Hacker News Reader

Comment by novagameco | Hacker News Reader

A lot of the advertising industry (Twitch is an ad publisher which uses tech, not a tech company) is moving away from high-volume low-intent advertising to low-volume high-intent. It's becoming harder to squeeze pennies out of banner and video ads on platforms like twitch, facebook, youtube, and google ads. Some retailers like Amazon and Walmart make a significant chunk (if not the majority) of their revenue from retail advertising (basically: promoted search results)

View on HN

>Some retailers like Amazon and Walmart make a significant chunk (if not the majority) of their revenue from retail advertising

That explains why amazon search results keep getting worse. I just thought they were having a problem with people gaming the system.

That's a pretty anti-consumer use of their large market share and lack of competition in my opinion.

All ecommerce sites do this if they can; it's just difficult for the smaller sites to normalize product information and share user browsing data across DSPs. Grocery stores have been doing it for decades: when you see a display on the endcap at the end of an aisle, that's a product which has paid Target or Kroger for the prime real estate.

The company I work for is working on a retail media system so that smaller ecommerce sites can get paid to promote results by advertisers in the same way that they can get paid to show banner ads: the advertiser knows nothing about the retailer and vice-versa. The advertiser offers their products on our DSP and the ecommerce site makes their inventory available to us on our SSP and we connect the two

So in other words you are contributing to the enshittification of e-commerce, giving the smaller sites the same hostile customer experience as Amazon. I don't blame you, might as well make some money off the trend while you can. But I doubt that this will end well for the sites themselves. If they can't deliver a better experience than Amazon then customers will just stick with Amazon.

The way I see it (and the way I see all OpenRTB advertising) is that we are helping to give a competitive edge to smaller, more independent sites so that they can survive against huge corporations like Amazon. Without higher yield advertising, independent publishers and new organizations can't survive and ecommerce sites can't compete. Unless people start paying for subscriptions to certain services or choosing to utilize smaller businesses at a higher cost and slower delivery times (which they will do neither of willingly), the open advertising system is the financial engine which keeps the internet from consolidating into a walled garden of just a handful of sites.

> Twitch is an ad publisher which uses tech, not a tech company

That's highly disputable. In the first place do they offer a service for communities, making it a social platform. Then do they seem to work intensively with AWS and for AWS, making them indeed a tech-company too. I mean, AWS seems to resell Twitch-Technology since some years. And finally did they had no significant ad-volume for many years, and in most countries did they not even serve any actual ads, outside of Amazon Prime Video-Ads.

Yes, they do work on transforming into an ad-company since 2, 3 years. But they are still on a pretty low level. Viewers are already complaining hard just because of 1,2 minutes of ads per hour. Getting to the level where they find their sweet-spot and making them a primary ad-company will still take some time, I think.

> is moving away from high-volume low-intent advertising to low-volume high-intent.

Yet, this seems to be where twitch is aiming for, because nothing else actually works with the type of content their customers serve. I mean, they only added banners last year or so.

> the first place do they offer a service for communities, making it a social platform.

All social platforms are advertising publishers. Facebook is an advertising company (though they refuse to say so; calling themself a publisher is a legal liability for them), they make almost all of their revenue from selling ads. YouTube is an advertising company as well.

Working with technology (and even developing your own technology) doesn't make you a technology company. insurance companies employ software engineers, but they're still insurance companies.

Even if twitch fails to make any money at advertising, they're still an Advertising company.

> All social platforms are advertising publishers.

Yes, because originally, they had no other way to monetize, unlike Twitch. But Twitch has subs and donations for a long time now, and ads are just another stream of income for them. And the other platforms are now trying to add subs and donations to their income too, while Twitch is coming from the other side, and tries to expand their income through ads.

> Even if twitch fails to make any money at advertising, they're still an Advertising company.

Going by that logic, are they also a Tech-Company.

Your definition of "tech company" is so restrictive that it's effectively meaningless.

Tech companies sell tech. Advertising companies sell attention. Most big tech companies are just high tech advertising companies. They don't like to say this because it doesn't carry nearly as much prestige to admit that the culmination of their life's work is to get people to buy more crap rather than making the world better in any measurable way. I say this as someone who works for an advertising company

I take issue with pretty much every single one of your statements here.

> culmination of their life's work is to get people to buy more crap rather than making the world better in any measurable way

Advertising makes the world better in a lot of ways. It allows companies to provide services without actively charging for them which is a much preferred way of monetization of the vast majority of users (just look at the popularity of Netflix's recent ad supported plan). It allows companies and users to connect on new products which often results in a purchase that both the consumer and company benefit from. The result are higher living standards.

Google Search is funded primarily through ads. If you truly believe that Google Search hasn't made the world better in any measurable way I truly don't know what to tell you.

Then you'll probably disagree with me when I say that I think the world wide web in general has had a net zero impact on the world. I believe it's had as many positives as negatives. Perhaps if we could've frozen it circa 2005 it would be an overall positive but I'm not convinced it's as good as we all believe it is

A company doesn't incur any legal liability by calling themselves a publisher.

They worry that if they consider themselves to be publishers of content, they will become liable for the substance of that content (e.g: calls to violence on their platforms). Thus, they go out of their way to specifically deny that they are a publisher.

> The oft-cited Section 230(c)(1) states, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”3 In practice, this means online services are not liable for defamatory or otherwise unlawful content their users post. Section 230(c)(2) elaborates, stating that online services are not liable for “any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of [objectionable content.]”4 This second provision protects online services from liability for engaging in content moderation and enforcing their community standards.

https://itif.org/publications/2021/02/22/overview-section-23...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/02/facebook-...

It seems to me that amazon (and many others) do not comprehend that twitch streams are primarily advertisements. People voluntarily pay cash to watch voluntarily created advertisements in the form of someone playing a video game (the product that is being advertised).

Trying to inject shorter advertisements by pausing the longer advertisements makes no sense at all -- it reminds me of the "Malkovich Malkovich" scene from the movie Being John Malkovich. It makes unhappy customers (viewers and streamers) as well as distracts from the primary business.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com