Comment by ryan-allen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryan-allen | Hacker News Reader

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I tend to agree with this. I rarely, if ever, click on ads because they seem interesting. I mostly see an ad and say "oh that is interesting, I was searching for cars before and now I'm being advertised cars on a music site, how completely useless".

The truth is I think Google's adsense business has never had any real true value to customers (except for perhaps their 'first page at the top' paid ads, I use them a lot, mostly because I figure companies willing to pay for ads usually are a likely 'proper solid business').

Most of the adsense these days is 'trick next buttons', where people put them at the bottom of a page that appears to be the 'next page' button, and it's not.

I spend absolute craptonnes of money of stuff I don't need. Internet advertisements I am exposed to contribute almost zero impact to my purchasing habits.

Except for Belroy wallets. I have no idea how they figured to target me ('hipster' programmer?), but I did end up buying a wallet from them when their ads followed me around for a while. And their products are nice :) But that is it!

I couldn't care less if they are giving backdoors to the NSA to all my email including all company crap that is confidential and all. If they put ads into my email I will look elsewhere unless there is a paid option.

>The truth is I think Google's adsense business has never had any real true value to customers.

I doubt that adsense has positive overall value to advertisers either. Weigh the amount you spend on the ads against the amount of profit you get from the revenue resulting from that advertising. Some people will be able to make it work but I really don't think it's a large percentage.

According to Wikipedia Google made $42 billion in adwords revenue in 2012. That's like $6 from each person on the planet.

Do adwords really have enough power to increase operating profit by that much?

> Weigh the amount you spend on the ads against the amount of profit you get from the revenue resulting from that advertising.

I'm kind of assuming that every company doing advertising is continually making that calculation, and deciding that it does come out in their favour. Otherwise we wouldn't see nearly so much advertising.

I tend to assume the reason why we see so much advertising is because they _don't_ make that calculation.

That would be true for the old media. OTOH, online advertising is extremely data-oriented, especially in the US. Most business decisions are based on data. Businesses may be using wrong models or assumptions about the correlation or causation between advertising and revenue, but there is a very strong effort to analyze data for revenue growth.

When I was in high school, I worked for a farmer whose primary product was hay, as he was getting old for dairy. He was able to correlate the value of $1 investment in advertising (mostly weekly newspapers and ads at horse facilities) to sales. He used a pencil, penknife (for sharpening) and a bound marble notebook from the drugstore to do this.

At the end of the day, there may be businesses blowing useless dollars on advertising, but businesses that don't watch their dollars don't tend to last very long.

disclaimer: i worked at Google

Actually, Google display network, that is the other side of Adsense brings immense value to advertisers. I don't know exact statistics, however I estimate that the number of advertisers using display network for the immdediate or nearly-immediate conversion is in double digits.

For most of them it is mathematically proven through conversion attribution and simple calculations that advertising on display network is profitable for their business.

As a fellow "hipster programmer", I was also enticed by the Bellroy wallet ads...

They showed up when I was in the market for a wallet and were exactly what I needed. Love mine, but seeing your post was kind of eerie.

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