Comment by tyingq
7 months ago
What's sort of interesting about that catalyst of “steady weakness in the daily numbers” is that it didn't equate to a plateau, decline, etc...
It was that the ad dollars weren't, for the umpteenth time, exceeding YoY growth that far exceeded the growth in eyeballs watching/seeing ads. They were just somewhat exceeding the already meteoric growth of the web in general.
Google had unrealistic expectations in sustaining that growth rate because they started off with no ads, then very unintrusive ads, then somewhat instrusive, and so on. And, at the same time, leaps in A/B testing, targeting, bidding, and so on.
Until there was no more space on the visible page for ads, and little more to optimize for bids, views, targeting, etc. Then the growth fell back from crazy high to just amazingly high, and everyone lost their minds. Like it was a surprise.
> unrealistic expectations
From my (admittedly limited!) experience, unrealistic expectations are often set only when you want to push a senior off the team, and then as the new exec comes in, they'll "re-evaluate" the trajectory such that goals are much more realistic for their teams.
Ugh. I have a feeling I know what happened.
People ran experiments where they showed big, ugly, profitable ads, and they convinced themselves that the metrics meant it was a positive experience for users.
p-Hacking, again and again.
I have a ton of sympathy for everyone involved in this. It's incredibly hard to have a good model of what is good for users, and to have metrics that measure relevant things, and to have the discipline to make yourself test a real hypothesis rather than hunt for evidence that proves your foregone conclusion. And to reward people for negative experiments.
All very hard to do.
And frankly, if Google can't do it right - who can?
I think you need really powerful product managers who happen to be right. And that's not sustainable. Not something you can plan on or measure. Only reward if you happen to be lucky enough to notice it. Ow.