this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023

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Google quietly raised ad prices to boost search revenue, says executive (www.theverge.com)

submitted 1 year ago by Voyager@psychedelia.ink to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] drekly@lemmy.world 47 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

To the people who work with it, it hasn't been quiet at all. I work with Google ads every day and it's fucking disgusting the way they're rigging the system against advertisers.

They constantly recommend changes that ensure you spend more money on bad traffic.

They constantly push their "automation" which is essentially just giving Google money and trusting them to spend it where they think is best.

They make your traffic broader and target less relevant people, to get you to spend money on useless clicks.

They made it harder to opt.out of mobile app advertising because that's the most likely traffic to gain money from accidental clicks.

They stopped us seeing exactly where our money was spent.

They constantly contact people with "advisors" who are actually salespeople from the Philippines tasked with getting you to waste more money by enabling money wasting settings.

It's just been getting worse and worse in the last decade, with worse traffic and costing more.

Hey, in fact, here's a screenshot of an "advisor" contacting me today

This is meant to be an official contact from Google but it reads like a scam. This guy isn't trying to help me, he's trying to get me to spend more and enable money-wasting settings in the account.

Also I manage many accounts and he hasn't even mentioned which one he's emailing about!

Oh also, they always want a call so they can be more convincing and pushy, and so their suggestions aren't in writing. If I ask for an email with all their recommendations they usually leave me alone. (Until the next advisor 3 months later)

[–] YurkshireLad@lemmy.ca 46 points 1 year ago (2 children)

When $98B revenue isn’t enough….

[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 48 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's late-stage capitalism for you. Making a profit isn't enough. It has to be more profit than last year or your business is floundering.

[–] Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Because if you’re not, you’re making less simply due to inflation.

You would need to make $108 Billion in profit this year to have the same relative profit as $98 Billion last year.

[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"Relative profit." Who gives a fuck? $1 more than costs is a profit. Be satisfied with that rather than unsustainable never-ending growth.

[–] Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Accounting for inflation isn’t growth is the point.

If you’re not making more, you’re making less simply due to that.

It’s real easy to say “just be satisfied with it” when you’re talking about a private company, but for a publicly traded company you’re fucking over millions of people with retirement accounts if you’re not keeping up with inflation.

[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Are you claiming that if Google only made $50 billion this year it would go under? That it wouldn't be able to pay its employees? What exactly happens if they make less profit than they did last year?

[–] ripcord@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Gamblers lose money due to emotions.

[–] Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What happens if they make less profit? Their stock goes down which affects millions of 401ks that are invested in the market.

[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sounds like maybe we should go back to pensions, which don't rely on the investor class.

[–] Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How do you think pensions were set up?

The company holding the pension just invested in the market themselves instead of you getting to choose what to invest in yourself, and you lost all of that investment if you left the company before 20 years. There were more strict requirements for what they could invest in, and they had to be much lower risk than what an individual is allowed to invest their own money into. You still had issues with if the stock market tanked, pension funds would be affected.

Talk about people being tied to an employer over health insurance being terrible, you would lose your entire retirement if you left a company.

If you want to talk about a nationwide public pension system, that’s basically what social security is. And guess what, it’s invested in the market too. It’s one of the single largest holders of US bonds. Same with every other government pension system.

[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The bond market is not the stock market. You're being disingenuous now.

[–] Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It’s not as volatile, as the stock market, but bonds are still traded the same way and are still risky in certain cases.

Just as an example, Silicon Valley bank failed because they were invested heavily into bonds because they’re “safe” and when the Fed changed rates, they couldn’t liquidate their bonds quick enough to pay out their obligations because nobody wanted to buy the lower interest bonds they held when newer bonds were higher interest.

You can end up in cases where a pension fund can’t liquidate their bonds to make regular payouts during times like now when the Fed is increasing rates to combat inflation.

All investments are risky. With a pension, you’re trusting a company you work for to manage that risk for you in exchange for it being all or nothing based on if you stay there long enough.

With a 401k, you can manage your own risk level yourself. If you want to put it all into bonds, you can do that.

[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago

Please explain how GM not making as much profit this year because they are paying their workers more affects the bond market. Because you seem to have forgotten that's what we're talking about.

[–] ripcord@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago

$98B in one quarter!

[–] ech@lemm.ee 21 points 1 year ago (2 children)

...are people actually in here defending advertisers? Wtf?

Fuck 'em. If it's so overly expensive, then stop. Leave us the fuck alone and stop stealing our personal information.

I'm not cheering for Google here, but I'm sure as hell not going to advocate for advertisers.

[–] Unforeseen@sh.itjust.works 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The cognitive dissonance with advertisers is crazy. They don't see it as perpetuating late stage capitalism and wasteful consumerism. They turn a blind eye to the fact that the reason people are so anxious and depressed is because of the constant badgering that you should want more and more objects in your life instead of just leaving us all the fuck alone.

Fuck advertisers.

[–] GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 year ago

This is an Alien-vs-Predator situation.

[–] drekly@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I'm the one with the big comment above, the middleman between Google and the advertisers.

I definitely defend the advertisers. I work with small local businesses who just want to sell their products. I have a guy who just wants to sell quality handles with his daughter. A lady who wants to sell her luxury decorations, and a family who produce extremely secure residential doors.

I'm really happy working with all of them, they're all lovely genuine people with a good product that will absolutely sell to the right person at the right time.

But how do they get to the right person at the right time? How do they fight the giant corporations for your attention so you don't just order from Amazon or TEMU or AliExpress? They advertise.

And what's the best, most cost effective way to advertise right now? Digitally.

Of course they can't compete with the huge marketing budgets of those corporations, but at least they get a small price of the pie, and I help them maximise that effect so they're not showing useless ads to people who never wanted to see their product, and they're not wasting money they could be using to compete with the big guys.

Unfortunately if you block tracking, you're left with the cesspool of untargeted ads that aren't relevant to you, and unfortunately sometimes the ads you see are just related to criteria like "you are over 20 and using a phone" which is useless to everyone and usually the result of companies with more money than sense.

As usual I feel the people to be angry at here are the rich corporations, not every advertiser, of which many are innocent small businesses trying to stay relevant and competitive.

[–] BooksAndLetters@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’ll take the most irrelevant ads in the world, please. I don’t want to be manipulated.

[–] drekly@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

The worst quality, most ugly, annoying ones that constantly talk about things you don't want or care about 👍

I'd personally like ads to actually be related to things I care about if there are any at all.

[–] ech@lemm.ee 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I in zero way care. Waste your time and money. You don't deserve access to personal information in any fucking way, and trying to pretend it's for the benefit of "small businesses" or, even more laughably, the people you're forcing your ads in front off, is disgusting. Not that you actually care what anyone else thinks. As long as you get your money, you're happy.

[–] rastilin@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Harsh but true. I also need to sell stuff to people, and I hate ads, I realize that other people hate ads too and that in fact ads generally suck. The solution is word of mouth advertising, not ever-more-intricate tools. The real truth is that what the ad companies are selling is the idea that ads are actually cost efficient and worthwhile, and the gullible customers are actually the advertisers, not the people who they're trying to flog stuff to.

[–] drekly@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago

Unfortunately, bad ads suck. Many advertisers with a lot of money don't care, they just target everyone, so you see ads about things you have no interest in. Or a site uses an ad platform that doesn't allow such accurate targeting (but they pay the website more for showing them) and you get horrible spammy ads.

As fucking annoying as Google ads can be, they're still better than the competition because they actually have strict rules and regulations about what you're allowed to show.

For most of my customers, they make at least double their money back on ads, because we make sure it's super narrow focus and only people who are already interested should be seeing the ads.

This highly depends on the site of course, if their site looks untrustworthy or bad in some way, nobody will buy their product or service, so we're super clear about that up front. This also ensures we're always working with legitimate businesses too.

[–] drekly@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I don't think you understand how it even works. What personal information do you think I get?

I just tick a box that says "I think people who like dogs will be interested in this product" and then, if you search "buy high quality dog bed" my clients business appears, because they sell high quality dog beds.

I see nothing about you personally, and there's too much traffic on the internet to even care about being that granular even if I could.

I'm not pretending anything 🤣 I literally only work with small businesses

[–] ech@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"I'm not stomping all over your rights. I just use it for profit!" Seriously? Get out of here with your self-serving bs. You're as culpable as the rest of 'em, regardless of what you tell others or yourself to justify it.

[–] drekly@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Stomping on your rights lol. Again, I'm not sure you actually know how any of it works, just looking for the next thing to be outraged about.

[–] ech@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Fuck aallllllll the way off with that. This has been a long standing problem and it's only getting worse, no thanks to attempts like yours to belittle and delegitimize anyone that criticizes it. But whatever it takes to make another buck, right?

[–] Siegfried@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can we stop using the word quietly for just one day, please?

[–] ClockworkOtter@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

I can say it softly if you prefer

[–] Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

We are officially in the "capitalism is on decline and corporations are passing their ~~losses~~ slower growth on to yooouuu" stage.

[–] Bulletdust@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

Hell, as a small business owner providing third party IT technical support/repair services, I'd simply like to be able to advertise my actual technical support services in any form whatsoever on Google's bullshit platform.

But for some vague and obscure reason, third party technical support and repair services are banned from advertising under Google Ads - Something that most definitely was not always the case.

At minimum they could provide a realistic and fair certification system for businesses that are obviously legitimate, assuming that providing 'the best experience for the consumer' really is Google's main focus - They seem to be able to provide such a system for questionable online dating services boardering on human trafficking not a problem in the world.

But the shameless unspoken reality is that Google are only interested in maximizing the marketing presence of their own certified partners for the service and repair of Google's own range of products, while burrying the little guy.

You can't even configure the word 'apple' as a keyword search term in your advertising - The customer can't see the keyword, it's just a search term - But you can't use the name of a piece of fruit in your advertising.

Fuck Google.

[–] autotldr@lemmings.world 5 points 1 year ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Bloomberg’s Leah Nylen has the details of Dischler’s testimony, where he describes statements he made under oath in 2020.

Raising ad prices was apparently one way for Google to increase search revenue during dry spells — one of which apparently occurred in the spring of 2019, according to an email chain involving Dischler and fellow Google executive Anil Sabharwal.

The email also describes other options for boosting revenue that include making Search more prominent for Chrome users.

Another trial exhibit indicates that Google made $98 billion from search ads for its owned-and-operated services in 2019 (apparently not including revenue from YouTube, according to Big Tech on Trial newsletter reporter Yosef Weitzman), and Dischler said that the number topped $100 billion in 2020.

Dischler said in court that 10 percent was around the upper limit of price increases and that raising prices by 15 percent would be “a dangerous thing to do” — although, as Nylen notes, Dischler acknowledged that overall revenue might still rise even if the high rates drove some advertisers to competitors like Meta or TikTok.

Dischler is resuming testimony today in the trial, which is expected to stretch into November, with a verdict not anticipated until next year.

The original article contains 410 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 51%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] ComradeBunnie@aussie.zone 3 points 1 year ago

I've been marking these advisor emails as spam in our ticketing software for ages, they set off all my alarm bells and raise all the red flags!