I was most impressed by a Google Ad that showed up if you searched for the Dutch tax office. It would only show the name "Tax office" with a free to call phone number under it. Only the hyperlink pointed at a paid number 90 cent per minute.

Depending on how busy it is or how exotic your question one can easily be on hold for an hour or two. Then you get the bill and pay 54 euro per hour.

Google thought this was a great way to make money. The ad ran forever.

Makes you wonder which other phone numbers they highjacked.

Would they provide the same service if I copy some website?

[dead]

I worked at Google on Adtech. I can tell you everybody knew it was an unfair game and illegal.

Lots of unrecorded meetings and “no notes taken” sessions

> On what planet is a loss of 70% of the resources to the matching process between buyers and sellers "incredibly efficient"?

One where the market maker is taking up the cost of providing a market. E.g. Steam takes a 30% cut for providing the infrastructure required to distribute games. Some people/companies can do it for less but it is the best option for a majority of sellers.

If the market maker did not the seller would get more revenue but would also eat the cost directly instead of paying someone else to do it.

It is 'incredibly efficient' because it is incredibly good at predicting clicks, conversions, or even conversion values. Which in turn makes it efficient. Sure, there is something called "auction" there, but Sothesby's or Tattersalls generally don't have buyers bidding based on what some machine-learning prediction AI computed in a jiffy (or maybe they do these days, who knows).

There are three parties. Media Buyers, publishers and users. As a publisher, you can go with “dumb” platforms that don’t deliver quality users to media buyers because of relevancy, you’ll make less money m. Apple ad platform is 40/60 split but for media buyers, it’s not efficient so we spend less money on it. Assume publishers make less money with it as well.

We seen dumb platforms with linear tv. Go watch any TV with an antenna.

I am on the purchasing side. Google is very efficient when delivering traffic especially their Max Performance product. Probably the cheapest of all platforms. So they are serving relevant ads to users who engage with the ads. This is win for me and I assume also a win for publishers who get revenue due to higher engagement.

Also users should benefit because they are getting relevant ads. Linear tv is notorious for non relevant ads like all the drug ads for conditions you don’t have. If you’re forced to see ads, wouldn’t you want ads that are relevant?

>Thankfully HN is finally at a stage people can come out and talk about Ad tech without being harassed or attacked.

Is this comment some sort of performance art? When was the last time any post about ads wasn't filled with people posting about how advertising is evil, all advertising should be banned, ads on the internet are "stealing personal information" and other things like that?

There may have been a point where the way ads are delivered on the internet was positively received on HN but it has not been for at least a decade.

> Perhaps Google does well for their publishers but do they do well for advertisers? Inherently it seems like it's impossible to do both because what's good for one group is bad for another.

There's certainly some tension between advertisers and publishers, in that advertiser would like to pay less and publishers would like to be paid more; but there's a lot of things an ad exchange can do that are good for both. Selecting ads to display that result in meaningful downstream conversion is good for both advertisers and publishers, because they'll both get paid and maybe something about the user getting something they want too.

Showing inappropriate and ineffective ads isn't great for the advertiser, and it might make the publisher money in the near term, but it can drive users away and tends not to be sustainable --- advertisers stop advertising in venues where they don't get results.

The value of a good ad exchange for the publisher and the advertiser is when it provides reasonable matching at a lower cost than the parties arranging advertising directly. Possibly some amount of assurances for both sides too --- the exchange should ensure the advertising code and destinations aren't going to compromise the publisher or their user and should ensure that the ads paid for are actually seen (to the degree possible). There's room for the exchange to profit from scale while still being lower cost than self-managed advertising.

It’s a two-sided market and it doesn’t have to be either/or. Google has a wide range of advertisers so it can find one that converts on your site and it has a wide range of sites so it can find ones that work for a given advertisers. Also Google has a large database and user inventory for personalization so it can find ads that convert on your site even if your site wouldn’t attract ads otherwise. the personalization economy has all sorts of ads and might be brand destroying in the case of retargeting but you see that crap everywhere whereas many Google alternatives run brand-destroying ads and pay you $0.00 after rounding.

> Inherently it seems like it's impossible to do both

but that is the value of a marketplace, aligning buyers and sellers via the price mechanism

I have tried to sell ads and never been able to fill all my inventory and often the rates are poor and the ads brand destroying. If you are The New York Times it is different but a site that makes $1000 /mo in ads can’t afford an ads salesperson and in the big scheme of things that is royalty.

Because the banner ad generates less revenue than $5,000 worth of advertising spent on something else.

Geotargeting of ads is essential for local businesses. Banning it would make advertising only practical for national brands. It would be bad for the world if only national brands could advertise.

None of that seems at all user-hostile to me, it's literally all aimed at making sure what the user is shown is more likely to actually be useful to them.

I guess this is a big and probably unbridgeable divide, some people think this sort of thing is obviously evil and others, like me, actually prefer it very strongly over a world where all advertising is untargeted but there is massively more of it because it's so much less valuable...

demand-side platform, i assume