Posted by iamflimflam1 12 hours ago
I mean apple music/tv/icloud are always pinging me with "free 3 month subscriptions".
MS is no better with the "lets finish setting up your pc with one drive..." to which the options are [yes/ remind me again later]
I've moved mostly to linux and its refresing.
-A
Google has no interest in policing that because money and won't until they are forced to and since they are a transnational that's difficult since it requires multiple countries to do it with the added wrinkle that if you even hint at the possibility that just maybe you might consider doing something about US big tech you get immediate screaming from across the Atlantic.
And I suspect (would love some real data from scammy advertisers) that this is a bigger factor than most folks appreciate.
If you're a regular business that sells clothes or food or SaaS or insurance or whatever, online ads are a) not your whole customer acquisition system (you have regular marketing, word of mouth, maybe sales people, maybe brick-and-mortar brand presence, physical advertising, etc.) and b) not part of your expense sheet that you want to spend tons of time on.
The "b)" there leads companies to either overspend on stupid (but unlikely to be flagged) ads, or to try to keep their ad spend as low as possible for the highest reward, because they think of it like opex. After all, they have all the normal expenses of a normal business to worry about in addition to ad spend. Sure, there are outliers here who spend almost all their non-product money on online ads, but not most ordinary companies from Verizon to Dave's Local Auto Insurance to Safeway.
So "good"/ordinary advertisers aren't generating super high flag rates, but they're probably either a) spending lots of money without churn/support-needs risk or b) aren't spending that much ... compared to scam-ads-only businesses. Sure, google would prefer more upstanding customers in category "a)", but they're a near-monopoly and some of that growth is expensive to chase, while the scammers are beating a path to their door.
If you're a scam-ad business that produces malware or LLM-written gacha games or whatever, your product expenses are minimal and, if your business is lucrative, you can spend very large amounts of your balance sheet on ads for scam delivery channels. Tiny businesses in this area are likely to have whale-sized ad spends and a strong likelihood of growth (vertical as they get bigger/greedier, or horizontal as they keep spinning up new businesses to keep ahead of the law and bad press). I bet they punch above their weight ad-spend-wise, in other words.
You thought the unit economics of a SaaS business were good? Well, wait until you see the unit economics of a Play Store whitelabeled gacha game app with a credential stealer inside!
As much as I personally disliked Susan Wojcicki, she kinda sort kept Youtube shenanigans in check. Yes, there were baity, inappropriate ads, but after she left it has gotten out of control.
Google signaled with "Lake America" they are playing along, and I don't think any real consquences will come of it as long as they keep pulling in billions and the QoQ keeps going.
The publishers (websites or apps owners) that provide free content to users need a way to support the free content, and typically it's either donation (like wikimedia) or ads. To most publishers, ads revenue is far more predictable. By right most publishers also would like the ads to be reliable and relevant to the users consuming their content, but that's usually a secondary concern, compared to the revenue.
The users viewing the content are often annoyed by the ads, but as long as the ads are not too intrusive, they usually tolerate the ads. If the users occasionally find ads are actually useful, that's great, but most of the time in my experience, when I click into an ad it's usually a mis-click, not because I'm genuinely interested in this ad.
The advertisers need a way to reach more potential customers. Most advertisers are honest players in the game with real products or services to offer to users, trying to find ways to maximize the impression, click-through and conversion rate by optimizing their creatives, targeting, and bidding strategies etc. But there are always scammers that try to cheat the game, showing dodgy ads to rip off users whenever possible.
Google as an ad-tech platform sits between these 3 parties, trying to show the most relevant ad from advertisers in a publisher's ad-slot to the user. But the system has evolved into a complex maze over the years that likely nobody knows the full picture any more. New legal requirements and regulatory policies and industry landscape shifts keep pushing the system to extremes. There are teams to fight ad spams, but there are also business goals to make more money to fund the AI initiatives. The scammers keep finding new loopholes in the system, and the teams fighting the scammers are often steps behind, due to limited resource and budget. End result is many dodgy ads keep slipping through the policy filters.
In an ideal world, ad-tech platforms should optimize for satisfying all 3 parties at the same time: publishers, advertisers, and end users, in addition to making money for themselves. But that's probably hard to achieve, given the dynamic nature of the world. AI can help fight scams, but AI can also help finding loopholes in the scam-fighting system. It's a sad state of the world.
Yeah, but
> trying to find ways to maximize the impression, click-through and conversion rate by optimizing their creatives, targeting, and bidding strategies etc
Rapidly turns them malicious and anti-human, preying on psychological bugs.
> End result is many dodgy ads keep slipping through the policy filters.
Therefore their platform / process is not fit for purpose, no advertising platform has effectively solved scaling.
I have to believe Tim Cook never actually tried to use it. I don’t know how any executive using that app could allow it out the door… not at a company that claims to pride themselves on providing a good user experience.