposed to take care of this stuff
are you caching the HTML response or just the assets?
I can't remember I think it's just the assets though - seems to be surviving so far. How do you get it to cache everything, is that a paid thing?
Page rules should do it
Another explanation is that when the cost of living is high, people reduce their spending on entertainment. If that's the case, no amount of advertising will materially shift your bottom line.
my vote is for ATProto
let's take back the interwebs and have a single account where all apps store their data about you, which you can move around and also swap out clients for any data without companies blocking you
Look, the 90's Internet isn't cool anymore. Sorry. Things are cool for a while and then they're not.
Franchises die. It's still cool to say "The originals were really cool", and always will be, but now we're talking about now. Star Wars is uncool. There are people who sort of automatically praise it and subtly put down those who don't like they're aligned with a magnetic field, sure, but they're in their own world. Indiana Jones and Ghostbusters are uncool now. Star Trek is almost there. AI is not cool and never will be. Tiktok is cool, but soon everything that is uncool will descend upon it.
Sorry. Bananas blacken and apples get spots. Time moves on.
Downvoting isn't cool. Reply instead.
You're joking, but they're really trying hard to make cool things uncool.
I think it's not directly in their interest to make anything uncool. They're there to suck away some of it for themselves, that's all.
I don't know why people are so aggressively downvoting this. It's the honest truth.
I grew up before Google, I remember when it was just a useful search tool. Then an industry grew up around exploiting it in various ways and ads became a major revenue source for Google, completely changing the platform. I witnessed this entire online marketing/ad industry come into existence.
I have friends who worked in SEO for years. Very talented, smart people. But that industry is gone now. Likewise Google ads is clearly not long for this world as Google will probably get a lot more money leveraging their AI for product recommendations/sales etc.
People used creative thinking to create this industry, so the answer to "where do we go now?" is find the next one. It won't just be the same thing repeated, just like SEO and ad optimization where fairly major departures from the previous world of advertising and marketing they came from.
>I don't know why people are so aggressively downvoting this. It's the honest truth.
There you go.
Did you read the page? The context is very clear: a small business that had for years gotten a lot of its leads/customers from Adwords is seeing that Adwords ("Google" in context) is not working. They are then asking (other small businesses in the same situation, "where do we go now?").
There nothing about nostalgia, no real concern for Google as a company, or how the web used to work, etc. Just a small business trying to stay afloat.
Yes, Google is no longer producing good results for them. That is what I'm addressing.
"Cool" is precisely the problem. Cool is completely irrelevant to whether something is useful or valuable.
God no! Useful and valuable is incredibly cool! How could you write this?
It seems you didn't read the article, which doesn't tell anything about google being cool or uncool.
The title is "Google is dead".
To be fair, I find the title to be misleading.
That is fair. It's dead to me though.
Haha no wonder, check out the website its dodgy as f. https://bigtop.co.za/
This is actually the most legit thing I can think of that could be behind an ad. It looks like an actual small business that is using ads as a replacement for the yellow pages, presumably when people are searching for party entertainment. I had assumed that basically all online ads were just straight up scams.
That said, I don’t ever want to see ads for it either. If I lived in Durban and wanted a juggling act, I’d like to be able to find it, as I’m sure all their clients would. I wonder if the market is just very competitive, or if they don’t show up on regulular searches for some reason.
Funny how a simpler and self-made website is seen as "dodgy af" but geocity 90s mash of stuff is "nostalgic".
It's not the neatest but it feels real, like these guys are into entertainment for parties, not web design.
I’m not handing over money to 90s geocities.
Not enough layers of SPA and Tailwind for your taste?
Serious question: why do you find it dodgy?
Well, it's harshly put... bu not entirely untrue. The website would probably need to be refreshed.
I agree, that site looks like the owners lack basic self-awareness. Surely they must use the modern internet and recognize the difference?
And if they’re unable to invest in their site or they’re simply shut out of the modern world, I’d assume the same applies to other aspects of their business as well.