Someone who has spent $100M+ on Google Ads explained to me that Google is doing everything possible to juice their revenue right now, in ways they've never seen before.

Seems like two things 1) Google is losing at AI and Sundar wants to mask this 2) AI is going to destroy their ad business and they want to get while the getting is good.

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conception 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think the 3.8 Flash release shows they are doing just fine at AI. Unlike OpenAI and Anthropomorphic, Google doesn’t have to release new models to capture VC sentiment every three months. They have the hardware, data and money. And when they release a model it’s very good.

Now their product strategy however…

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jjallen 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They can be doing fine at AI models but not so well with AI revenue.

Although I am curious if they are not worried and playing the long game confident that their distribution will eventually help them catch up (and worst case they own some of Anthropic). But obviously Anthropic and OpenAI have their own distribution now too.

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dspillett 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> but not so well with AI revenue

Nobody is doing well enough with AI revenue ATM (https://isaiprofitable.com/). At the moment it is probably more about market share of users, that is where the investment capital will need to be clawed back from when it starts to be called back (or replacement money will need to come from if the investment cycle simply stops giving generously).

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jjallen 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I do wonder if the more they goose their ad business the faster it eventually falls. I know I am more and more reluctant to view many normal Web page ads at all and usually immediately click away the second a site gets annoying

	▲	ungreased0675 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I block ads because I don’t want my family exposed to scams, clickbait, and offensive content. If ads weren’t so annoying, I wouldn’t put too much effort into blocking them.

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soundworlds an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A large chunk of the population don't use Google to search anymore. They go straight for the GenAIs. That's got to be scaring a lot of managerial folks at Google.

	▲	charmd 40 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Slide 65 of this (very nice) set of slides [1] broke down search vs genAI use to get information. "Mostly genAI was not breaking 25% in all age brackets... Curious to see how that will evolve [1] https://readwise-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/media/wisereads/art...

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alfalfasprout 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

very HN take. Reality is 3.8 flash is good at what it does (being fast + cheap)... but that market is becoming very saturated and google is not competing at all at the frontier where major spend lies.

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Citizen_Lame 2 hours ago | parent [-]

So just ignore the reality, that Gemini (and yes even 3.8 Flash) is worst of all major LLMs across most metrics? But that's fine, because reasons?

	▲	econ an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Today search results are a page full of ads. They can't get away with that unless they completely corner down the LLM market. I forget the name but I see one LLM chatbox that looked like one of those old world news media websites plastered from top to bottom with jumpy obnoxious ads. It did offer some good models for free. I honestly might even consider using it if I could remember what it was called. If they turned Gemini into that today I think people would just laugh, shake their head and close the app.

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reddalo an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>Google is doing everything possible to juice their revenue right now, in ways they've never seen before

My experience confirms this: many years ago I had a website banned from serving Google Ads. They said my pages didn't have enough content.

Then a competitor started showing ads on the exact same type of pages where I had previously been able to serve them. So I tried getting my website approved again and -- surprise -- now I can serve ads again.

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bbor 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't think it's related to AI, at least not originally. To me this is about the slow death of display advertising. The arms race of ad blockers and ad blocker blockers and such has created a world where people hate display ads, especially because they require so much creepy data to even work in the first place.

AI probably would help their display ad business overall -- they finally just launched a "have Gemini create your ad!" feature, and I imagine having to hire a designer was a common blocker for SMBs.

	▲	shevy-java 44 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> To me this is about the slow death of display advertising. That's good. I hate ads. I will fight them down until they are gone. But I don't think this is the case here. Ads are still pushed down onto the people willy-nilly style.

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somewhereoutth an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

everyone (on all sides!) is losing at AI and we'll see increasingly frantic attempts from all players to paper over the cracks as this extreme resource misallocation bites.

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ihsw 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]