I recently took someone to go and watch a hockey game. Been a little while but I personally played as a goalie myself.
The person kept making the comment that she couldn't see/find the puck and it made it frustrating to watch.
As a goalie, not being able to see the puck is pretty normal (especially with big bodies trying to screen you).
What I told her was that what matters a lot more than where the puck is, is where it's going to be in about two seconds. But the next best thing is to know where the puck is now.
If you can't see the puck then look at the players and as a last resort, look at the ref. 99% of the time they will be looking at the puck. Look where they're looking and soon enough it will appear.
I think this applies very much to this whole Google question.
The puck is gone (or on the way to the other side of the rink) and everyone is confused where it is or where it's going.
Look where everyone is looking and you'll find your answer there. It may not be in the same form as Google adwords, but the game is the same. Leveraging attention.
The tactics were different during the phonebook days (it was having your business start with the letter "A") as opposed to Google and will be different for the next thing as well.
From what I can tell, everyone seems to be looking at chatbots and vertical, shortform video. Not sure how that plays out in terms of advertising, but in terms of the answer to this article's question, that seems like a good place to start.
In my anecdotal experience, it's moved to private, trust-based channels: iMessage, WhatsApp, email, face-to-face interactions. Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring the public and the private has finally ended: people don't want to be online, don't trust social media, don't really trust any media, and are living simple local lives with a small circle of friends that they get together with regularly in person.
But then, my anecdotal experience may not be representative of most of the world. Most of my friends have money, houses, kids, friends - all of which are, by the numbers, rarities these days.
It's an interesting thought experiment to explore what it means if that actually is the new normal, and people are not consuming media or much of anything, or even if the people who are still addicted to social media are now tapped out and don't have any more disposable income left to spend. Probably economic depression. If everybody bought only what they needed and ignored all the advertisements, our present level of economic activity would plunge.
I had a very interesting discussion with a friend today, where I was talking to her about the /r/golang thread about Rob Pike's comments to OpenAI and how the thread was full of bots talking with other bots. No idea why the density of bots was so high in that thread, it was kind of absurd to see.
Then she said: "I know nobody that comments on online forums. Nobody would ever comment to strangers on the internet. It's too dangerous."
Took me a while to grasp what she meant with that, but I think she's right. Trust has eroded so much over the last two decades that most forums are either full of bots or full of annoyed and toxic people. It's very rare to find welcoming communities to newbies, and most of the ones I have discovered were offline connections.
She also mentioned that all of her friends use private profiles only, because having public profiles is too dangerous because of stalkers.
To me this sounded a bit absurd at first, but maybe that's a different perception on "how to use" the internet from a different younger generation that grew up post-socialmedia? My first contact with the internet was MIT opencourseware, her first contact was receiving dick pics at the age of 10 from assholes on the other side of the planet.
I miss the old phpbb forum days when the most toxic comment was someone being snarky and derailing the discussion into "did you use the search function?"
No idea how to fix the internet, maybe it's time to move to gopher or another protocol :-/
Absolutely this. I recently got a nice photo taken with my kids and for the first time I... didn't post it on Facebook. I sent it to my family group chat. Yesterday I posted on Facebook for the first time in months and it was about the power being out for an hour in the ice storm. I haven't posted travel photos to FB in years.
I'm mostly still on FB at all for the acquaintance-level connections to things like neighbourhood, church, and hobby communities. All the people I actually care about are in private group chats.
I was reflecting recently that Google Plus actually had the right idea back in 2011 with "circles", but at the time we all said it was too hard figuring out which circles we wanted to share a particular message or thought with. Hmm, maybe they were ahead of the game all along?
It's interesting to see how much of a behemoth Discord has become. Seems like there's a Discord for everything - from open source projects to hobbies and games to individual groups of friends/family.
It's occupying the segment that subreddits historically have. However, it's perhaps-intentionally search-opaque. You can't Google to find a message/link/download that's gated by Discord. And it also gives a sense of community, where someone who had more attention and time on a computer than a sense of what to do with those things can go have casual conversation with… someone.
None of the numbers I've seen on web usage, platform usage, etc. indicate people are significantly pulling away from online lives. Though, there has been a slight dip in daily social media browsing time in the last couple of years (of course, it also follows the end of the pandemic, and it hasn't ceded back to where it was prior).
That does sound like a rather charmed life though. Could also be a sign that people are reverting to using the social internet apart from their irl acquaintances as well.
Linking up with all of our irl acquaintances through the public web was a terrible mistake imo. Seeking privacy can mean many different things.
My two kids absolutely do not trust open social media (thankfully). My 16 year old has a IMessage group with his friends as well as a discord and that’s it. My 13 year old just uses iMessage with his friend group. My wife and I have taught them the risks of social media but never to the degree of their current distrust. They seem to have picked it ip on their own and want no part of X, insta, TikTok or anything else. They just want to talk to the friends they know.
> Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring the public and the private has finally ended
I wish you were right. We took our kid to a stage show she really wanted to see. People round us kept checking their phones. They weren’t even really checking them. They held them and would turn the screen on and off, lighting the place up.
They couldn’t be without them for more than 5 minutes. This, after 30 mins of painful selfies before the show. It’s awful.
People didn’t leave social media, social media left them. Instagram used to show your friends, not it shows algorithmic content. Same for the other networks. People are still there but it’s now the new tv.
> It's an interesting thought experiment to explore what it means if that actually is the new normal, and people are not consuming media or much of anything, or even if the people who are still addicted to social media are now tapped out and don't have any more disposable income left to spend.
Even if they do have disposable income to spend, the lack of working ads means that they're getting their vendors in a different way.
Some speculation follows: If advertisements as the main driver of sales went away, wouldn't that help smaller players gain a foothold against incumbents? Because, while incumbents can use their war chest to push all newcomers to page 2 of the results. If the awareness is coming from somewhere else, being on page 2 of the results doesn't matter anymore, because no one is even seeing page 1 of the results anyway!
It's the people with money, houses, and kids that departed the 'simple local' lifestyle when the Internet and social media become large. It's them that are re-discovering the joys of the simple local lifestyle.
The simple local lifestyle is that which was lived by all of humanity for all of history up until the last ~75 years (give or take).
I'd say it was much shorter than 30 years. Facebook opened to the public in 2006, and I was surprised to learn Myspace (the first "normie" space on the Web) isn't much older. And before that your digital persona was separate from your offline persona, unless you were one of the grognards with a faculty .edu address.
> people don't want to be online, don't trust social media, don't really trust any media, and are living simple local lives with a small circle of friends that they get together with regularly in person.
Not true. People post their entire lives (OK not entire, but the positive parts) on social media every day for the public to see.
The brief period where I could check Facebook and reliably find someone's name I forgot or figure out how to contact people or invite them to a gathering was pretty nice. Now everyone's on fifty apps I don't use, or installed but never remember to check. Oh well. Sorry, too stimulating for me to join your Discord and get hundreds of notifications, most of which don't concern me at all.
From my own experience as one grows over their 30's, or probably much older, to get to what you mentioned "money, houses, kids, friends", these ads pretty much don't target u very effectively any ways because one's priorities are shifted and you care more about other things than what the attention economy is all about. IOW these ads all about the people who have attention to spare.
I’ve known a lot of neurodivergent and LGBT people, and I was in my late teens when The Internet happened and a young adult when the Web happened.
If you’re not within a couple standard deviations of boring, local living is isolating. Al Gore gave a mea culpa speech at one point because he thought, as a Senator, that legislating to give everyone the Internet would halt the rural brain drain but it had the opposite effect. People learned that they weren’t alone, they were just surrounded by (my words, not his) idiots and so they moved to where their people were. They voted with their feet in droves.
Ultimately, the Internet is good for support. It lets you find people who have the same obscure cancer your child has. Who are dealing with the same sort of neuroses your mom has. Who are being defrauded by a corporation in the same way. Who have the same feelings that the people around you ridicule you for even the hint of having. It lets these people find the patterns, see other people are feeling the same things they do, stop being gaslit.
Everything else has become about dopamine and money. And for those parts we should definitely unplug. But without forums or chat threads that same feeling of being The Other comes back.
This one is on its way to becoming part of the social media ecosystem. That's what the "Updates" feature is.
To get an idea of what it will look like, check out Instagram users who use it for both 1:1 messaging and social media (1:many) features. Which (again anecdotally) is widely used in younger generations.
Few of my friends use Instagram or TikTok, but I think we're just outliers. I see many (young) users, all the time, whenever I'm on the train.
> Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring the public and the private has finally ended: people don't want to be online, don't trust social media, don't really trust any media, and are living simple local lives with a small circle of friends that they get together with regularly in person.
That's a nice narrative, but its simplicity clashes with reality.
I am a gen-z and most of my peers look at me weird when I express the same. It was once cool to have social media and presence -- I was only 8 when I made a facebook account. But now, things are different. I actively avoid social media and don't like to show myself online anywhere other than my personal website.
I regularly do improv every week, which is essentially improvised live theater. So some time is spent not watching youtube or some sort of electronic intermediaries.
Which is actually pretty odd, because improvisational comedy as we know it today is younger than the film industry.
> my anecdotal experience, it's moved to private, trust-based channels: iMessage, WhatsApp, email, face-to-face interactions
I can attest to this based on my circle of friends and acquaintances. Email not so much but yeah WA etc. I think people are done putting content that matters to them on public platforms. So all we see now on FB/Insta is memes, influencers or ads.
Meta appears to believe this, and so is pushing chatbot integration into private chats on Messenger and WhatsApp; presumably that will be the vector by which they push product advertisements.
What’s really interesting to me is how this coincides with a larger push to break up more and more ties that kept our society going for the last 30–50 years. Look at what’s happening to globalization and the push to near-shore. Look at the fragmentation of media into private channels and closed groups, the erosion of shared narratives, and the growing skepticism toward institutions that used to act as connective tissue.
Individually, many of these shifts make sense: resilience over efficiency, trust over reach, local over global. But collectively they point to a world that is becoming more segmented, less interoperable, and harder to coordinate at scale. If fewer people participate in shared public spaces, economic, cultural, or informational, it’s not just advertising models that break, but the assumptions underpinning growth, politics, and even social cohesion.
That doesn’t necessarily mean collapse, but it does suggest a lower energy equilibrium: slower growth, fewer mass phenomena, more parallel realities. The open question is whether we can rebuild new forms of shared infrastructure and trust at smaller scales—or whether we simply learn to live with a more fragmented, quieter, and less synchronized society.
> people don't want to be online, don't trust social media, don't really trust any media, and are living simple local lives with a small circle of friends that they get together with regularly in person.
I think you're correct to a degree. Instututions like social media and google ads were given a very generous chance, we gave them our money and attention, they gave us scams (especially facebook) and enshittification.
The loss of faith in institutions takes quite a long time to occur but I think it will be quite a bit of effort to reverse.
100% this. I remember when I took advantage of being online and not really competing in SEO, it was simply a matter of being real. At the time, I didn’t realize it was just arbitrage: I was naturally in a space with fewer participants and most organizations didn’t even know the rules yet.
Now that advantage is completely gone, and I have to build business the way it’s always been done in history: walking the streets while the online "broadcasted" world is a massive distraction.
> The person kept making the comment that she couldn't see/find the puck and it made it frustrating to watch.
Lifelong hockey fan, I never understood this complaint. I believe it was FOX that did the 'highlight the puck' thing for a few years in the 1990's.
You can't see the ball in American football, either.
But you don't need to. The guy that's running and everyone is trying to tackle? He has the ball. Just like the guy skating across the ice with his stick on the ground? He's got the puck.
When you CAN see the puck/ball, either someone lost control of it, or they're shooting/throwing/passing it.
You're right - it was called FoxTrax, it's a fairly interesting piece of engineering.
It's pretty wild they were able to convince the NHL to use a modified puck with a battery and PCB inside, all so American viewers could better follow the action.
pretty common with my crowd of fans to even get a little giddy when the play is so deceptive that it fakes out the camera man and they dont realize theyre focused on the wrong player until a second or two passes
I'd go a step further and say the ball/puck is not the interesting thing to watch.
Imagine if you couldn't see the players, and just saw the puck. Would that be interesting at all?
Think about tennis. There is the trope of people's eyes going back and forth following the ball, but I don't think they are following the ball directly. They are going back and forth looking at the person who is going to hit the ball.
> ...vertical, shortform video. Not sure how that plays out in terms of advertising...
I have seen a comment about them being terrible for advertising, it looks like a "good" idea but it is not.
The problem is that the attention of people watching these videos drop to almost zero, too much is happening in a too short amount of time, and as a result nothing is remembered, including the ads. It is a very good deal for whoever is monetizing this content, they show a lot of ads, plenty of revenue, but not for those who are paying for the ads. It is like subliminal messages, "good" idea, but not very effective. For ads to work, people need to pay attention.
I don't know how ads in chatbots will turn out and what form it will take, but I think it is inevitable.
It's kinda interesting to see how advertising is evolving. I'll mindlessly scroll Instagram reels once in a while and every other reel is an ad with the sponsored tag, with an obvious thing being sold and advertised. A fair amount of non-"ads" are influencers or celebrities promoting a product on their personal IGs with the #ad.
It's like advertising and social media are slowly merging together.
I couldn't say how effective it is. Who knows how much they paid that influencer and how much revenue it drives. But it sure is common.
One rough heuristic I use is people-watching on the subway. Just a quick glance from a distance at their phones. What are they actually looking at? (Yeah I know it's a bit nosy...)
I see: short-form video, WhatsApp/Messaging, YouTube long-format - in that order.
This is an analogy that is very appealing, which is precisely why I feel it sends the fundamentally wrong message.
There is not one single puck in the web search field, and we actively don't want that situation in the first place (want no monopoly or cartel). There should be at least 2 if not a ton more. Everyone focusing their attention and resource on a single thing is the absolute worst case scenario.
I also hope the future of search is not where every existing player is looking at. That means there is no disruption happening, money straight dictates the winner and nothing truly innovative is expected.
Even "skating where the puck will be" is essentially following someone else's play. It can be fine, but I'd prefer to focus on the person actually acting on the puck, where they're trying to lead the game.
> The tactics were different during the phonebook days (it was having your business start with the letter "A") as opposed to Google and will be different for the next thing as well.
And to add to this, the dark pattern of the time was to register in the Phone Book as “AAA Your Real Business Name” which was exactly what my first job did.
Bang on. It's advertising, so literally looking at where people are getting their info from is the way to go.
Google searches don't produce good results these days. The enshittification has become too extreme. Google openly admits as much (and further intensifies the enshittification) by placing a huge AI summary above those results.
The answer is self evident. If, before, you were relying on clicks resulting from google searches, today you need to be what an AI recommends when somebody uses an AI like they used to use google. (Users will eventually become more sophisticated though!) Lots of people are using AI like a search engine and getting better results than google gives simply because massive resources are currently being put into training AI, while mere neglect is insufficient to explain how fast Google search results are getting worse.
Is this how AI companies plan to cash in? Accept money from advertisers to promote their products in interactions with their LLM's? Were I an advertiser, I'd be trying to get Anthropic to take my money instead of giving it to Google. AI might be what finally makes it impossible to tell content and ads apart. That's great for advertisers... I guess. Not so great for the rest of us.
> Google searches don't produce good results these days. The enshittification has become too extreme. Google openly admits as much (and further intensifies the enshittification) by placing a huge AI summary above those results.
I haven't asked Google a question it has failed to provide a more than adequate answer to in ... months? years?
And on all my devices, I run google search with &udm=14, so I am not talking about AI summaries. I also have search personalization disabled.
I see a lot of people complaining about this on HN. It simply doesn't match my experience at all, in any way.
>
The tactics were different during the phonebook days (it was having your business start with the letter "A") as opposed to Google and will be different for the next thing as well.
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Interesting! I thought, they did it because of the stock-item-list order :-D
I don't know why people are down-voting it. You might not like it, you may not think it's good. But this is absolutely happening and there's a lot of data out there about it.
It's unnatural to search an LLM for a product. It's why Alexa never became a shopping portal.
Best way to get the word out about a product now is through an influencer in the space.
-- Edit:
Show of hands for anyone using ChatGPT to shop. Be honest.
People don't even use Google to shop. They try to find something either (1) by brand name, eg. "iphone" or (2) generically by category, eg. "best cold weather tent".
In the former case, Google used their enormous, antitrust flaunting power and 90% browser marketshare to turn the URL bar into a competitive trademark bidding dragnet. Apple pays out the nose for the iPhone spot. For every click. And every other major corporation selling to business or consumer does the same. This is the source of Google's enormous wealth. Google is a middle man. You cannot conceivably get to a brand or product without paying the Google tax.
In the latter case, when people try to look up blogs and reviews and Reddit posts to compare products, Google gets in the way and inserts themselves into the flow. If LLMs make this experience even shittier, there won't be upstream content to source as no reward will reach the people providing the value. It will naturally atrophy over time.
As a new sales channel, young people are buying content off of TikTok and Instagram directly now. When they see influencers using products they like, it leads to massive sales volume. New unicorn consumer businesses are being minted regularly from this.
I know this might seem reductive but when you say "look where everyone is looking", the answer hasn't really changed since the 2010s — it's our phones.
(and to some extent, monitors if you account for the amount of time 9-5 people spend on their work laptops or screens. desktop is not dead but that's another matter)
The hot apps are for now, chatbots and vertical shortform platforms. We know advertisers get much better bang for their buck marketing where the influencers are.
Google is "dead" because search advertising is much worse at figuring you out and showing you stuff when you're not necessarily looking for it. But Google can easily advertise where the eyeballs are - your phones.
We must remember that enshittification is an ongoing process and Google has the power to reach billions of people, one shitty update at a time.
From their POV, it definitely feels like a miss that they don't own a successful and dedicated social media platform. Maybe they will make another foray into it.
The recent Acquired ep on “Alphabet Inc” put it aptly: social media moved into Google’s space, video (reels, “pivot to video”), and social media for socialising moved to message groups, iMessage/Whatsapp/Discord.
Revenue-wise, video ads have always been the sun to print ads peanut m&m.
Look where the pucks going then:
Implication: ChatGPT as a realtime video avatar will hit the jackpot with ads, but not before. Count on the ChatGPT device having a screen for that reason
>Look where everyone is looking and you'll find your answer there. It may not be in the same form as Google adwords, but the game is the same. Leveraging attention.
The chill that ran down my spine when I realized that you and TFA think that the part people care about is Google as an ad platform, and not as a way to access websites.
"AI" is the next advertising frontier, no question.
People are throwing themselves to feed you personal data. You no longer have to come up with sneaky ways to collect it, or build out their profile from inferred metadata. Less work for you, more accurate profiling, and less risk getting fined by pesky regulation.
Ad campaigns can be much more personal and targeted. You can push them at just the right moment to optimize the chances of conversion. They can be much more persuasive, since chatbots and assistants are deeply trusted. You can dial the sensitivity knob to make them very subtle, or completely blatant, depending on your urgency and client.
If I as someone outside of this hostile industry can think up these scenarios, the world is not ready for what advertising geniuses are cooking up as we speak.
> the world is not ready for what advertising geniuses are cooking up as we speak.
Advertising directed towards AI models, at the very least. If you can get into ChatGPT's weights that McDonalds is the cheapest and tastiest hamburger, how many millions of people would ChatGPT tell that to?
I’d suggest that the title should be, “Competition for Google AdWords is so strong that unsophisticated advertisers can no longer get a good return. Where do I promote my business now?”
> Also, In my own experience for my business ( also entertainment) I have found reddit ads to be useful.
Reddit is very hit or miss depending on your target audience.
Depending on your Reddit target audience, a lot of people could have adblock installed. They might be loyal to communities that have approved vendor lists where everyone parrots the same vendor recommendations back and forth in every thread, so not being part of that game means you're left out. In some niches, the subreddit moderators have a financial relationship with vendors and they'll put their weight into swaying every conversation away from competitors.
For other niches, none of this applies and Reddit can be a good ad destination. It really depends
100%. My business is in the smart home space. I peruse various smart home subreddit communities, and they all have a few brands that are aggressively celebrated on Reddit. Market research, financial disclosures, and other public data largely indicates that these brands are not all that popular, especially in the biggest-spend markets.
Thank you. This is a perfect example of clickbait. I trusted the HN crowd, clicked the link, and immediately realized the trap. I'm upset at how effective it is. And also commend the author for publishing an article specifically engineered to waste the viewers time.
I think he's aimed in the right direction with the observation about short videos.
I tried to load his website. It took a full minute to come up. Maybe that's the HN hug of death or something, but this is surely issue #1 to resolve.
Beyond that I would ask whether targeting the "young'uns" directly is the correct strategy. His business is party entertainment, kids' birthday parties could be the biggest slice of that, but the kid isn't the purchasing decisionmaker, and there are all these other opportunities (like corporate events) too.
And then I would consider whether paying for ads in shorts is the right or only way to approach the world of video. The thing about video is it's huge, lucrative, and eating up more of people's time every year. People are moving from the text Internet, to watching videos. I would think given the nature of the business this guy has raw footage which can be turned into entertaining videos, or can produce it pretty quickly. I'm increasingly surprised by how much some people can earn on Youtube, by creating videos that also function as marketing collateral for their business. He will ultimately need to geotarget to get customers, so yeah that's probably paid ads, but a good YouTube channel would build authority, making sales easier to close, and might also make him more money than you'd expect via ad revenue.
My entertainment website typically gets 10-100 visitors per day, yesterday it was more like 1000 per hour. The only reason it's still online is because of CloudFlare CDN!
My content is best live and in person but you are right, will be concentrating more on video content for yt and others going forward
It's been some years since I've had to put ads on the web, but I found Reddit ads insanely effective. Really, Google ads have been dead for a long time. I found them hardly effective at all since maybe 2011.
A surgeon in our family got basically all his (private) clients from Google. Spend was multiple k per month. If you consider that one surgery brings in 7k in revenue, then those numbers actually make sense. He's retired now but did this up to 2y ago.
> Really, Google ads have been dead for a long time.
For you perhaps. I work with a huge amount of businesses whose profits are still driven almost entirely by them, who have seen not even a blip and make money hand over fist.
Hm good point but if one were to try to reach visibility via let's say contacting the creators themselves or making reddit showcases themselves?
I am not sure what might work better, sponsorships or Ads. Of course some are definitely icky sponsorships but if one were to align with small youtubers who develop their own things and you enjoy their content and there might be an overlap etc.
I personally have an ad blocker so I don't really know what might work for. I guess organic marketing? But how does one achieve it?
Any good books / ideas on more sustainable forms of marketing aside from paying the large corporations a sort of land tax basically?
Google search ain't dead at all: it became so good something silly like 99% of all the queries have to be answered by the Google AI before the very first "result". And for those who want more, there's the "continue this discussion with Gemini".
Now this may not be great for Google Ads (dunno about that) but Google search now works better than it ever did.
Surprised to see this upvoted because the takeaway is completely incorrect, and based on the anecdotal evidence of one advertiser.
As someone who spends seven figures every month on Google ads, what’s much more likely to be happening here is that the individual advertiser is either getting outcompeted or they’re executing ads poorly.
Google ads revenue in the US continues to grow every quarter. And, since advertisers will generally invest in ads until the last dollar is break even, it’s likely that the total value advertisers unlock through Google ads is growing as well. Whether that’s true or not, the notion that value generated for advertisers is “dead” is absurd.
I just Googled "kids magic show in Durban" and his ad showed up in the top slot (sorry if this post has swamped your ad bill); and as a bonus, the Gemini AI blurb also touted him: "For kids' magic shows in Durban, look for local entertainers like Big Top Entertainment..."
Doesn't seem like the issue is he's being outbid by international conglomerates with million dollar budgets. Maybe the kids magic show market has cooled in South Africa? Or users have left Google? Curious what we are to conclude here.
Google ads are very time & location dependent, the fact that it's showing to you might be a bad sign since you are most likely not close to Durban and this seems like an ad you only want to run locally.
Your experience is 100% compatible with the linked article: the seven-figure spender is presumably running a much higher margin business and can scale narrowly profitable ads much more effectively. The natural equilibrium for a perfect ad market is for the ad spend to be exactly equal to increase in revenue: a perfectly efficient market with no profit for the advertiser. Google (and Meta et al) are so good that for many SMBs they are completely cornered at the zero-point: spend as much as you can just to stay in the same place financially.
> The natural equilibrium for a perfect ad market is for the ad spend to be exactly equal to increase in revenue
Not quite, the equilibrium is when marginal ad spend results in no change to profit. The ad spend at equilibrium should result in increased profit compared to no ad spend.
I run a small software business and I know various other people who run small software businesses. We are all pretty much agreed that that Google Ads have been less and less profitable, year or year. Most of us have now given up on PPC ads.
I've run Google PPC on-and-off for 20+ years. It's definitely way harder to make money with them now, and the complexity is now through the roof, which makes it way harder for a novice to optimize their campaign. I steer small businesses away because it's too easy to screw up and lose your shirt on PPC without professional help.
And equally I know many people running non software businesses whose experience is the complete opposite of yours and Google ads has and continues to drive the majority of their revenue.
I expected them to start seeing a hit or significant decline by now, and even told them as such but in what I honestly find surprising, it’s not come to pass.
> As someone who spends seven figures every month on Google ads, what’s much more likely to be happening here is that the individual advertiser is either getting outcompeted or they’re executing ads poorly.
Outcompeted by who??? He's a performer offering local entertainment. I highly doubt that people searching for "entertainer in durban" are getting ads for Cirque du Soleile.
His ad is probably on the first page for that search term; the problem is more likely that no one is looking at that first page anymore.
The question is, why has this post been massively upvoted?
It contains zero useful information. Just somebody struggling with AdWords and they don't know why. Not helpful.
I have to assume the vast majority of upvotes are based on the title alone, assuming it's about Search? A large proportion of top level comments are about Search too. Depressing.
Basically any online shop with decent volume / revenue is going to be spending 100s of thousands if not millions of dollars a month on Google ads. (Not just Google Ads, also Facebook ads etc.)
It used to be possible to get by with "organic" search traffic and some SEO... but google search looked completely different back then. Now when you look for something it's an AI box, products (google merchant) ad box, ad (promoted results) box, ... then there's a couple of (like two) results that are "organic" (whatever that means these days) and that's it. And we all know that when you want to hide something, you put it on the second page of google search results. So the space for doing online business "ad free" has been squeezed out over time.
And the K shaped economy is totally true in this ecomm space. These days say 15% of your revenue gets eaten by ads, but you also have say 50% higher revenue overall. At some point it becomes a margin game and the bigger players will start squeezing out the smaller ones because the biggers ones can operate on tighter margins (making up the difference with volume) which the smaller ones simply can't afford. The difference in operating costs of an eshop that sells 10000 items a month is not that different than that of an eshop selling 100000 items a month (i.e. not 10x, more like 2-3x). But selling 10x items gives you the volume you need to be able to lower your margins and put the difference into ads.
BTW all of this is handled by professional online marketing people with increasingly widespread use of AI so there's no room for the small players to make it big while not being optimized to the gills. This is why most small advertisers are seeing small or negative returns while Google and Meta are making tens if not hundreds of billions in ad revenue... The ads work, but the amounts you need to spend and the optimization level you need to have is in a completely different galaxy than it was 10 years ago.
> Surprised to see this upvoted because the takeaway is completely incorrect
It's the standard actually. Hot takes get more votes and hot takes are usually wrong. Experts have non-controversial opinions, which are boring (so no impulse to upvote), and there are 1000x more non-experts with blogs. Add to that HN culture which values contrarian-ness. So HN front page blog posts are almost entirely incorrect, but spicy
Googles ad business is riddled with fraud in all levels.
Google profits directly from the fraud. It has no incentive to reduce it and is embarrassed by its extent.
Google is essentially overseeing a huge criminal enterprise which funds its other activities. It’s been well documented for over a decade and no one seems to care.
The traffic is faked, the publishers are faked, the clicks are faked and the ad rates are manipulated.
It’s an incredibly lucrative way to steal money with extremely low
risk and trivial penalties. The victims are the advertisers. Google has no interest in rocking the boat while they get paid.
The effective ads via Google platforms are like the percentage of real drugs in what’s bought off the street. Coincidental and ever being shaved.
I love knocking on Google, and have been doing so for longer than it was cool, but this sounds more like the business is no longer attractive than Google having become suddenly wildly ineffective.
My anecdotal evidence is the smarter normies are increasingly allergic to screens. They only use them to watch stuff they hear about by some other means, but parents, for example, look for any excuse to keep their kids off the Internet, and largely they're better for it.
If you've been around longer than internet advertising you realize the basics of demand have changed pretty considerably.
Let's go back to 1980 and say that you have widget X that person A would absolutely buy if they saw/heard it advertised. They live in Podunk Minnesota that had coverage by 3 radio stations, 3 TV stations, and 2 newspapers. But you have no idea what media they actually consumed to target the right one.
Right now you're at the point you would have to contact at least 8 different media companies for ad spend if you wanted coverage. Most likely you'd cut it down to one of each, and maybe a billboard. This said, the cost for just this little area is going to be wildly expensive! Ads were huge money, and this is just for one little town.
These costs were slightly lower for large corporate buyers, but not that much because as you go back farther and farther you were typically dealing with more companies before consolidation. Being an SMB was great in this market in a local area because you weren't competing with the world.
Fast forward to now and you compete with the entire world at any given moment. In the West we've forgotten about competition and allowed a huge portion of our economic product to consolidate to a small number of companies. This is very apparent in advertising as the old media entities are dead or far more expensive than you'll ever recoup with the competition out there. Instead you're looking at Google/Reddit/Facebook style ads, but with that kind of ad you again, complete with the entire world. If your ad actually does good and drive business, then Google metrics will feedback to players watching the market and they will advertise products in the same space driving up competition and the base costs for ads. The supply from your competitors is practically unlimited which will drive your profits to almost zero unless you happen to have something very special.
Welcome to the K shaped economy, where the big get bigger and the small die.
The way people get information online is changing rapidly.
I run a local makerspace. It is not quite the same thing as a local entertainment business, but there are certainly some similarities. We are local, and we are very event-based.
For the last 10 years, the way we would get new members was to host Meetups. Meetups are slowly bringing in fewer members. When I ask tour guests how they found out about us, they recently started saying that they found us on ChatGPT. They did not know what a makerspace was but they explained their problem and ChatGPT presented our space as a local solution. This has been good for us because we offer something useful to the community but struggle to explain it. In the old days of search, this was a problem because many people were not using the correct phrase to describe what we are. That doesn’t matter anymore.
How does a local business optimize for this though? I am not sure.
One of two ways. Yes, by scraping, even it it requires users to 'sell' their own browsing data to the AI companies because places like Discord lock them out.
Or, the other way is for particular event organizers to pay directly for their services to be advertised/incorporated into the LLM itself. Those that don't pay get more and more of their data erased from the LLM maybe?
Business directory for most of the telephone era was simply known as "the yellow pages". About once a quarter we get a color mailer with all the local plumbers, fencing companies, electricians etc. for homeowners who want a company that is actually licensed and insured.
Are you using "Meetups" to mean Meetup.com or just events in general? Meetup.com has completely gone to shit. Trying to find an event is super frustrating. They show the same events over and over. They don't enforce categorization. People mark online only events as in person and the platform doesn't care. They also started trying to charge users (people looking to attend events) instead of only planners (people hosting events) so it drives people away.
Sadly I don't know any better platform but it seems ripe for a new entry.
What’s super depressing about Meetup.com are those Modal popups that want you to sign up for Pro. You can’t dismiss them. It’s like they’re intentionally destroying their product to squeeze the last remaining dollars from their users, which I assume are becoming fewer and fewer.
There is a meetup-like platform called Spontacts here in Germany. I suspect that for the moment it is only available for meetups in Germany, but who knows, maybe it'll expand internationally if it's successful.
Glad to see I'm not the one that sees the similarity in "zapping" or channel surfing to what people do nowadays with those shorts...
I remember my brother loving to do channel surfing in the 80s when we were young. I've always hated it! maybe that's why I cannot stand the current Tiktok media format (so sad that Youtube is pushing more and more the same format).
Also, remember when telephones started and people who took vertical video where seen as sinners? How times change!
I still consider them as inconsiderate. You can watch a horizontal video on every screen with more, or equal detail. That's not true for vertical videos.
But at least, we could experience first hand that laziness beats thoughtfulness, when people are allowed to.
It's what Americans call non free to air television. You're probably being downvoted because it's intrensic there and they assume you must know about it.
Push advertising sucks, but we can make pull much better by giving the user more control.
Imagine a protocol to publish commercial offers for any given fragment of content addressable by URI. It would describe the details of some product or service and a set of proposed terms. We could surf the web looking for relevant content and publishing related offers. Various repositories would subscribe or not.
A browser (extension or native) would optionally pull offers from selected repositories and have UI for the user to solicit/pull offers for any given piece of content styled to signal their existence, and to filter and sort them. To make it sustainable there needs to be revenue sharing with the content source(s).
Are there existing projects like this?
The same protocol could be used for independent commentary and other annotation.
The Brave/BAT experiment was similar to what you're describing. I think it failed to live up to its dreams of revolutionizing advertising because for the most part there are two kinds of people.
- I try not to think about ads
- I think about ads because I aggressively block them
I'm sure somebody out there represents a middle ground, but I think it's a pretty small demographic.
As others said, most users don't care or don't want to see them.
This leaves the people that care being the ones who are providing the ads, and they will game the system with bots and other methods of bad acting that will make the system useless.
I hate ads until I need them, then I complain that the algorithms still suck. My wife recently reminded me I have to give Shopee time to surface good options when I don't have the exact words. I expect this to improve as their models improve.
I think Google’s search and ad business are at risk. Search has become such a mess that it’s become harder and harder to use to find quality results. It reminds me of Yahoo before Google in a way.
I’m using ChatCPT or equivalent for 60% of my searches. The remaining 40% is just muscle memory. Of that 40% about half the time I regret using Google search due to the difficulty of finding the relevant result.
I can see search users moving to ChatGPT or such and Googles Ad business suffering as a result and a general downward spiral of Google search.
This is a temporary situation. Think of it like how Napster let you download any song for free for a few years. For a while, all you heard was how the Internet was going to put all musicians out of business. Obviously that didn't happen.
The same will happen here. It's not like OpenAI has built a search engine; every time they need a live search they hit Bing (please correct me if I'm wrong) and get the results from there. No matter how you slice it, search companies who actually supply the data are going to get reimbursed, and since most users don't pay $20 / month, that likely means ads everywhere.
Also, Google's AI overviews are getting very good. Initially it was pretty inaccurate, but now it's basically 95% as good as ChatGPT, and faster. Most normies I talk to think it's good enough.
You don't think putting ads in Gemini output has crossed Google's mind?
I've never understood the "AI is eating search! Google is dead!" theory. The specific mechanism (whether that be keyword search, LLM conversation or something else) by which users describe their needs to a company doesn't matter, all that matters is that (a) the company makes that mechanism available for free, (b) it does a good job of satisfying the user's need and (c) ads can be smuggled into it.
It wasn't really AI. Fundamentally, building a website the "traditional" way (hosting agreement, apache install, your favorite way to convert data formats that don't hate you into HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) was always a learned and quite technical skill; most people weren't doing it for fun, they were doing it because it was the only way to be on the web.
What killed the open web was Facebook, Twitter, and their ilk replacing that whole mess with social media profiles, networking connections, and templated, pre-fabricated organization home pages. When social networks became dominant enough that businesses could use it to get their info out there without having to author a webpage, the balance tipped (at least for business-motivated web content).
- Build FAQ section (LLM can help write a lot of it, if you let it load the content of your site)
- Write news on your site (LLM can help you to find ideas what to write about)
There are other networks as well: X, Meta, YouTube, LinkedIn, Amazon ads. It depends what’s your target group. But all networks have targeting tools so you can test them with minimum budget just to see what works and what doesn’t.
For sure, you have some personalized landing pages with CTA (Posthog script included so you can see what works).
good riddance seriously i used to pay like $1~2 a click back in 2010s and remember feeling like a total scam. no way of knowing if those clicks were bots and any campaigns would always have inflation somehow even long tail words that shouldn't.
AI should equal the playing field and promote businesses based on merit and capacity not how much they can spend.
I will say I have no experience in the ad space, but surely the SEO/ad companies will figure out how to game LLMs to make their sites more likely to be picked up by it, no? Or OpenAI would just directly sell ads themselves.
I would be that Openai and Google will find a way to boost the embedded ad in the llm result to you based on an auction on how valuable you and your query are
I sometimes think people really don't understand the value-add of AI (and I say this as someone on the less hyperbolic end of the "AI-hype" spectrum). If your service to me can be accomplished by AI "very fast"... I don't need you anymore. AI provides a generic problem solving interface where non-experts can leverage the power of the AI to solve a task they previously couldn't have so long as they can describe it well.
I've had multiple cases at work or other places where I've been presented with something as the stakeholder and been told "I used AI to make this!" Great! Next time I'll use AI to make it and save myself the overhead/cost of having work with someone else. I don't see a lot of value in explaining a problem to you so that you can then re-explain it to an LLM.
When people show me they've used AI to complete a task I used to have to do I'm delighted, and, more often then not, proven my value when they come back weeks later asking for help untangling the mess they've made. But, I'm equally delighted in the cases where they are successful using AI to replace things I used to be tasked with. Despite the AI hype, I find myself busier than ever.
Seriously, one random website getting less traffic means "Google is dead"? I imagine if you hit your toe, you call it "end of the world"? This sort of posts should be illegal. Flagged.
Might this not also be the fact that given the cost of living the world over, being able to afford a fancy party with entertainment like the poster provides is a luxury few can afford now?
We used to eat out a lot more (Saturday lunch at a cafe I mean) and also used to get HelloFresh and other such services, but as the cost of them has gone up way faster than our salaries, we've had to reign them all back.
I agree with the "Google is dying" sentiment for sure, but I also wonder how much is just being unable to afford nice things anymore.
Most people now conduct searches through AI chat. We never trusted Google with our search terms, IP address linked to WiFi and cell towers surveys with Google trucks for cross referencing on Google map, browser fingerprinting, time of day pattern detection, mouse reaction time measurement for age estimation, cross referencing with economic profiling of neighbourhoods, income bracket estimation algorithms, interest profiling based on search terms, browsing breadcrumbs, social network tracking, etc. Now imagine the new powers of AI chat adding reasoning patterns, deep thinking and complete trust to the equation. Let us organise a disconnect day where you turn off your phone and Internet router and ISP box just to confuse the algorithms! Where do we go from here? We stay home and invite disconnected friends for a rare moment of statistically insignificant privacy.
Chegg’s decline is a concrete example of how AI search is changing the web
There’s been a lot of debate about whether Google’s AI Overviews and tools like ChatGPT are actually harming publishers. One publicly traded company’s timeline is worth looking at: Chegg.
What happened (with sources):
2021: Chegg launched Uversity, a platform for educators to share academic content.
(Wikipedia)
2023: ChatGPT emerged as a serious competitor in homework help. Chegg responded by launching CheggMate, its own AI product built on OpenAI’s models.
(Wikipedia)
Late 2024: Chegg reported accelerating subscriber declines, widely attributed to users shifting to free AI tools instead of paid study platforms.
(WSJ, company filings)
Feb 2025: Chegg sued Google, alleging that AI Overviews reduced traffic to Chegg by answering questions directly in search results, harming acquisition and revenue.
(Search Engine Land, Reuters)
May 2025: Chegg laid off ~22% of its workforce (≈248 employees), citing competitive pressure from AI and changes in search behavior.
(Reuters)
Oct 2025: Chegg announced another round of layoffs (~45%, ≈388 employees), explicitly referencing “the new realities of AI” and reduced traffic from Google to content publishers.
(Reuters / SF Chronicle)
What the data suggests (more broadly):
Independent studies show that when Google AI Overviews appear, users are significantly less likely to click through to external sites.
“Zero-click” searches (where users get answers directly on the results page) have increased, especially for informational and educational queries.
The impact isn’t uniform — some publishers report minimal effects — but content that answers how-to, homework, or factual queries appears most exposed.
Why this matters:
Chegg isn’t a small blog or SEO-driven site. It’s a public company with audited financials, legal disclosures, and incentives not to exaggerate under scrutiny. Its filings and lawsuit don’t claim AI is “bad” — they claim that traffic flows are structurally changing.
This doesn’t prove AI search is “killing the web,” but it does show:
AI answers are substituting clicks, not just competing for them.
Entire business models built on informational content are under pressure.
“Build better content” may not be sufficient when answers are synthesized upstream.
Curious how others here see it:
Is this a temporary transition problem?
Or are we watching the unbundling of the open web’s traffic economy in real time?
It’ not Google that’s dead. It’s the economy in North American markets. I am finding conversion way down, clicks and impressions I’m still getting. People are just being way more fussy before handing over cash.
Everyone i talk to is quoting the same time line, this started in September and it hasn’t returned to normal.
Please go anywhere but the platforms I use. Go fill Tiktok up with ads. Any of the "mainstream" platforms inbuilt ad posts are a good bet. Or a marketing agency that will disguse it as organic content.
Lol wish I could afford to "fill up Tiktok with ads"! Seriously though, I always felt like Google AdWords (we only used the search network) are the most honest way. Someone searches for what you offer and they see your ad. With these other platforms it's more about relying on the algorithm.
Google ads are the cheapest yes, but depending on your audience they may not be looking on Google now.
For ChatGPT (and similar) you need to have a strong FAQ page and lots of content marketing to increase the likelihood of being the suggested answer when a user asks ChatGPT a relevant question (it's a highly probabilistic system, look up AEO/GEO).
CloudFlare for example offers an option to block AI scraping bots by default. If you are in the services business, this is the opposite of what you want because having AI crawlers scrape your site would drive traffic down the road when users ask a related question.
I would also suggest having accounts with major chatbot companies and enabling the "allow training on my conversations" option and then talk to it about your services. Ultimately you just want to get your brand into the training data corpus, and the rest is just basic machine learning statistics.
Its not specific on him Ads just drive me insane. I haven't really formed enough strong reasoning(to me) to say they shouldn't exist. So I'm at a halfway point of "advertise somewhere that isnt in front of me".
The platforms I use are very NOT local so it'd be pointless. Mainstream platforms are invasive with their data collection that would allow his ads to be specifically targeted and do well there, getting put in front of people who might actual use his service.
I can't find it, but there's a good graph that shows Google search decline in share to GPT, but it excludes Gemini. With Gemini, it stays relatively on par. That's pretty much the answer with where one goes. LLMs are higher intent than search could ever be, and they are closer to you selling to yourself than a store selling to you since they have all of your user context
Yes but it's possible that the marketing channel is very profitable before drying out. Also the less a channel is known the more it will take to reach saturation.
So there might be channels that are very profitable and well hidden, the problem is that by definition it might be too hard/expensive to find them.
The very concept of people going to a private digital plaza was very problematic in the first place and arguably still is. Humanity's drive towards convenience is the source of marvels but also many ills imo. Google's decline is a chance for change. Change towards something better. Not that I am optimistic that we will get there imo but the opportunity window is opening now. Don't look for a new digital overlord. Embrace the new age
Google is not dead in this case; what is dead is Ads on top of Google. I think the best way to fix this is to ensure that your website is optimized for searches in Google and in the new AI world.
Just trying to find out what this guy actually does is hard. It’s a page of links linking to another page of links, repeat. Where is the thing? The content? The product? It just feels a bit disconnected from patterns users expect and delivery mechanisms users are comfortable with in 2025. It’s almost a 1995 style pastiche of intent with no payoff.
?? There is one link that takes you to his business. It’s kids parties (birthdays, etc) entertainment (Or corporate events). Think performers doing magic acts, juggling, comedy, balloons, etc. it really wasn’t that difficult to find out.
You mean the physical world where businesses are signing up with companies to put AI enabled cameras all over their properties and sell your data? Why not some nice dynamic pricing on their digital price bars next (oops, we are already there).
If you believe markets to be a future discounting mechanism, then they're sure as hell saying Google "figured something out" in the last year, even vs OpenAI [1]
Oh no, adtech is dying. I guess we'll all have to compete through quality of products and services and not gaming a rigged system designed to reward anything that maximizes the profit of the global surveillance adtech machine.
This gives me warm fuzzy feelings. It's nowhere near good, but this is better than it was.
I wish that were true, but I don't think it's dying, I think it's metastasizing.
Ads will ingress deeper into what were trusted layers -- embedded in text and video in a seemingly organic way. GenAI tools make this possible -- to splice a 20 second mention of something into a stream, or rewrite a paragraph injecting a subtle product placement.
We will develop new mental antibodies for this, we always do. Silver lining of sorts -- while short-form video content is making people illiterate, perhaps literacy will become a calm refuge once again.
The biggest problem is platform scale, imo - platforms grow so big as to make the network effects confer an invulnerability to regulation or moderation, and then get exploited to squash competition, either through legal action, acquisition, suppression, or sometimes simple inertia. Ubiquitous reach and total control over the platform made it irresistible to bad faith operators, politicians, activists, and rent-seekers. AI has a good shot at completely fragmenting those technologies at a fundamental level.
We should be resisting any ad injection into ChatGPT, Claude, etc maintaining a firewall between what's acceptable in a paid product and what's not, and as long as open source Chinese models roughly keep parity, the big US labs can't pivot hard into exploiting users for ad revenues. Private hosting and bots are almost as good as ChatGPT with UI and UX, within a few percentage points as good in capabilities, and the pressure to go elsewhere is minimal. If they drive off a whole lot of independence minded users, they risk creating a community of people who'll create a very slick, workable alternative, while paying only a tenth or less what the frontier labs charge. As long as that dynamic cripples the efforts of big labs to enshittify, there's a good shot that the entire ecosystem fundamentally evolves to something better. I hope, anyway - it could just explode into a grotesque mess of user exploitation and yet more of the same.
I think at some point you'll be able to have good-enough AI on your phone to carry everywhere you go, and it'll do all the ad filtering and opsec and digital hygiene for you - everyone will have a high quality competent tech nerd in their pocket looking out for their best interests, and it won't just be a niche rebel nerd thing anymore.
> to splice a 20 second mention of something into a stream
I'm seeing the start of this already, AFAICT. There have been a couple of YouTube videos with embedded ads that YouTube flipped over to a YouTube ad at exactly the point the sponsor part started.
Google is almost certainly getting ready to use AI to splice out in stream ads and replace them with Google ads.
I love your vibe but unfortunately I don't share your optimism.
The interregnum between monopolies gets exponentially shorter as the money printing gets exponentially faster. What was maybe 20 years of "OK-ish" after say WW2 got down to a few years in the 90s when internet was worth browsing, from Google to AI could be just months..
“Google is dead” feels overstated. What is actually breaking is the click based retrieval and attribution model once answers start getting synthesized upstream.
When discovery is mediated by LLMs, ranking a page is no longer sufficient because the system is not choosing a single best document. It is assembling an answer from spans that fit its internal representation of the problem, which quietly invalidates many of the assumptions SEO and ads were built on.
You can see this shift in the kinds of services being offered now. Instead of focusing on links, keywords, or bid optimization, teams are spending time on structured content that breaks cleanly into answerable fragments, on entity relationships and schema that make concepts legible to models, and on persona driven content that anticipates how questions will be interpreted rather than how pages will rank.
Measurement is shifting as well. Instead of impressions and clicks, people are running prompt level tests, checking whether their content shows up across different models, and tracking inclusion and citation patterns rather than traffic. In many cases, strong traditional pages disappear entirely from answers while smaller, better structured sources surface.
From the outside this looks like traffic declining. Internally it feels more like a loss of observability, where you cannot tell whether you were excluded, partially used, or summarized away into latent knowledge.
Google will likely face the same issue as AI Mode expands. Generating answers is not the hard part. Defining what visibility means when the retrieval layer is no longer exposed is.
Perhaps catering towards TikTok experiences, help them make the videos that they then share with their friends.
‘Pic or it didn’t happen’ has now been replaced by ‘TikTok or it didn’t happen.’ Is it possible to enjoy something without there being video evidence of it? According to my gf and her female friends the answer appears to be no.
Such thick tension in the air waiting for the first courageous company to place ads on their LLM chats and tools.
They can spare their ad income falling for a while, but making the first move is always risky. Should they let openAI go first and fail?
Where do you go now? You go make sure LLMs know about your site, you welcome the herds of bot crawlers and pray someone breaks the standstill before your business falters.
I'm amazed people on HN still use Google tbh. What for? Do you expect them to get better or treat your eyeballs and attention with more dignity anytime soon?
There's Kagi, Brave Search, even DDG would be better.
You’re definitely not alone in this, I’ve seen similar drops from Google Ads recently.
It feels less like bad optimization and more like the ground shifting under everyone.
The AdWords platform is extremely complicated nowadays, and try as I might I can’t get any impressions from it. I then went through a period with an AdWords specialist from their team who also couldn’t get any impressions. It’s like they don’t want or need my money.
Watching other people use Google, the predominant method of searching for information involves a query followed by getting their answer from the AI summary that appears above any search results.
I'm not sure what impact this would be having on Adwords, but another commenter mentions that Google isn't hurting in the ad revenue department.
While TFA is anecdote, the author mentions maintaining their spend, being gifted adword budget, and getting lower returns so increasing spend.
This suggests adword revenue is up, conversion to adword 'dollar' balances is inflating those balances, so both return per dollar in is down and even more down is return per adword balance dollar.
It's a leading indicator that quarterly-return focused Google must be scrambling to fix right now - they inflated themselves out of Q4 2025 but 2026 is a question mark, or to parle some Boxton Matrix, is the cash cow dying and if so is the extension strategy ad injection in AI responses, product placement in your AI videos, background changes in your family snaps, etc.
Say they drop 100bn on search revenue. How well are they positioned to convert their user platform and search crawling infrastructure onto Gemini, and introduce an advertising platform into LLMs to replace what they had? I imagine they are as well positioned as OpenAI.
I would lose a lot of sleep if I paid out for puts on them.
Reminds me of the whale oil business being replaced by petroleum. Except the ad-based economy was effectively a google monopsony. I'm surprised the OP managed to make ad revenue for a decade, but to me at always seemed about casino-ish and snake-oily. A decade is impressive but I think we all knew where this was going. I think the question is: will another monopsony for ads arise or will it be content based only? It seems YouTUbe is poised to be the next google since more people watch YouTube than cable, so the audience is captive since there's no alternative (yes I realize Google owns YouTube). But that's still a parasitic economy sucking from google. "Where to go now?" depends on if another ad server can gain dominance, otherwise the answer is "nowhere".
Google Ads started charging me $5 per click on low traffic search keywords this week, meanwhile YouTube ads are still 20 cents a click (presumably to keep up with Meta)
They're having a laugh if they think we'll keep paying that for no actual leads.
“Research shows” Lool!! Ask anyone in their teens or 20s even 30s. They’ll all answer what you did in the article. Short attention spans are ruling and so are those social media applications you mentioned.
I think it's time for a new way of discovering products. My ideal would be some sort of site that I can go to, to find services and products in my local area. There could also be national and international sections, with user ranked news of new interesting products in given categories.
For example, with video games I can go to sites like www.rockpapershotgun.com or others, or forums related to games, to see what the new products coming out. That's perfect in my world. No ads in my search, no ads in my email, no ads in youtube or whatever. But when I'm interested in seeing what's new, I can, on my terms, go and check out the new products.
Anecdotally it seems like a lot of people go to whatever LLM they have access to and ask it what to do. Surely the next frontier of advertising products is directly injecting recommendations into the response from the LLM. Or at least make the answer incorporate products and services somehow, similar to how influencers do paid content in a seamless way alongside their main content.
I know very little about online marketing, but my Googler marketing friend told me that just 6 months ago everybody would Google search three word terms: “best Chinatown dumpling”
But now people Google search: “my boyfriend is coming to town for the holidays and we are going to Chinatown and I want to have delicious dumplings with him because it was what we had on our first date, where should we go?”
So he now works to sell AdWords properly in that environment. I am wondering how or if OP took that into account with their new spend. What are other people doing?
I’ve also heard (probably via post+comments here on HN) that the new SEO is making tons of AI slop info pages on the site, not for humans but for AI crawlers to slurp, and then refer from prompts.
Anecdotally, this article seems to match with what I am witnessing regarding browsing habits. I am planning a big trip with others and everything is being found via social media apps; destination ideas, experiences, cafes, accommodation, etc.
This post and these comments give me low confidence in our HN community. No one here seems to understand ad platforms.
Google is far from dead. It still has the majority of the world’s online ad revenue, with Microsoft coming in second, then Meta at a far third. People assume that TikTok and Insta _must_ have the most since they assume that’s what all of their friends use, but even though they’re growing, they’re still not there yet.
Video ads on YouTube and others have a lot of play also, and everyone thinks of the TV commercials played during the Super Bowl.
But Google is still f-ing everywhere.
It’s fine to call them dying, but are they really when they are best positioned for ads in AI? OpenAI or Anthropic don’t have the data about users that Google has. There’s a reason that Buffett invested in Alphabet recently.
This feels like one of the most surreal things I have read in a while, believing that the blog is authentically written by a real person. I can't put my finger on why.
Is this really about Tiktok or about AI and how people are consuming the web? Used to be all web, then web+Tiktok,etc, now only AI+Tiktok, etc? I think I go to normal websites way less than I used to. Maybe everyone is doing that?
Apparently you should be getting ready to buy ad campaigns from LLM companies because they are going to inject ads into the responses soon. Young people are using LLMs like crazy in my experience.
The real story isn't that Google Ads stopped working, it's that attention moved somewhere ads can't follow. You can't buy placement in a Discord server or an iMessage group chat. If this is the new normal, the entire ad-supported internet is running on borrowed time.
It wouldn't surprise me if physical advertising, as mentioned in the post, makes a comeback. Especially coupled with magazines etc apparently making a comeback too.
Also, a lot of ads now have QR codes so you can tell which physical ads are driving versus traffic versus those that aren't.
e.g. the "half of my advertising is a waste but I don't know which half" is not true anymore if you are using specific QR codes per location/advertisement.
I assume physical still works. LIDL closed their shop in our neighborhood, so we stopped going unless their paper ads were interesting. Then they decided with a lot of fanfare to go all-in on digital, and as they decided we should want their ads we should install their app. Well, naughty us, we didn't. We simply stopped shopping there completely. A few months later, the paper ads are back (with a lot less fanfare), and no other shop followed their lead, so I assume LIDL was hurting hard.
I think this article title misled me a bit... Google seems to be fine but it's no longer driving traffic through Ad Words. I think that in particular is really getting messed up by AI since people often don't go to any Web site once an AI agent answers their question.
It's only going to get worse from here. Everything is trending towards zero for any kind of online service as it gets easier to make software with LLMs. There just simply won't any moat left.
One anecdote, but I have a brick and mortar business and Adwords leads have fallen off a cliff year over year. Since AI stuff started getting pushed harder we've gotten fewer impressions and fewer conversions. Some of it is economic headwinds but also Google is just a black box we throw money into and pray it will send us business.
Google never sells your data to anyone. Why would they sell the primary data that they themselves use to determine how to show you ads? Doing so means a deep-pocketed new advertising platform can just buy data from Google and get started with competing against Google on their primary revenue source. It’s like having a goose that lays golden eggs and selling the goose. It’s corporate suicide. I’m surprised anyone on HN even believes Google will sell your data. It takes five seconds of thinking to dispel that notion.
Is there such a thing as a good ad? I've always blocked them on all platforms.
Looking at instagram where I don't block anything, most of what it suggests to me are soft porn or soft scams (generic chinese dropships marketed as a unique innovation).
I mean, you mean "I've always tried to block 'obvious' ads in the places I expect obvious ads to be".
The thing is the world of ads is far larger and more complicated than that. Just think of product placement in movies? That is an ad, have you stopped watching most movies?
What about content that is a thinly veiled ad? What about a set of bots that follows everything you post on line, and when it's little AI core figures out you are looking for something makes a suggestion under a post where you're asking questions?
you wrongly assumed about tiktok or shortform content.
In last 6 months I only visited google for 2 things. Searching and looking at reviews of restaurants or shops. And of course navigation in maps. Other than that I never use google now a days. I'm sure there are a lot like me.
Kagi is building their own index. There are also other open indexes. Over time these can replace the big corporate indexes. The hard truth is that the big players in search are dead. They are now the yahoo of search, with landing pages full of ads and results that are primarily ads.
Search engines can usually search the closed web as well.
Also, incentives are super high for businesses to create quality content for the open web to drive business. For example a car tire manufacturer could publish reliable restaurant reviews in order to encourage driving.
psa, "is comprised of" is almost never correct. "comprises" means "is composed of". so when people say X is comprised of Y they really mean "X comprises Y" or "X is composed of Y"
Try contacting YouTube creators in your area. Much more cost efficient than any other kinds of ads especially if you pick channels with your target audience IF you can actually get creators to promote you (most won't reply).
Google isn’t dead, but it’s no longer the single answer. Even Mark Zuckerberg recently acknowledged how fast Google is improving, which explains why Meta is pushing AI harder. Still, competing shouldn’t mean replacing what already works.
They'll presumably monetize their AI (more) on both ends: getting you to pay for more access and getting advertisers to pay to be mentioned more often in the outputs. I mean that isn't really a bad position for them if you "using the Internet" degrades into you just sitting there typing queries in their Web app and never going anywhere else.
I work in private events and the answer is definitely Facebook. Facebook ads have been better for quite some time. Targeting is a harder but also the CPCs are a lot lower so you can spray and pray a bit more.
Thanks, we tried them before but many years have passed and things have changed. Our new Instagram campaign just bore fruit in the first hour (4 WhatsApp enquiries with $1.50 spent!), will be looking at FB also
I was intrigued to see this trending, because it seems to contradict what Google has been saying on earnings calls.
It also made me wonder if this reflects conditions for individuals / SMEs rather than large corporate accounts. And I didn’t expect the story to come out of Durban - I would’ve guessed the US.
I haven't been to Durban lately, but my understanding is that the broader SA economy has been under pressure (high unemployment, etc.), and that can hit smaller/local businesses first. So it could simply be a rough patch for your market right now.
That said, if you’re seeing campaigns picking up on other platforms, you might be onto something, at least for your niche.
Looking at your website/content: you’re selling an experience, and this seems like a product that really benefits from strong visual marketing. Make it easy for someone new to "get it" in the first 10 seconds.
Three ideas:
1) Ride local trends: build demos around what’s currently hot in SA/Durban and showcase that with the Magicpods in short, punchy videos.
2) Consider adjacent use cases: beyond magic shows, this could be compelling for advertising, especially at conventions (e.g., ICC). That might be a natural expansion path if event bookings are slowing.
3) Try Airbnb Experiences, or local platforms, like daddysdeals.co.za :-)
The mainstream leaving Google search and the general web would be a chance for both getting better again. A new equilibrium will establish itself one way or the other.
It's a chance.. But which for-profit environments are not going to do whatever is necessary to try to win that role and how will the worst of them not have the most profitable model?
I'm glad as hell not to run a business and never plan to, but it's interesting to think as a consumer where I would try to get information like this. Guy's running a service that provides in-person entertainment for events and parties, seemingly things like clowns and magicians, maybe small-time bands or what-not.
Seemingly you don't want to target children directly. If they ask their parents for specific entertainment at a party, they're going to ask for entertainers they know, not companies acting as brokers and middlemen. They might want a particular clown (but probably not) but will never want a particular local vendor of clowns. You need to target the parents for that. If it were me doing the buying, I'd probably prioritize word of mouth recommendations if anyone had such, and otherwise for a large enough event like a wedding or graduation party, I'd look to professional planners. Assuming that's any kind of widespread pattern, you'd want to target strong relationships with planners rather than trying to advertise directly to consumers.
Did people really ever search Google to find party entertainment, and then ignore the search results and use the ads instead? Let alone Tik Tok videos? I guess I'm out of touch enough that the answer can be yes and I'm just that clueless about how small businesses work, but all the comments talking about LLM chatbot services are tripping me out. Y'all would ask ChatGPT who to hire for your kid's party?
you can buy ads on instagram, fb, tiktok, reddit, youtube, amazon, apple iOS apps, the M$ windows start menu (apparently), and soon OpenAI (gemini gotta be following right)!
> Right now, though – I’m broke. Anyone need a website or IOT project built? I am AI assisted, very fast!
Oh wow, this author is tone deaf to the entire situation that is occurring in the world right now. I just had a conversation with my 70 year old Aunt (no tech skills) about AI and its impact on the labor market and I used the example of how for the first time ever I actually believe she could build her own iPhone app by just talking to her computer. This is an hypothetical app that would have cost her $10k-100k or more in the very recent past. I really think the market for the very services this author is selling is evaporating or at least on hold while everyone is at least trying to diy it with AI.
Sorry in advance if this comes off as hostile, that's not my intent. I am genuinely wondering: You're in the business of advertising? And you're upset that Google isn't your golden goose anymore?
Though, that doesn't really conflict with the story. He increased his ad spend before he figured out it wasn't working. Which would be more $$ for Google.
is super ineffective, indeed. if you need to pay 20$ to get s.o. to pay you 50$ for a service/product, well in all honesty calling people one by one and giving them 10$ is more likely to result in sale.
- Google, the company, is doing pretty well in the stock market.
- Google, the advertising company, isn't generating good ROI for its advertising customers.
From Google's point of view, they've been very gunshy about having ads be their only revenue stream for years; I wouldn't be surprised that the consequence is the value there is drying up.
Yet if I turn off my ads my sales drop to nearly nothing, but when I turn them on again I get a steady flow of new customers as well as some repeaters who either forgot about us or needed a reminder to buy again, sometimes literally years later.
It all depends on how big you are, what you sell, and how people can or will find you. I sell something that some people REALLY want, but they will never think to Google if it exists, they just think it's not available anymore/end of story, and I rank #1 unpaid, it's frustrating.
Now I only have one ad platform I can get to work at this point and I've wasted so much money on others, trying again every few months, but they all seem to suck or I don't have the patience and pockets to try and figure them out compared to how I've figured out the one that works enough to make a living off of.
I don't know what click fraud is but it's a very small entertainment agency market in Durban, South Africa's 3rd largest city. We only advertised locally (specified in AdWords)
Click fraud is malicious activity where someone runs bots that click on ads for specific category keywords. For example, if this is a villa rental website, someone like competitors or a large platform, might use ad agencies that perform click fraud against the villa rental website to exhaust their budget and therefore get more traffic themselves. In the case of an entertainment agency, it might be other competitors interested in your traffic.
The first step you might take is to check that you are not advertising with AdWords partner networks, as they might be the reason for the clicks on your ads.
Second, you can check your server logs and verify clicks from Google Ads, especially the geolocation of those clicks. If they are not from your region and the visitors perform no action after viewing the first page, this is most probably click fraud.
I use our own open-source security platform (I'm a co-founder) for this purpose (1), as it's server-side and works even if bots aren't running JS. However, your website analytics might also be useful if they can collect events without JS.
Where do you go know - maybe realize that ads make everyone around miserable and with this bitter understanding go through painful but necessary process of finding other means of earning money.
Instagram (one of the potential targets of the author to replace Google Ads) became unusable for me with this last update, where they make you wait for ads to finish.
Not that I ever used it much (in fact, after all these years, I still didn't wrap my mind around anything but simple posts), but now, I basically only go there to do a post about a group I have (and that I had to remove from Meetup because Meetup is equal shares of terribly bad and terribly expensive) and answer some messages.
There's a generation (in fact several) of people that still want to meet in person, and the platforms that allowed us to create and join groups for it (Meetup was great for that during a golden period of 3-4 years) are all turning into garbage.
Here's the business model in a nutshell: If you want AI to recommend your business for some purpose, you must pay to have it included in the training corpus. And you will pay fees every time those vectors get used for outputs. And if you don't pay, you don't get mentioned.
Contextual ads is the answer. You sell shoes, go and advertise on fashion related sites. I don't want to see a shoe ad while I'm browsing a gaming site just because I did some relative search a week ago. It's so fucking annoying and I never understood why Google never bothered to try some alternative too. I don't mean completely replace behavioral targeting but at the very least try some contextual one too.
A few things to determine if what you're experiencing is actually Google "being dead"
1. Check your search volume. Use Google Trends or the method I will share below.
2. Check how you spent in December vs how you spent during a previously great time. Understand if it's a volume issue or a conversion issue
3. See if anyone new entered your auction. If they did, find out what they're saying
-- 1a) Search Volume
Checking search volume: In the era of broad match, this is one of the most underrated approaches to diagnosing issues. Take a look at your `search exact match impression share` relative to your impressions on a few of your top keywords. Then measure out if search volume for your business is actually decreasing. Then, use the following rubric to diagnose futher:
1. Not decreasing. Move on to the next item
2. 5-10% decrease and competitive auction. If you have a decrease AND a competitive auction, a 20% drop in efficiency could be explained.
3. 5-10% decrease and a not-so-competitive auction. If this is the case, the drop in volume may not be what's causing your issues.
-- 1b) Click volume
Check your exact match impression > click rate. Similar to the last approach, this helps diagnose if there are SERP feature changes which could decrease the amount of clicks you're receiving despite demand remaining flat.
If this is the case, take a look at the SERP and find the new winners.
-- 2) Segment comparison
Compare December YOY and see what changed. Are you serving to a different age range? Different search term mix? Increased spend to search partners? Are the headline combinations which are serving different?
-- 3) Auction changes
Have you checked your auction insights? Are new competitors being more or less aggressive? If so, what are their headlines? Are they offering an easier booking experience than you are?
And... if Google is actually dead, you might try:
1. Meta ads. Turn off audience network, make sure you've got the conversions API set up, and see what happens. Expect leads to be lower intent. Make your creative dead simple. "If you're looking for kid party entertainment in Northdene..." Start with $20/day optimizing for leads.
2. Improve your form. I see typeform-style-forms do better than the long one you have.
3. (Maybe) If you don't already track `closed (won)` conversions into your google ads account, that could help. I find when I start tracking which searches turn into deals, I can restructure my account to de-prioritize the junk leads.
4. (Maybe) Add a soft form to each of your service pages. Basically an embedded form which starts by asking people softball questions like "How Old Are The Kids At Your Party." Once people start a form they're much more likely to complete it, even if the questions are very basic.
5. (Maybe) Add a way to give a phone call. Phone call leads convert 30-50% better in my experience. But, this isn't an option for every
I remember the rise and the fall of AltaVista search engine.
I remember the rise of Google that was able to circumvent all the "old days" SEO efforts by spamming keywords in the HTML headers. Then everyone was trying to guess how to game Google page rank algo.
Finally people learned how to cheat Google, searches on many topics are returning endless pages of spam, marketing content that is supposed to earn AdSenens money (Google's "disruption" of online ads, better than all those cringe banners, that, eventually, destroyed Google search).
Right now Bing is working better for me (Bing! WTF?), for some stuff I use Yandex (shrug), but most of the stuff goes through AI, if you ask them to provide source of the information and you check it, this seems to be working fine...
For the time being, until people learn how to feed AI bots with the manipulated content they want. This will be probably more complicated, but it will happen (gaming page rank was also harder than adding "right" words to HTML keywords), unless AI providers will be careful with what they give as a food for their hungry Nvidia GPUs.
But this will be more expensive than blindly scanning the internet. That's why I see here a proper place where governments should step in, finance curation of the content for AI, as this will benefit society in a big way.
I see here an opportunity for smaller players, like Mistral, who can get some gov/EU funding and provide more quality than others who will devour whatever they find.
Can we also talk about how dogshit YouTube Search has been the last 2 years? Some videos have turned to shorts, but they're not searchable through their search API, making the feature pretty useless.
The jump from the op's "i screwed up my google ads campaigns" to "Research shows that many young people are getting their information from short video platforms like TikTok"....
Judging by the post this guy advertises his kids entertainment business to young people. With recent crackdowns on age verification etc. it could be his ads are no longer reaching the audience they used to.
Now I wonder how long until AI chat tool are riddled with ads, and with shitty content because of people trying to game them just like they've been gaming search engines.
Another explanation is that when the cost of living is high, people reduce their spending on entertainment. If that's the case, no amount of advertising will materially shift your bottom line.
I am glad to not be the only one to come to a similar conclusion. But we need to go one step further: I believe that Google has become harmful to the world in its present form. I'll skip listing all reasons, as there are many other websites that detailed this already, as well as (ironically) youtube videos. The problem goes much deeper than "merely" Google's monopoly in regards to all that ad-money. This is indeed probably the biggest reason why Google sucks so much nowadays, but the problem really is much bigger than that; it also taps into politics, what with the orange King meta-protecting these mega-corporations and the tech-bros ruthlessly abusing the rest of the world. We need real change, substantial change. Fixing Google is one important step but not the only one - but let's focus on Google mostly here, to simplify things a little.
The big underlying problem is that Google has no real incentive to change the way how it operates. Its search engine, which they crippled, is not really that important to Google anymore compared to the ad-revenue and other business ventures here. AI is the current insanity rage and Google went for it too. When you cripple the search engine, you can sell more bullshit to people, fake-generate and hallucinate a world wide web that is controlled by these walled garden corporations (Facebook is probably the best example of a walled garden, but there are many similar; twitter run by a crazy oligarch too, "bla bla bla log in to read news bla bla bla" - never going to do that, so they cut off my access to an open world wide web here).
I do not think Google can be fixed with the current setup though. It will just continue to steal money by taking our data and interconnecting this with other greedy private interests, now represented by lobbyists running the USA (and also other places, of course; just the USA being bigger than the other places, economically).
Google has to be split up and removed. There is no other way to fix it anymore. They want down a path from which they can not change anymore, because any change means less revenue, and no corporation wants to do so on its own.
> Research shows that many young people are getting their information from short video platforms like TikTok and Instagram. We are trying ads on there.
Well - circusscientist adds to this problem. They depend on ads, so they contribute to the overall problem. The issue is not just Google here; it is also commercial interests who think they have a right to pester-harass people via irrelevant crap (aka ads). Google killed ublock origin. Google controls the web virtually via chrome. We have a conflict of interests here. Google has no reason to change this, and many companies think they need to use ads. This is a problem. I believe in an ad-free world. I don't want to see any ads. Many years of commercial interests confused people into thinking ads are the way to go. I disagree. I think ads are evil and must die. And companies that have no alternative business model, who rely on ads, also have to go. Google is just sitting on top of it all, acting as a greedy parasite.
> We have an email newsletter
They still think anyone cares about email spam. I never subscribe to any "newsletter". A better model is to read up on things WHEN YOU VISIT THE WEBSITE.
This works on many private websites too such as github. I can read when I want
to, not when some bot spams me down with this irrelevant stuff (and admittedly I would not read ads anyway, but my point is about DELIVERY versus VISITING something here).
> We also plan to do some actual physical advertising
So he chose confrontation.
> I am AI assisted, very fast!
Why would I want to give my money to anyone using ads or
wanting to lower the overall quality via AI? That makes no
sense. Some people are beyond hope.
Look, the 90's Internet isn't cool anymore. Sorry. Things are cool for a while and then they're not.
Franchises die. It's still cool to say "The originals were really cool", and always will be, but now we're talking about now. Star Wars is uncool. There are people who sort of automatically praise it and subtly put down those who don't like they're aligned with a magnetic field, sure, but they're in their own world. Indiana Jones and Ghostbusters are uncool now. Star Trek is almost there. AI is not cool and never will be. Tiktok is cool, but soon everything that is uncool will descend upon it.
Sorry. Bananas blacken and apples get spots. Time moves on.
I don't know why people are so aggressively downvoting this. It's the honest truth.
I grew up before Google, I remember when it was just a useful search tool. Then an industry grew up around exploiting it in various ways and ads became a major revenue source for Google, completely changing the platform. I witnessed this entire online marketing/ad industry come into existence.
I have friends who worked in SEO for years. Very talented, smart people. But that industry is gone now. Likewise Google ads is clearly not long for this world as Google will probably get a lot more money leveraging their AI for product recommendations/sales etc.
People used creative thinking to create this industry, so the answer to "where do we go now?" is find the next one. It won't just be the same thing repeated, just like SEO and ad optimization where fairly major departures from the previous world of advertising and marketing they came from.
Did you read the page? The context is very clear: a small business that had for years gotten a lot of its leads/customers from Adwords is seeing that Adwords ("Google" in context) is not working. They are then asking (other small businesses in the same situation, "where do we go now?").
There nothing about nostalgia, no real concern for Google as a company, or how the web used to work, etc. Just a small business trying to stay afloat.
let's take back the interwebs and have a single account where all apps store their data about you, which you can move around and also swap out clients for any data without companies blocking you
This is actually the most legit thing I can think of that could be behind an ad. It looks like an actual small business that is using ads as a replacement for the yellow pages, presumably when people are searching for party entertainment. I had assumed that basically all online ads were just straight up scams.
That said, I don’t ever want to see ads for it either. If I lived in Durban and wanted a juggling act, I’d like to be able to find it, as I’m sure all their clients would. I wonder if the market is just very competitive, or if they don’t show up on regulular searches for some reason.
Checked out as instructed, it somehow made me empathetic towards the OP. Not only the business completely harmless, it's the opposite: their job is trying to make people happy, and it's lovely.
Off-topic reply but I don't want to start another comment:
The problem about Google and AI has deeper layers: AI answers has trained users to not look into the source information (a.k.a websites), and websites are combating it by making themselves harder to crawl (for example, by enabling Cloudflare protection/verification), which in turn makes creating new search engine harder.
This down circle is currently unbreakable, which is a hellish situation for new comers, but great for established players such as Reddit, Facebook etc since they have internal search engine as well as mountains amount of content to provide.
If one day the big platforms (there are only handful of them) completely blocked Google from crawling them, that will be the true death of Google.
I agree, that site looks like the owners lack basic self-awareness. Surely they must use the modern internet and recognize the difference?
And if they’re unable to invest in their site or they’re simply shut out of the modern world, I’d assume the same applies to other aspects of their business as well.
I knew about duckduckgo for years and it was always too much friction to switch. I tried like 4 times but always went back to google when I had to research something quickly. Eventually the friction of using google became high enough though that the friction of switching was not that much higher. I’ve been using ddg and occasionally duck ai for over a year now.
I recently took someone to go and watch a hockey game. Been a little while but I personally played as a goalie myself.
The person kept making the comment that she couldn't see/find the puck and it made it frustrating to watch.
As a goalie, not being able to see the puck is pretty normal (especially with big bodies trying to screen you).
What I told her was that what matters a lot more than where the puck is, is where it's going to be in about two seconds. But the next best thing is to know where the puck is now.
If you can't see the puck then look at the players and as a last resort, look at the ref. 99% of the time they will be looking at the puck. Look where they're looking and soon enough it will appear.
I think this applies very much to this whole Google question.
The puck is gone (or on the way to the other side of the rink) and everyone is confused where it is or where it's going.
Look where everyone is looking and you'll find your answer there. It may not be in the same form as Google adwords, but the game is the same. Leveraging attention.
The tactics were different during the phonebook days (it was having your business start with the letter "A") as opposed to Google and will be different for the next thing as well.
From what I can tell, everyone seems to be looking at chatbots and vertical, shortform video. Not sure how that plays out in terms of advertising, but in terms of the answer to this article's question, that seems like a good place to start.
In my anecdotal experience, it's moved to private, trust-based channels: iMessage, WhatsApp, email, face-to-face interactions. Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring the public and the private has finally ended: people don't want to be online, don't trust social media, don't really trust any media, and are living simple local lives with a small circle of friends that they get together with regularly in person.
But then, my anecdotal experience may not be representative of most of the world. Most of my friends have money, houses, kids, friends - all of which are, by the numbers, rarities these days.
It's an interesting thought experiment to explore what it means if that actually is the new normal, and people are not consuming media or much of anything, or even if the people who are still addicted to social media are now tapped out and don't have any more disposable income left to spend. Probably economic depression. If everybody bought only what they needed and ignored all the advertisements, our present level of economic activity would plunge.
I had a very interesting discussion with a friend today, where I was talking to her about the /r/golang thread about Rob Pike's comments to OpenAI and how the thread was full of bots talking with other bots. No idea why the density of bots was so high in that thread, it was kind of absurd to see.
Then she said: "I know nobody that comments on online forums. Nobody would ever comment to strangers on the internet. It's too dangerous."
Took me a while to grasp what she meant with that, but I think she's right. Trust has eroded so much over the last two decades that most forums are either full of bots or full of annoyed and toxic people. It's very rare to find welcoming communities to newbies, and most of the ones I have discovered were offline connections.
She also mentioned that all of her friends use private profiles only, because having public profiles is too dangerous because of stalkers.
To me this sounded a bit absurd at first, but maybe that's a different perception on "how to use" the internet from a different younger generation that grew up post-socialmedia? My first contact with the internet was MIT opencourseware, her first contact was receiving dick pics at the age of 10 from assholes on the other side of the planet.
I miss the old phpbb forum days when the most toxic comment was someone being snarky and derailing the discussion into "did you use the search function?"
No idea how to fix the internet, maybe it's time to move to gopher or another protocol :-/
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Absolutely this. I recently got a nice photo taken with my kids and for the first time I... didn't post it on Facebook. I sent it to my family group chat. Yesterday I posted on Facebook for the first time in months and it was about the power being out for an hour in the ice storm. I haven't posted travel photos to FB in years.
I'm mostly still on FB at all for the acquaintance-level connections to things like neighbourhood, church, and hobby communities. All the people I actually care about are in private group chats.
I was reflecting recently that Google Plus actually had the right idea back in 2011 with "circles", but at the time we all said it was too hard figuring out which circles we wanted to share a particular message or thought with. Hmm, maybe they were ahead of the game all along?
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It's interesting to see how much of a behemoth Discord has become. Seems like there's a Discord for everything - from open source projects to hobbies and games to individual groups of friends/family.
It's occupying the segment that subreddits historically have. However, it's perhaps-intentionally search-opaque. You can't Google to find a message/link/download that's gated by Discord. And it also gives a sense of community, where someone who had more attention and time on a computer than a sense of what to do with those things can go have casual conversation with… someone.
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None of the numbers I've seen on web usage, platform usage, etc. indicate people are significantly pulling away from online lives. Though, there has been a slight dip in daily social media browsing time in the last couple of years (of course, it also follows the end of the pandemic, and it hasn't ceded back to where it was prior).
That does sound like a rather charmed life though. Could also be a sign that people are reverting to using the social internet apart from their irl acquaintances as well.
Linking up with all of our irl acquaintances through the public web was a terrible mistake imo. Seeking privacy can mean many different things.
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My two kids absolutely do not trust open social media (thankfully). My 16 year old has a IMessage group with his friends as well as a discord and that’s it. My 13 year old just uses iMessage with his friend group. My wife and I have taught them the risks of social media but never to the degree of their current distrust. They seem to have picked it ip on their own and want no part of X, insta, TikTok or anything else. They just want to talk to the friends they know.
100% this. I used to be a "digital native". I guess I have migrated away from my native lands and now I am a boring old local again.
> Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring the public and the private has finally ended
I wish you were right. We took our kid to a stage show she really wanted to see. People round us kept checking their phones. They weren’t even really checking them. They held them and would turn the screen on and off, lighting the place up.
They couldn’t be without them for more than 5 minutes. This, after 30 mins of painful selfies before the show. It’s awful.
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People didn’t leave social media, social media left them. Instagram used to show your friends, not it shows algorithmic content. Same for the other networks. People are still there but it’s now the new tv.
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> It's an interesting thought experiment to explore what it means if that actually is the new normal, and people are not consuming media or much of anything, or even if the people who are still addicted to social media are now tapped out and don't have any more disposable income left to spend.
Even if they do have disposable income to spend, the lack of working ads means that they're getting their vendors in a different way.
Some speculation follows: If advertisements as the main driver of sales went away, wouldn't that help smaller players gain a foothold against incumbents? Because, while incumbents can use their war chest to push all newcomers to page 2 of the results. If the awareness is coming from somewhere else, being on page 2 of the results doesn't matter anymore, because no one is even seeing page 1 of the results anyway!
It's the people with money, houses, and kids that departed the 'simple local' lifestyle when the Internet and social media become large. It's them that are re-discovering the joys of the simple local lifestyle.
The simple local lifestyle is that which was lived by all of humanity for all of history up until the last ~75 years (give or take).
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I'd say it was much shorter than 30 years. Facebook opened to the public in 2006, and I was surprised to learn Myspace (the first "normie" space on the Web) isn't much older. And before that your digital persona was separate from your offline persona, unless you were one of the grognards with a faculty .edu address.
> people don't want to be online, don't trust social media, don't really trust any media, and are living simple local lives with a small circle of friends that they get together with regularly in person.
Not true. People post their entire lives (OK not entire, but the positive parts) on social media every day for the public to see.
The brief period where I could check Facebook and reliably find someone's name I forgot or figure out how to contact people or invite them to a gathering was pretty nice. Now everyone's on fifty apps I don't use, or installed but never remember to check. Oh well. Sorry, too stimulating for me to join your Discord and get hundreds of notifications, most of which don't concern me at all.
From my own experience as one grows over their 30's, or probably much older, to get to what you mentioned "money, houses, kids, friends", these ads pretty much don't target u very effectively any ways because one's priorities are shifted and you care more about other things than what the attention economy is all about. IOW these ads all about the people who have attention to spare.
I’ve known a lot of neurodivergent and LGBT people, and I was in my late teens when The Internet happened and a young adult when the Web happened.
If you’re not within a couple standard deviations of boring, local living is isolating. Al Gore gave a mea culpa speech at one point because he thought, as a Senator, that legislating to give everyone the Internet would halt the rural brain drain but it had the opposite effect. People learned that they weren’t alone, they were just surrounded by (my words, not his) idiots and so they moved to where their people were. They voted with their feet in droves.
Ultimately, the Internet is good for support. It lets you find people who have the same obscure cancer your child has. Who are dealing with the same sort of neuroses your mom has. Who are being defrauded by a corporation in the same way. Who have the same feelings that the people around you ridicule you for even the hint of having. It lets these people find the patterns, see other people are feeling the same things they do, stop being gaslit.
Everything else has become about dopamine and money. And for those parts we should definitely unplug. But without forums or chat threads that same feeling of being The Other comes back.
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> WhatsApp
This one is on its way to becoming part of the social media ecosystem. That's what the "Updates" feature is.
To get an idea of what it will look like, check out Instagram users who use it for both 1:1 messaging and social media (1:many) features. Which (again anecdotally) is widely used in younger generations.
Few of my friends use Instagram or TikTok, but I think we're just outliers. I see many (young) users, all the time, whenever I'm on the train.
> Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring the public and the private has finally ended: people don't want to be online, don't trust social media, don't really trust any media, and are living simple local lives with a small circle of friends that they get together with regularly in person.
That's a nice narrative, but its simplicity clashes with reality.
I am a gen-z and most of my peers look at me weird when I express the same. It was once cool to have social media and presence -- I was only 8 when I made a facebook account. But now, things are different. I actively avoid social media and don't like to show myself online anywhere other than my personal website.
I regularly do improv every week, which is essentially improvised live theater. So some time is spent not watching youtube or some sort of electronic intermediaries.
Which is actually pretty odd, because improvisational comedy as we know it today is younger than the film industry.
> In my anecdotal experience, it's moved to private, trust-based channels
The Return of Content Curation. Peer-to-peer: research, retrieval, review.
> my anecdotal experience, it's moved to private, trust-based channels: iMessage, WhatsApp, email, face-to-face interactions
I can attest to this based on my circle of friends and acquaintances. Email not so much but yeah WA etc. I think people are done putting content that matters to them on public platforms. So all we see now on FB/Insta is memes, influencers or ads.
Meta appears to believe this, and so is pushing chatbot integration into private chats on Messenger and WhatsApp; presumably that will be the vector by which they push product advertisements.
> If everybody bought only what they needed and ignored all the advertisements, our present level of economic activity would plunge.
Why would it plunge instead of re-focusing on things that are intrinsically important?
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What’s really interesting to me is how this coincides with a larger push to break up more and more ties that kept our society going for the last 30–50 years. Look at what’s happening to globalization and the push to near-shore. Look at the fragmentation of media into private channels and closed groups, the erosion of shared narratives, and the growing skepticism toward institutions that used to act as connective tissue.
Individually, many of these shifts make sense: resilience over efficiency, trust over reach, local over global. But collectively they point to a world that is becoming more segmented, less interoperable, and harder to coordinate at scale. If fewer people participate in shared public spaces, economic, cultural, or informational, it’s not just advertising models that break, but the assumptions underpinning growth, politics, and even social cohesion.
That doesn’t necessarily mean collapse, but it does suggest a lower energy equilibrium: slower growth, fewer mass phenomena, more parallel realities. The open question is whether we can rebuild new forms of shared infrastructure and trust at smaller scales—or whether we simply learn to live with a more fragmented, quieter, and less synchronized society.
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> people don't want to be online, don't trust social media, don't really trust any media, and are living simple local lives with a small circle of friends that they get together with regularly in person.
maaaaybe 2% of the people…
I think you're correct to a degree. Instututions like social media and google ads were given a very generous chance, we gave them our money and attention, they gave us scams (especially facebook) and enshittification.
The loss of faith in institutions takes quite a long time to occur but I think it will be quite a bit of effort to reverse.
This is 100% what I see too.
100% this. I remember when I took advantage of being online and not really competing in SEO, it was simply a matter of being real. At the time, I didn’t realize it was just arbitrage: I was naturally in a space with fewer participants and most organizations didn’t even know the rules yet.
Now that advantage is completely gone, and I have to build business the way it’s always been done in history: walking the streets while the online "broadcasted" world is a massive distraction.
> If everybody bought only what they needed and ignored all the advertisements, our present level of economic activity would plunge.
Shh! One must never question the ponzi scheme.
> The person kept making the comment that she couldn't see/find the puck and it made it frustrating to watch.
Lifelong hockey fan, I never understood this complaint. I believe it was FOX that did the 'highlight the puck' thing for a few years in the 1990's.
You can't see the ball in American football, either.
But you don't need to. The guy that's running and everyone is trying to tackle? He has the ball. Just like the guy skating across the ice with his stick on the ground? He's got the puck.
When you CAN see the puck/ball, either someone lost control of it, or they're shooting/throwing/passing it.
You're right - it was called FoxTrax, it's a fairly interesting piece of engineering.
It's pretty wild they were able to convince the NHL to use a modified puck with a battery and PCB inside, all so American viewers could better follow the action.
It was not well received in Canada :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FoxTrax
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> You can't see the ball in American football, either.
The average play must be what, like 5 seconds? So if you lose where the ball is you're not going to be confused for long.
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What I’ve always found fascinating is that I could always clearly see the puck in any stadium, no matter how high up I sat. It was impossible to miss.
However, when watching hockey on TV, it’s incredibly difficult to see the damn thing.
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The effect is so powerful, it fools professionals and the camera-operator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fioVbt7eF8
Even when the technique is known, everyone remains susceptible (the victim team in the above video is the trickster here): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSNTfFg4XW0
> American football
handegg*
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pretty common with my crowd of fans to even get a little giddy when the play is so deceptive that it fakes out the camera man and they dont realize theyre focused on the wrong player until a second or two passes
I'd go a step further and say the ball/puck is not the interesting thing to watch.
Imagine if you couldn't see the players, and just saw the puck. Would that be interesting at all?
Think about tennis. There is the trope of people's eyes going back and forth following the ball, but I don't think they are following the ball directly. They are going back and forth looking at the person who is going to hit the ball.
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> ...vertical, shortform video. Not sure how that plays out in terms of advertising...
I have seen a comment about them being terrible for advertising, it looks like a "good" idea but it is not.
The problem is that the attention of people watching these videos drop to almost zero, too much is happening in a too short amount of time, and as a result nothing is remembered, including the ads. It is a very good deal for whoever is monetizing this content, they show a lot of ads, plenty of revenue, but not for those who are paying for the ads. It is like subliminal messages, "good" idea, but not very effective. For ads to work, people need to pay attention.
I don't know how ads in chatbots will turn out and what form it will take, but I think it is inevitable.
It's kinda interesting to see how advertising is evolving. I'll mindlessly scroll Instagram reels once in a while and every other reel is an ad with the sponsored tag, with an obvious thing being sold and advertised. A fair amount of non-"ads" are influencers or celebrities promoting a product on their personal IGs with the #ad.
It's like advertising and social media are slowly merging together.
I couldn't say how effective it is. Who knows how much they paid that influencer and how much revenue it drives. But it sure is common.
For sure, I've been hesitantly awaiting ChatGPT's first "sponsored" reply, or at least, one that features a "sponsored" product or link.
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This is a great analogy and approach!
One rough heuristic I use is people-watching on the subway. Just a quick glance from a distance at their phones. What are they actually looking at? (Yeah I know it's a bit nosy...)
I see: short-form video, WhatsApp/Messaging, YouTube long-format - in that order.
It's short form video for sure. My wife just got 4 WhatsApp messages from our new Instagram campaign in 1 hour. Spent $1.50 so far.
So Zuckerberg is the ref now?
This is an analogy that is very appealing, which is precisely why I feel it sends the fundamentally wrong message.
There is not one single puck in the web search field, and we actively don't want that situation in the first place (want no monopoly or cartel). There should be at least 2 if not a ton more. Everyone focusing their attention and resource on a single thing is the absolute worst case scenario.
I also hope the future of search is not where every existing player is looking at. That means there is no disruption happening, money straight dictates the winner and nothing truly innovative is expected.
Even "skating where the puck will be" is essentially following someone else's play. It can be fine, but I'd prefer to focus on the person actually acting on the puck, where they're trying to lead the game.
Google is far from dead we need grounding of truth, and from what i hear they already have perplexity like answer engine in testing internally.
> The tactics were different during the phonebook days (it was having your business start with the letter "A") as opposed to Google and will be different for the next thing as well.
And to add to this, the dark pattern of the time was to register in the Phone Book as “AAA Your Real Business Name” which was exactly what my first job did.
Bang on. It's advertising, so literally looking at where people are getting their info from is the way to go.
Google searches don't produce good results these days. The enshittification has become too extreme. Google openly admits as much (and further intensifies the enshittification) by placing a huge AI summary above those results.
The answer is self evident. If, before, you were relying on clicks resulting from google searches, today you need to be what an AI recommends when somebody uses an AI like they used to use google. (Users will eventually become more sophisticated though!) Lots of people are using AI like a search engine and getting better results than google gives simply because massive resources are currently being put into training AI, while mere neglect is insufficient to explain how fast Google search results are getting worse.
Is this how AI companies plan to cash in? Accept money from advertisers to promote their products in interactions with their LLM's? Were I an advertiser, I'd be trying to get Anthropic to take my money instead of giving it to Google. AI might be what finally makes it impossible to tell content and ads apart. That's great for advertisers... I guess. Not so great for the rest of us.
> Google searches don't produce good results these days. The enshittification has become too extreme. Google openly admits as much (and further intensifies the enshittification) by placing a huge AI summary above those results.
I haven't asked Google a question it has failed to provide a more than adequate answer to in ... months? years?
And on all my devices, I run google search with &udm=14, so I am not talking about AI summaries. I also have search personalization disabled.
I see a lot of people complaining about this on HN. It simply doesn't match my experience at all, in any way.
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> Google openly admits as much (and further intensifies the enshittification) by placing a huge AI summary above those results.
The AI summary is not the problem; you could take it away and the experience would be just as poor.
In fact, the AI summary slightly improves the experience for faster readers.
Ice hockey player also here. Defence. Pretty neat analogy with Google. :)
> The tactics were different during the phonebook days (it was having your business start with the letter "A") as opposed to Google and will be different for the next thing as well. <
Interesting! I thought, they did it because of the stock-item-list order :-D
So maybe the puck is on TV?
Reason I say this is that this guy (Bob Hoffman)
https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=Ad+Cont...
says people watch ads on TV not the Internet.
AI SEO is where the attention is going, with ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/Google AI Overviews replacing the need for people to visit websites
I don't know why people are down-voting it. You might not like it, you may not think it's good. But this is absolutely happening and there's a lot of data out there about it.
It's unnatural to search an LLM for a product. It's why Alexa never became a shopping portal.
Best way to get the word out about a product now is through an influencer in the space.
-- Edit:
Show of hands for anyone using ChatGPT to shop. Be honest.
People don't even use Google to shop. They try to find something either (1) by brand name, eg. "iphone" or (2) generically by category, eg. "best cold weather tent".
In the former case, Google used their enormous, antitrust flaunting power and 90% browser marketshare to turn the URL bar into a competitive trademark bidding dragnet. Apple pays out the nose for the iPhone spot. For every click. And every other major corporation selling to business or consumer does the same. This is the source of Google's enormous wealth. Google is a middle man. You cannot conceivably get to a brand or product without paying the Google tax.
In the latter case, when people try to look up blogs and reviews and Reddit posts to compare products, Google gets in the way and inserts themselves into the flow. If LLMs make this experience even shittier, there won't be upstream content to source as no reward will reach the people providing the value. It will naturally atrophy over time.
As a new sales channel, young people are buying content off of TikTok and Instagram directly now. When they see influencers using products they like, it leads to massive sales volume. New unicorn consumer businesses are being minted regularly from this.
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I know this might seem reductive but when you say "look where everyone is looking", the answer hasn't really changed since the 2010s — it's our phones.
(and to some extent, monitors if you account for the amount of time 9-5 people spend on their work laptops or screens. desktop is not dead but that's another matter)
The hot apps are for now, chatbots and vertical shortform platforms. We know advertisers get much better bang for their buck marketing where the influencers are.
Google is "dead" because search advertising is much worse at figuring you out and showing you stuff when you're not necessarily looking for it. But Google can easily advertise where the eyeballs are - your phones.
We must remember that enshittification is an ongoing process and Google has the power to reach billions of people, one shitty update at a time.
From their POV, it definitely feels like a miss that they don't own a successful and dedicated social media platform. Maybe they will make another foray into it.
Maybe magnifying the puck could be a good use case for AR glasses
As someone who is completely disinterested in sports[1], I like this analogy.
-----------------------------
[1] Watching them, anyway. I like playing, but I get almost sleepy-coma-like boredom by watching it. Probably a personality deficiency, but meh.
Skate to where the puck is going
Better to stop playing the game.
--WOPR
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So, The King is dead long live the King!
It's moved to AI training sets. If you can't get your product into the training set of a popular model, it's game over.
Nice, I really enjoyed this interpretation of Jobs famous quote. Even getting into the character "I used to be a goalie" was pretty cool as well!
The recent Acquired ep on “Alphabet Inc” put it aptly: social media moved into Google’s space, video (reels, “pivot to video”), and social media for socialising moved to message groups, iMessage/Whatsapp/Discord.
Revenue-wise, video ads have always been the sun to print ads peanut m&m.
Look where the pucks going then:
Implication: ChatGPT as a realtime video avatar will hit the jackpot with ads, but not before. Count on the ChatGPT device having a screen for that reason
Interesting way to put it!
>Look where everyone is looking and you'll find your answer there. It may not be in the same form as Google adwords, but the game is the same. Leveraging attention.
The chill that ran down my spine when I realized that you and TFA think that the part people care about is Google as an ad platform, and not as a way to access websites.
Jesus fucking Christ, things are bleak.
Do you know how Google makes money?
"AI" is the next advertising frontier, no question.
People are throwing themselves to feed you personal data. You no longer have to come up with sneaky ways to collect it, or build out their profile from inferred metadata. Less work for you, more accurate profiling, and less risk getting fined by pesky regulation.
Ad campaigns can be much more personal and targeted. You can push them at just the right moment to optimize the chances of conversion. They can be much more persuasive, since chatbots and assistants are deeply trusted. You can dial the sensitivity knob to make them very subtle, or completely blatant, depending on your urgency and client.
If I as someone outside of this hostile industry can think up these scenarios, the world is not ready for what advertising geniuses are cooking up as we speak.
> the world is not ready for what advertising geniuses are cooking up as we speak.
Advertising directed towards AI models, at the very least. If you can get into ChatGPT's weights that McDonalds is the cheapest and tastiest hamburger, how many millions of people would ChatGPT tell that to?
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I think the author intended the title to be,
"Google Ads is dead, Where do I promote my business now?"
When I hear "Google" I assume search, oof (sigh of relief).
They mention running ads on tiktok or instagram but no mention of youtube ads...
Also, In my own experience for my business ( also entertainment) I have found reddit ads to be useful.
So my next steps would be,
[Edit: Added Instagram Ads, from a different comment]
I’d suggest that the title should be, “Competition for Google AdWords is so strong that unsophisticated advertisers can no longer get a good return. Where do I promote my business now?”
He had presumably used it for 10 years successfully. Surely he gained some expertise over that time period.
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Nobody goes there any more. It's too crowded.
-- Yogi Berra
I have a feeling that it is mostly unsophisticated advertisers bidding up the price of AdWords.
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it's not "competition"
it's bots creating too high noise-to-ratio for feedback loop
> Also, In my own experience for my business ( also entertainment) I have found reddit ads to be useful.
Reddit is very hit or miss depending on your target audience.
Depending on your Reddit target audience, a lot of people could have adblock installed. They might be loyal to communities that have approved vendor lists where everyone parrots the same vendor recommendations back and forth in every thread, so not being part of that game means you're left out. In some niches, the subreddit moderators have a financial relationship with vendors and they'll put their weight into swaying every conversation away from competitors.
For other niches, none of this applies and Reddit can be a good ad destination. It really depends
100%. My business is in the smart home space. I peruse various smart home subreddit communities, and they all have a few brands that are aggressively celebrated on Reddit. Market research, financial disclosures, and other public data largely indicates that these brands are not all that popular, especially in the biggest-spend markets.
We don’t find Reddit ads valuable.
Let's be honest, most "Reddit marketing" isn't about on-site ads, it's about posting UGC that promotes your product in some way.
Thank you. This is a perfect example of clickbait. I trusted the HN crowd, clicked the link, and immediately realized the trap. I'm upset at how effective it is. And also commend the author for publishing an article specifically engineered to waste the viewers time.
Based on personal experience, I would be wary on spending much on Reddit ads without carefully measuring the results. Some real world data:
https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/08/11/what-i-learned-spe...
I think he's aimed in the right direction with the observation about short videos.
I tried to load his website. It took a full minute to come up. Maybe that's the HN hug of death or something, but this is surely issue #1 to resolve.
Beyond that I would ask whether targeting the "young'uns" directly is the correct strategy. His business is party entertainment, kids' birthday parties could be the biggest slice of that, but the kid isn't the purchasing decisionmaker, and there are all these other opportunities (like corporate events) too.
And then I would consider whether paying for ads in shorts is the right or only way to approach the world of video. The thing about video is it's huge, lucrative, and eating up more of people's time every year. People are moving from the text Internet, to watching videos. I would think given the nature of the business this guy has raw footage which can be turned into entertaining videos, or can produce it pretty quickly. I'm increasingly surprised by how much some people can earn on Youtube, by creating videos that also function as marketing collateral for their business. He will ultimately need to geotarget to get customers, so yeah that's probably paid ads, but a good YouTube channel would build authority, making sales easier to close, and might also make him more money than you'd expect via ad revenue.
My entertainment website typically gets 10-100 visitors per day, yesterday it was more like 1000 per hour. The only reason it's still online is because of CloudFlare CDN!
My content is best live and in person but you are right, will be concentrating more on video content for yt and others going forward
It loaded in far less than a second for me, almost immediate.
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It's been some years since I've had to put ads on the web, but I found Reddit ads insanely effective. Really, Google ads have been dead for a long time. I found them hardly effective at all since maybe 2011.
A surgeon in our family got basically all his (private) clients from Google. Spend was multiple k per month. If you consider that one surgery brings in 7k in revenue, then those numbers actually make sense. He's retired now but did this up to 2y ago.
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> Really, Google ads have been dead for a long time.
For you perhaps. I work with a huge amount of businesses whose profits are still driven almost entirely by them, who have seen not even a blip and make money hand over fist.
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I forgot YouTube has ads, thanks.
I do occasionally post (free) on Reddit, it's not that big here though
By "here" I think you mean SA. Reddit is big in the U.S.
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Occasionally post reddit content or occasionally post reddit ads?
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I see paid ads as a short-term goal; the business seems to be local, so people should find this when looking for this specific service in their city.
Hm good point but if one were to try to reach visibility via let's say contacting the creators themselves or making reddit showcases themselves?
I am not sure what might work better, sponsorships or Ads. Of course some are definitely icky sponsorships but if one were to align with small youtubers who develop their own things and you enjoy their content and there might be an overlap etc.
I personally have an ad blocker so I don't really know what might work for. I guess organic marketing? But how does one achieve it?
Any good books / ideas on more sustainable forms of marketing aside from paying the large corporations a sort of land tax basically?
for my life, I haven't found ads useful at all, so I block them
Any suggestions for local business? Things that operate only within a specified area. Google worked well for those.
> When I hear "Google" I assume search, oof (sigh of relief).
If Google Ads is dead/dying the search is soon to follow...
Search died ages ago [1]. Ads dying is a direct consequence of that.
[1] https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
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Google search died years ago already.
Gemini is the new search.
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Google ads is dead precisely because their search product is dead.
Ever since Google bought double click, their ads business has been their search business. They are the same product.
> their search product is dead
Do we have any evidence search volume is down?
Don't get me wrong, I'm an avid Kagi user. But I'm sceptical anyone outside tech is using anything other than Google.
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Google search ain't dead at all: it became so good something silly like 99% of all the queries have to be answered by the Google AI before the very first "result". And for those who want more, there's the "continue this discussion with Gemini".
Now this may not be great for Google Ads (dunno about that) but Google search now works better than it ever did.
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How did you run campaigns on reddit? Reddit ads had the worst performance among all platforms I tried, literally zero conversion.
Without search ad revenue Google is dead.
Surprised to see this upvoted because the takeaway is completely incorrect, and based on the anecdotal evidence of one advertiser.
As someone who spends seven figures every month on Google ads, what’s much more likely to be happening here is that the individual advertiser is either getting outcompeted or they’re executing ads poorly.
Google ads revenue in the US continues to grow every quarter. And, since advertisers will generally invest in ads until the last dollar is break even, it’s likely that the total value advertisers unlock through Google ads is growing as well. Whether that’s true or not, the notion that value generated for advertisers is “dead” is absurd.
I just Googled "kids magic show in Durban" and his ad showed up in the top slot (sorry if this post has swamped your ad bill); and as a bonus, the Gemini AI blurb also touted him: "For kids' magic shows in Durban, look for local entertainers like Big Top Entertainment..."
Doesn't seem like the issue is he's being outbid by international conglomerates with million dollar budgets. Maybe the kids magic show market has cooled in South Africa? Or users have left Google? Curious what we are to conclude here.
Google ads are very time & location dependent, the fact that it's showing to you might be a bad sign since you are most likely not close to Durban and this seems like an ad you only want to run locally.
Your experience is 100% compatible with the linked article: the seven-figure spender is presumably running a much higher margin business and can scale narrowly profitable ads much more effectively. The natural equilibrium for a perfect ad market is for the ad spend to be exactly equal to increase in revenue: a perfectly efficient market with no profit for the advertiser. Google (and Meta et al) are so good that for many SMBs they are completely cornered at the zero-point: spend as much as you can just to stay in the same place financially.
> The natural equilibrium for a perfect ad market is for the ad spend to be exactly equal to increase in revenue
Not quite, the equilibrium is when marginal ad spend results in no change to profit. The ad spend at equilibrium should result in increased profit compared to no ad spend.
[dead]
I run a small software business and I know various other people who run small software businesses. We are all pretty much agreed that that Google Ads have been less and less profitable, year or year. Most of us have now given up on PPC ads.
I've run Google PPC on-and-off for 20+ years. It's definitely way harder to make money with them now, and the complexity is now through the roof, which makes it way harder for a novice to optimize their campaign. I steer small businesses away because it's too easy to screw up and lose your shirt on PPC without professional help.
Agree, ran a business for years and I’ve seen the slow but steady decline of Google ads.
Ultimately I relied more on returning customer and mouth to mouth recommendations, kept lowering the Google ads budget.
And equally I know many people running non software businesses whose experience is the complete opposite of yours and Google ads has and continues to drive the majority of their revenue.
I expected them to start seeing a hit or significant decline by now, and even told them as such but in what I honestly find surprising, it’s not come to pass.
> As someone who spends seven figures every month on Google ads, what’s much more likely to be happening here is that the individual advertiser is either getting outcompeted or they’re executing ads poorly.
Outcompeted by who??? He's a performer offering local entertainment. I highly doubt that people searching for "entertainer in durban" are getting ads for Cirque du Soleile.
His ad is probably on the first page for that search term; the problem is more likely that no one is looking at that first page anymore.
> and based on the anecdotal evidence of one advertiser
The author admits as much.
The question is, why has this post been massively upvoted?
It contains zero useful information. Just somebody struggling with AdWords and they don't know why. Not helpful.
I have to assume the vast majority of upvotes are based on the title alone, assuming it's about Search? A large proportion of top level comments are about Search too. Depressing.
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> seven figures every month on Google ads
What are you advertising?
Basically any online shop with decent volume / revenue is going to be spending 100s of thousands if not millions of dollars a month on Google ads. (Not just Google Ads, also Facebook ads etc.)
It used to be possible to get by with "organic" search traffic and some SEO... but google search looked completely different back then. Now when you look for something it's an AI box, products (google merchant) ad box, ad (promoted results) box, ... then there's a couple of (like two) results that are "organic" (whatever that means these days) and that's it. And we all know that when you want to hide something, you put it on the second page of google search results. So the space for doing online business "ad free" has been squeezed out over time.
And the K shaped economy is totally true in this ecomm space. These days say 15% of your revenue gets eaten by ads, but you also have say 50% higher revenue overall. At some point it becomes a margin game and the bigger players will start squeezing out the smaller ones because the biggers ones can operate on tighter margins (making up the difference with volume) which the smaller ones simply can't afford. The difference in operating costs of an eshop that sells 10000 items a month is not that different than that of an eshop selling 100000 items a month (i.e. not 10x, more like 2-3x). But selling 10x items gives you the volume you need to be able to lower your margins and put the difference into ads.
BTW all of this is handled by professional online marketing people with increasingly widespread use of AI so there's no room for the small players to make it big while not being optimized to the gills. This is why most small advertisers are seeing small or negative returns while Google and Meta are making tens if not hundreds of billions in ad revenue... The ads work, but the amounts you need to spend and the optimization level you need to have is in a completely different galaxy than it was 10 years ago.
Either Claude or OpenAI, going by all the ads I see.
He's been using AdWords for 10 years, so I wouldn't assume incompetence there.
It's just as likely that people are simply spending less on entertainment due to high cost of living.
> Surprised to see this upvoted because the takeaway is completely incorrect
It's the standard actually. Hot takes get more votes and hot takes are usually wrong. Experts have non-controversial opinions, which are boring (so no impulse to upvote), and there are 1000x more non-experts with blogs. Add to that HN culture which values contrarian-ness. So HN front page blog posts are almost entirely incorrect, but spicy
Googles ad business is riddled with fraud in all levels.
Google profits directly from the fraud. It has no incentive to reduce it and is embarrassed by its extent.
Google is essentially overseeing a huge criminal enterprise which funds its other activities. It’s been well documented for over a decade and no one seems to care.
The traffic is faked, the publishers are faked, the clicks are faked and the ad rates are manipulated.
It’s an incredibly lucrative way to steal money with extremely low risk and trivial penalties. The victims are the advertisers. Google has no interest in rocking the boat while they get paid.
The effective ads via Google platforms are like the percentage of real drugs in what’s bought off the street. Coincidental and ever being shaved.
I love knocking on Google, and have been doing so for longer than it was cool, but this sounds more like the business is no longer attractive than Google having become suddenly wildly ineffective.
My anecdotal evidence is the smarter normies are increasingly allergic to screens. They only use them to watch stuff they hear about by some other means, but parents, for example, look for any excuse to keep their kids off the Internet, and largely they're better for it.
It’s googles fault no one wants my product! It certainly can’t be the basics of demand!
- most SMBs I ever work with.
> the basics of demand
If you've been around longer than internet advertising you realize the basics of demand have changed pretty considerably.
Let's go back to 1980 and say that you have widget X that person A would absolutely buy if they saw/heard it advertised. They live in Podunk Minnesota that had coverage by 3 radio stations, 3 TV stations, and 2 newspapers. But you have no idea what media they actually consumed to target the right one.
Right now you're at the point you would have to contact at least 8 different media companies for ad spend if you wanted coverage. Most likely you'd cut it down to one of each, and maybe a billboard. This said, the cost for just this little area is going to be wildly expensive! Ads were huge money, and this is just for one little town.
These costs were slightly lower for large corporate buyers, but not that much because as you go back farther and farther you were typically dealing with more companies before consolidation. Being an SMB was great in this market in a local area because you weren't competing with the world.
Fast forward to now and you compete with the entire world at any given moment. In the West we've forgotten about competition and allowed a huge portion of our economic product to consolidate to a small number of companies. This is very apparent in advertising as the old media entities are dead or far more expensive than you'll ever recoup with the competition out there. Instead you're looking at Google/Reddit/Facebook style ads, but with that kind of ad you again, complete with the entire world. If your ad actually does good and drive business, then Google metrics will feedback to players watching the market and they will advertise products in the same space driving up competition and the base costs for ads. The supply from your competitors is practically unlimited which will drive your profits to almost zero unless you happen to have something very special.
Welcome to the K shaped economy, where the big get bigger and the small die.
The way people get information online is changing rapidly.
I run a local makerspace. It is not quite the same thing as a local entertainment business, but there are certainly some similarities. We are local, and we are very event-based.
For the last 10 years, the way we would get new members was to host Meetups. Meetups are slowly bringing in fewer members. When I ask tour guests how they found out about us, they recently started saying that they found us on ChatGPT. They did not know what a makerspace was but they explained their problem and ChatGPT presented our space as a local solution. This has been good for us because we offer something useful to the community but struggle to explain it. In the old days of search, this was a problem because many people were not using the correct phrase to describe what we are. That doesn’t matter anymore.
How does a local business optimize for this though? I am not sure.
The question is how LLMs will get that kind of information in the future, if not from the web. By scraping TikTok and Discords?
>By scraping TikTok and Discords?
One of two ways. Yes, by scraping, even it it requires users to 'sell' their own browsing data to the AI companies because places like Discord lock them out.
Or, the other way is for particular event organizers to pay directly for their services to be advertised/incorporated into the LLM itself. Those that don't pay get more and more of their data erased from the LLM maybe?
I anticipate a cottage industry of “AI optimization” types similar to the current SEO crowd. I have not seen too much of it yet, though.
Business directory for most of the telephone era was simply known as "the yellow pages". About once a quarter we get a color mailer with all the local plumbers, fencing companies, electricians etc. for homeowners who want a company that is actually licensed and insured.
instead of hosting a website you host... SERVICE.md, BUSINESS.md, .... or maybe a MCP server describing what you provide /s
Have a look at llms.txt
Are you using "Meetups" to mean Meetup.com or just events in general? Meetup.com has completely gone to shit. Trying to find an event is super frustrating. They show the same events over and over. They don't enforce categorization. People mark online only events as in person and the platform doesn't care. They also started trying to charge users (people looking to attend events) instead of only planners (people hosting events) so it drives people away.
Sadly I don't know any better platform but it seems ripe for a new entry.
What’s super depressing about Meetup.com are those Modal popups that want you to sign up for Pro. You can’t dismiss them. It’s like they’re intentionally destroying their product to squeeze the last remaining dollars from their users, which I assume are becoming fewer and fewer.
There is a meetup-like platform called Spontacts here in Germany. I suspect that for the moment it is only available for meetups in Germany, but who knows, maybe it'll expand internationally if it's successful.
I meant both, and you are correct 100% that meet up has entirely gone to shit.
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The web is dead, we replaced with portable cable TV where you scroll up to change channel.
Glad to see I'm not the one that sees the similarity in "zapping" or channel surfing to what people do nowadays with those shorts...
I remember my brother loving to do channel surfing in the 80s when we were young. I've always hated it! maybe that's why I cannot stand the current Tiktok media format (so sad that Youtube is pushing more and more the same format).
Also, remember when telephones started and people who took vertical video where seen as sinners? How times change!
I still consider them as inconsiderate. You can watch a horizontal video on every screen with more, or equal detail. That's not true for vertical videos.
But at least, we could experience first hand that laziness beats thoughtfulness, when people are allowed to.
a cable TV where anybody can poison your brain with whatever benefit them
Any state sponsored actor can pay to play.
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whats a cable tv?
It's how we got our internet before the internet.
It's what Americans call non free to air television. You're probably being downvoted because it's intrensic there and they assume you must know about it.
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It's like TikTok but you hit buttons instead of swiping.
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Push advertising sucks, but we can make pull much better by giving the user more control.
Imagine a protocol to publish commercial offers for any given fragment of content addressable by URI. It would describe the details of some product or service and a set of proposed terms. We could surf the web looking for relevant content and publishing related offers. Various repositories would subscribe or not.
A browser (extension or native) would optionally pull offers from selected repositories and have UI for the user to solicit/pull offers for any given piece of content styled to signal their existence, and to filter and sort them. To make it sustainable there needs to be revenue sharing with the content source(s).
Are there existing projects like this?
The same protocol could be used for independent commentary and other annotation.
The Brave/BAT experiment was similar to what you're describing. I think it failed to live up to its dreams of revolutionizing advertising because for the most part there are two kinds of people.
- I try not to think about ads
- I think about ads because I aggressively block them
I'm sure somebody out there represents a middle ground, but I think it's a pretty small demographic.
Why would I, as a user, ever opt in to this instead of just using adblock and never seeing adverts at all.
>user more control
As others said, most users don't care or don't want to see them.
This leaves the people that care being the ones who are providing the ads, and they will game the system with bots and other methods of bad acting that will make the system useless.
The problem is curation. People will mis-categorize in every way possible just to try to get eyeballs. I see this all over the web.
I hate ads until I need them, then I complain that the algorithms still suck. My wife recently reminded me I have to give Shopee time to surface good options when I don't have the exact words. I expect this to improve as their models improve.
I think Google’s search and ad business are at risk. Search has become such a mess that it’s become harder and harder to use to find quality results. It reminds me of Yahoo before Google in a way.
I’m using ChatCPT or equivalent for 60% of my searches. The remaining 40% is just muscle memory. Of that 40% about half the time I regret using Google search due to the difficulty of finding the relevant result.
I can see search users moving to ChatGPT or such and Googles Ad business suffering as a result and a general downward spiral of Google search.
This is a temporary situation. Think of it like how Napster let you download any song for free for a few years. For a while, all you heard was how the Internet was going to put all musicians out of business. Obviously that didn't happen.
The same will happen here. It's not like OpenAI has built a search engine; every time they need a live search they hit Bing (please correct me if I'm wrong) and get the results from there. No matter how you slice it, search companies who actually supply the data are going to get reimbursed, and since most users don't pay $20 / month, that likely means ads everywhere.
Also, Google's AI overviews are getting very good. Initially it was pretty inaccurate, but now it's basically 95% as good as ChatGPT, and faster. Most normies I talk to think it's good enough.
You don't think putting ads in Gemini output has crossed Google's mind?
I've never understood the "AI is eating search! Google is dead!" theory. The specific mechanism (whether that be keyword search, LLM conversation or something else) by which users describe their needs to a company doesn't matter, all that matters is that (a) the company makes that mechanism available for free, (b) it does a good job of satisfying the user's need and (c) ads can be smuggled into it.
> You don't think putting ads in Gemini output has crossed Google's mind?
What do you think the mandatory youtube link in every conversation is, if not a link to an ad?
They have successfully monetised chatbot AI, while no one else has.
A blog post lamenting the demise of Google Adwords.
AI is built with content from the open web, but it has also killed the open web. The death of Adwords is only one symptom of that.
I don't know what comes next, I just know it will be worse.
It wasn't really AI. Fundamentally, building a website the "traditional" way (hosting agreement, apache install, your favorite way to convert data formats that don't hate you into HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) was always a learned and quite technical skill; most people weren't doing it for fun, they were doing it because it was the only way to be on the web.
What killed the open web was Facebook, Twitter, and their ilk replacing that whole mess with social media profiles, networking connections, and templated, pre-fabricated organization home pages. When social networks became dominant enough that businesses could use it to get their info out there without having to author a webpage, the balance tipped (at least for business-motivated web content).
No, google search has stopped being useful years before "AI".
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- Build FAQ section (LLM can help write a lot of it, if you let it load the content of your site) - Write news on your site (LLM can help you to find ideas what to write about)
There are other networks as well: X, Meta, YouTube, LinkedIn, Amazon ads. It depends what’s your target group. But all networks have targeting tools so you can test them with minimum budget just to see what works and what doesn’t.
For sure, you have some personalized landing pages with CTA (Posthog script included so you can see what works).
good riddance seriously i used to pay like $1~2 a click back in 2010s and remember feeling like a total scam. no way of knowing if those clicks were bots and any campaigns would always have inflation somehow even long tail words that shouldn't.
AI should equal the playing field and promote businesses based on merit and capacity not how much they can spend.
I will say I have no experience in the ad space, but surely the SEO/ad companies will figure out how to game LLMs to make their sites more likely to be picked up by it, no? Or OpenAI would just directly sell ads themselves.
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For now.
I give it maybe 12-18 months before AI results are polluted by advertising.
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I would be that Openai and Google will find a way to boost the embedded ad in the llm result to you based on an auction on how valuable you and your query are
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Is this being on top of HN part of the writer's new non-google marketing strategy?
Please not that again, my server was down for 2 days last time! (I did join CloudFlare CDN after that)
Cloudflare seems to be sorting it out (mostly).
> CloudFlare CDN
lol
Not sure how much HN is read in SA though. Could even be a small GEO/SEO bonus if search engines/LLMs pick up the thread + his webpage.
Thankfully there are a bunch of comments here summarising the post.
> I am AI assisted, very fast!
I sometimes think people really don't understand the value-add of AI (and I say this as someone on the less hyperbolic end of the "AI-hype" spectrum). If your service to me can be accomplished by AI "very fast"... I don't need you anymore. AI provides a generic problem solving interface where non-experts can leverage the power of the AI to solve a task they previously couldn't have so long as they can describe it well.
I've had multiple cases at work or other places where I've been presented with something as the stakeholder and been told "I used AI to make this!" Great! Next time I'll use AI to make it and save myself the overhead/cost of having work with someone else. I don't see a lot of value in explaining a problem to you so that you can then re-explain it to an LLM.
When people show me they've used AI to complete a task I used to have to do I'm delighted, and, more often then not, proven my value when they come back weeks later asking for help untangling the mess they've made. But, I'm equally delighted in the cases where they are successful using AI to replace things I used to be tasked with. Despite the AI hype, I find myself busier than ever.
Seriously, one random website getting less traffic means "Google is dead"? I imagine if you hit your toe, you call it "end of the world"? This sort of posts should be illegal. Flagged.
Might this not also be the fact that given the cost of living the world over, being able to afford a fancy party with entertainment like the poster provides is a luxury few can afford now? We used to eat out a lot more (Saturday lunch at a cafe I mean) and also used to get HelloFresh and other such services, but as the cost of them has gone up way faster than our salaries, we've had to reign them all back. I agree with the "Google is dying" sentiment for sure, but I also wonder how much is just being unable to afford nice things anymore.
Most people now conduct searches through AI chat. We never trusted Google with our search terms, IP address linked to WiFi and cell towers surveys with Google trucks for cross referencing on Google map, browser fingerprinting, time of day pattern detection, mouse reaction time measurement for age estimation, cross referencing with economic profiling of neighbourhoods, income bracket estimation algorithms, interest profiling based on search terms, browsing breadcrumbs, social network tracking, etc. Now imagine the new powers of AI chat adding reasoning patterns, deep thinking and complete trust to the equation. Let us organise a disconnect day where you turn off your phone and Internet router and ISP box just to confuse the algorithms! Where do we go from here? We stay home and invite disconnected friends for a rare moment of statistically insignificant privacy.
Chegg’s decline is a concrete example of how AI search is changing the web
There’s been a lot of debate about whether Google’s AI Overviews and tools like ChatGPT are actually harming publishers. One publicly traded company’s timeline is worth looking at: Chegg.
What happened (with sources):
2021: Chegg launched Uversity, a platform for educators to share academic content. (Wikipedia)
2023: ChatGPT emerged as a serious competitor in homework help. Chegg responded by launching CheggMate, its own AI product built on OpenAI’s models. (Wikipedia)
Late 2024: Chegg reported accelerating subscriber declines, widely attributed to users shifting to free AI tools instead of paid study platforms. (WSJ, company filings)
Feb 2025: Chegg sued Google, alleging that AI Overviews reduced traffic to Chegg by answering questions directly in search results, harming acquisition and revenue. (Search Engine Land, Reuters)
May 2025: Chegg laid off ~22% of its workforce (≈248 employees), citing competitive pressure from AI and changes in search behavior. (Reuters)
Oct 2025: Chegg announced another round of layoffs (~45%, ≈388 employees), explicitly referencing “the new realities of AI” and reduced traffic from Google to content publishers. (Reuters / SF Chronicle)
What the data suggests (more broadly):
Independent studies show that when Google AI Overviews appear, users are significantly less likely to click through to external sites.
“Zero-click” searches (where users get answers directly on the results page) have increased, especially for informational and educational queries.
The impact isn’t uniform — some publishers report minimal effects — but content that answers how-to, homework, or factual queries appears most exposed.
Why this matters:
Chegg isn’t a small blog or SEO-driven site. It’s a public company with audited financials, legal disclosures, and incentives not to exaggerate under scrutiny. Its filings and lawsuit don’t claim AI is “bad” — they claim that traffic flows are structurally changing.
This doesn’t prove AI search is “killing the web,” but it does show:
AI answers are substituting clicks, not just competing for them.
Entire business models built on informational content are under pressure.
“Build better content” may not be sufficient when answers are synthesized upstream.
Curious how others here see it:
Is this a temporary transition problem?
Or are we watching the unbundling of the open web’s traffic economy in real time?
It’ not Google that’s dead. It’s the economy in North American markets. I am finding conversion way down, clicks and impressions I’m still getting. People are just being way more fussy before handing over cash.
Everyone i talk to is quoting the same time line, this started in September and it hasn’t returned to normal.
Winter is coming.
Everyone I talk to says the opposite.
Spring has sprung.
The blog in question is in South Africa.
Please go anywhere but the platforms I use. Go fill Tiktok up with ads. Any of the "mainstream" platforms inbuilt ad posts are a good bet. Or a marketing agency that will disguse it as organic content.
Lol wish I could afford to "fill up Tiktok with ads"! Seriously though, I always felt like Google AdWords (we only used the search network) are the most honest way. Someone searches for what you offer and they see your ad. With these other platforms it's more about relying on the algorithm.
Google ads are the cheapest yes, but depending on your audience they may not be looking on Google now.
For ChatGPT (and similar) you need to have a strong FAQ page and lots of content marketing to increase the likelihood of being the suggested answer when a user asks ChatGPT a relevant question (it's a highly probabilistic system, look up AEO/GEO).
CloudFlare for example offers an option to block AI scraping bots by default. If you are in the services business, this is the opposite of what you want because having AI crawlers scrape your site would drive traffic down the road when users ask a related question.
I would also suggest having accounts with major chatbot companies and enabling the "allow training on my conversations" option and then talk to it about your services. Ultimately you just want to get your brand into the training data corpus, and the rest is just basic machine learning statistics.
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Your product are programmable LED pois?
That does seem like a very good fit for a good video that can spread on TikTok etc on its own if some performers upload videos.
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Why hate on the guy with the kids’ entertainment business for placing ads? I don’t get it.
I think they’re really hating on ads in general, not this specific person.
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Its not specific on him Ads just drive me insane. I haven't really formed enough strong reasoning(to me) to say they shouldn't exist. So I'm at a halfway point of "advertise somewhere that isnt in front of me".
The platforms I use are very NOT local so it'd be pointless. Mainstream platforms are invasive with their data collection that would allow his ads to be specifically targeted and do well there, getting put in front of people who might actual use his service.
pls don't go to TikTok, I use it
TikTok's already full of ads and barely hidden sponsored posts though
I can't find it, but there's a good graph that shows Google search decline in share to GPT, but it excludes Gemini. With Gemini, it stays relatively on par. That's pretty much the answer with where one goes. LLMs are higher intent than search could ever be, and they are closer to you selling to yourself than a store selling to you since they have all of your user context
Reminds me of a quote I once read of "marketing being a game of diminishing returns".
When you find a working marketing solution, it's just a matter of time when it dries out, because of competitors and overall saturation.
Yes but it's possible that the marketing channel is very profitable before drying out. Also the less a channel is known the more it will take to reach saturation. So there might be channels that are very profitable and well hidden, the problem is that by definition it might be too hard/expensive to find them.
I can't rule out competition here, definitely part of it - cost per click has gone up a lot over the years
The very concept of people going to a private digital plaza was very problematic in the first place and arguably still is. Humanity's drive towards convenience is the source of marvels but also many ills imo. Google's decline is a chance for change. Change towards something better. Not that I am optimistic that we will get there imo but the opportunity window is opening now. Don't look for a new digital overlord. Embrace the new age
Google is not dead in this case; what is dead is Ads on top of Google. I think the best way to fix this is to ensure that your website is optimized for searches in Google and in the new AI world.
Every website should be optimized for searches in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude,...
They recently changed the max results per page from 100 to 10 and they're suing serpapi. They've basically killed their google newspaper archive.
Not happy with google.
And it's become clear to me how little of the open web, and top 100k sites they've fully indexed, I used to have a lot more faith in them.
Just trying to find out what this guy actually does is hard. It’s a page of links linking to another page of links, repeat. Where is the thing? The content? The product? It just feels a bit disconnected from patterns users expect and delivery mechanisms users are comfortable with in 2025. It’s almost a 1995 style pastiche of intent with no payoff.
?? There is one link that takes you to his business. It’s kids parties (birthdays, etc) entertainment (Or corporate events). Think performers doing magic acts, juggling, comedy, balloons, etc. it really wasn’t that difficult to find out.
The old decentralized Internet is dying out and being replaced by a few apps under the total control of a few companies.
I'm not sure much can be done about this. At least the physical world is still the same.
> At least the physical world is still the same
You mean the physical world where businesses are signing up with companies to put AI enabled cameras all over their properties and sell your data? Why not some nice dynamic pricing on their digital price bars next (oops, we are already there).
I only go to small local specialty shops within walking distance of my house, none of which has such sophisticated equipment.
Where I live, the trend has been to make spaces more walkable and with more nature and green spaces.
If you believe markets to be a future discounting mechanism, then they're sure as hell saying Google "figured something out" in the last year, even vs OpenAI [1]
[1] https://x.com/firstadopter/status/1993464859376468102/photo/...
Hugged to death right now, therefore: https://web.archive.org/web/20251229204141/https://www.circu...
His actual entertaiment bussiness is down,
https://bigtop.co.za/
They are a circus for hire (events) https://web.archive.org/web/20250424004511/https://bigtop.co...
Located in Durban, South Africa. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durban
He got too much exposure by stating Adworks no longer works?
Oh no, adtech is dying. I guess we'll all have to compete through quality of products and services and not gaming a rigged system designed to reward anything that maximizes the profit of the global surveillance adtech machine.
This gives me warm fuzzy feelings. It's nowhere near good, but this is better than it was.
I wish that were true, but I don't think it's dying, I think it's metastasizing.
Ads will ingress deeper into what were trusted layers -- embedded in text and video in a seemingly organic way. GenAI tools make this possible -- to splice a 20 second mention of something into a stream, or rewrite a paragraph injecting a subtle product placement.
We will develop new mental antibodies for this, we always do. Silver lining of sorts -- while short-form video content is making people illiterate, perhaps literacy will become a calm refuge once again.
The biggest problem is platform scale, imo - platforms grow so big as to make the network effects confer an invulnerability to regulation or moderation, and then get exploited to squash competition, either through legal action, acquisition, suppression, or sometimes simple inertia. Ubiquitous reach and total control over the platform made it irresistible to bad faith operators, politicians, activists, and rent-seekers. AI has a good shot at completely fragmenting those technologies at a fundamental level.
We should be resisting any ad injection into ChatGPT, Claude, etc maintaining a firewall between what's acceptable in a paid product and what's not, and as long as open source Chinese models roughly keep parity, the big US labs can't pivot hard into exploiting users for ad revenues. Private hosting and bots are almost as good as ChatGPT with UI and UX, within a few percentage points as good in capabilities, and the pressure to go elsewhere is minimal. If they drive off a whole lot of independence minded users, they risk creating a community of people who'll create a very slick, workable alternative, while paying only a tenth or less what the frontier labs charge. As long as that dynamic cripples the efforts of big labs to enshittify, there's a good shot that the entire ecosystem fundamentally evolves to something better. I hope, anyway - it could just explode into a grotesque mess of user exploitation and yet more of the same.
I think at some point you'll be able to have good-enough AI on your phone to carry everywhere you go, and it'll do all the ad filtering and opsec and digital hygiene for you - everyone will have a high quality competent tech nerd in their pocket looking out for their best interests, and it won't just be a niche rebel nerd thing anymore.
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> to splice a 20 second mention of something into a stream
I'm seeing the start of this already, AFAICT. There have been a couple of YouTube videos with embedded ads that YouTube flipped over to a YouTube ad at exactly the point the sponsor part started.
Google is almost certainly getting ready to use AI to splice out in stream ads and replace them with Google ads.
I love your vibe but unfortunately I don't share your optimism. The interregnum between monopolies gets exponentially shorter as the money printing gets exponentially faster. What was maybe 20 years of "OK-ish" after say WW2 got down to a few years in the 90s when internet was worth browsing, from Google to AI could be just months..
Isn’t it just AIs that have an agenda? That lie to you? That use a directive to persuade you to do / purchase something under the guise of authority?
ChatGPT, etc. right now is the early web where everything was free and everyone wondered how it would make money.
Soak it up because it won’t last long.
“Google is dead” feels overstated. What is actually breaking is the click based retrieval and attribution model once answers start getting synthesized upstream.
When discovery is mediated by LLMs, ranking a page is no longer sufficient because the system is not choosing a single best document. It is assembling an answer from spans that fit its internal representation of the problem, which quietly invalidates many of the assumptions SEO and ads were built on.
You can see this shift in the kinds of services being offered now. Instead of focusing on links, keywords, or bid optimization, teams are spending time on structured content that breaks cleanly into answerable fragments, on entity relationships and schema that make concepts legible to models, and on persona driven content that anticipates how questions will be interpreted rather than how pages will rank.
Measurement is shifting as well. Instead of impressions and clicks, people are running prompt level tests, checking whether their content shows up across different models, and tracking inclusion and citation patterns rather than traffic. In many cases, strong traditional pages disappear entirely from answers while smaller, better structured sources surface.
From the outside this looks like traffic declining. Internally it feels more like a loss of observability, where you cannot tell whether you were excluded, partially used, or summarized away into latent knowledge.
Google will likely face the same issue as AI Mode expands. Generating answers is not the hard part. Defining what visibility means when the retrieval layer is no longer exposed is.
I don't know if Google is dead, but what I know is this:
For the first time since 1995 my default method to research information on the web does not involve any traditional search engine anymore.
We don’t know any details on OP’s ad campaign. Did they happen to make any errors? Is holiday the most competitive time? Bids?
Your business seems well suited to advertising through short form content so I wish you lots of success with transitioning away from Adwords.
Thanks, yeah I see lots of video editing in my future
Perhaps catering towards TikTok experiences, help them make the videos that they then share with their friends.
‘Pic or it didn’t happen’ has now been replaced by ‘TikTok or it didn’t happen.’ Is it possible to enjoy something without there being video evidence of it? According to my gf and her female friends the answer appears to be no.
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Such thick tension in the air waiting for the first courageous company to place ads on their LLM chats and tools.
They can spare their ad income falling for a while, but making the first move is always risky. Should they let openAI go first and fail?
Where do you go now? You go make sure LLMs know about your site, you welcome the herds of bot crawlers and pray someone breaks the standstill before your business falters.
I'm amazed people on HN still use Google tbh. What for? Do you expect them to get better or treat your eyeballs and attention with more dignity anytime soon?
There's Kagi, Brave Search, even DDG would be better.
You’re definitely not alone in this, I’ve seen similar drops from Google Ads recently. It feels less like bad optimization and more like the ground shifting under everyone.
The AdWords platform is extremely complicated nowadays, and try as I might I can’t get any impressions from it. I then went through a period with an AdWords specialist from their team who also couldn’t get any impressions. It’s like they don’t want or need my money.
Watching other people use Google, the predominant method of searching for information involves a query followed by getting their answer from the AI summary that appears above any search results.
I'm not sure what impact this would be having on Adwords, but another commenter mentions that Google isn't hurting in the ad revenue department.
While TFA is anecdote, the author mentions maintaining their spend, being gifted adword budget, and getting lower returns so increasing spend.
This suggests adword revenue is up, conversion to adword 'dollar' balances is inflating those balances, so both return per dollar in is down and even more down is return per adword balance dollar.
It's a leading indicator that quarterly-return focused Google must be scrambling to fix right now - they inflated themselves out of Q4 2025 but 2026 is a question mark, or to parle some Boxton Matrix, is the cash cow dying and if so is the extension strategy ad injection in AI responses, product placement in your AI videos, background changes in your family snaps, etc.
Googles Search Ad revenue is dead, but the business is diversified and positioned for change. As of 2024:
Search Ads and Partner Revenue = 230bn Youtube = 36bn Cloud = 40bn
Say they drop 100bn on search revenue. How well are they positioned to convert their user platform and search crawling infrastructure onto Gemini, and introduce an advertising platform into LLMs to replace what they had? I imagine they are as well positioned as OpenAI.
I would lose a lot of sleep if I paid out for puts on them.
Reminds me of the whale oil business being replaced by petroleum. Except the ad-based economy was effectively a google monopsony. I'm surprised the OP managed to make ad revenue for a decade, but to me at always seemed about casino-ish and snake-oily. A decade is impressive but I think we all knew where this was going. I think the question is: will another monopsony for ads arise or will it be content based only? It seems YouTUbe is poised to be the next google since more people watch YouTube than cable, so the audience is captive since there's no alternative (yes I realize Google owns YouTube). But that's still a parasitic economy sucking from google. "Where to go now?" depends on if another ad server can gain dominance, otherwise the answer is "nowhere".
Google Ads started charging me $5 per click on low traffic search keywords this week, meanwhile YouTube ads are still 20 cents a click (presumably to keep up with Meta)
They're having a laugh if they think we'll keep paying that for no actual leads.
“Research shows” Lool!! Ask anyone in their teens or 20s even 30s. They’ll all answer what you did in the article. Short attention spans are ruling and so are those social media applications you mentioned.
There is always chaos when a central authority fails, and the "main home page for the Internet" model has definitely failed. AI killed it.
How long before we see sponsored ads placed alongside prompt answers?
I think it's time for a new way of discovering products. My ideal would be some sort of site that I can go to, to find services and products in my local area. There could also be national and international sections, with user ranked news of new interesting products in given categories.
For example, with video games I can go to sites like www.rockpapershotgun.com or others, or forums related to games, to see what the new products coming out. That's perfect in my world. No ads in my search, no ads in my email, no ads in youtube or whatever. But when I'm interested in seeing what's new, I can, on my terms, go and check out the new products.
Anecdotally it seems like a lot of people go to whatever LLM they have access to and ask it what to do. Surely the next frontier of advertising products is directly injecting recommendations into the response from the LLM. Or at least make the answer incorporate products and services somehow, similar to how influencers do paid content in a seamless way alongside their main content.
I know very little about online marketing, but my Googler marketing friend told me that just 6 months ago everybody would Google search three word terms: “best Chinatown dumpling”
But now people Google search: “my boyfriend is coming to town for the holidays and we are going to Chinatown and I want to have delicious dumplings with him because it was what we had on our first date, where should we go?”
So he now works to sell AdWords properly in that environment. I am wondering how or if OP took that into account with their new spend. What are other people doing?
I’ve also heard (probably via post+comments here on HN) that the new SEO is making tons of AI slop info pages on the site, not for humans but for AI crawlers to slurp, and then refer from prompts.
Anecdotally, this article seems to match with what I am witnessing regarding browsing habits. I am planning a big trip with others and everything is being found via social media apps; destination ideas, experiences, cafes, accommodation, etc.
This post and these comments give me low confidence in our HN community. No one here seems to understand ad platforms.
Google is far from dead. It still has the majority of the world’s online ad revenue, with Microsoft coming in second, then Meta at a far third. People assume that TikTok and Insta _must_ have the most since they assume that’s what all of their friends use, but even though they’re growing, they’re still not there yet.
Video ads on YouTube and others have a lot of play also, and everyone thinks of the TV commercials played during the Super Bowl.
But Google is still f-ing everywhere.
It’s fine to call them dying, but are they really when they are best positioned for ads in AI? OpenAI or Anthropic don’t have the data about users that Google has. There’s a reason that Buffett invested in Alphabet recently.
> I am AI assisted, very fast!
This feels like one of the most surreal things I have read in a while, believing that the blog is authentically written by a real person. I can't put my finger on why.
I do feel like it's maybe time to rewatch BSG.
lol I meant coding, can't stand AI slop web content myself. I wrote all the words - what's BSG?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica_(2004_TV_...
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Is this really about Tiktok or about AI and how people are consuming the web? Used to be all web, then web+Tiktok,etc, now only AI+Tiktok, etc? I think I go to normal websites way less than I used to. Maybe everyone is doing that?
Apparently you should be getting ready to buy ad campaigns from LLM companies because they are going to inject ads into the responses soon. Young people are using LLMs like crazy in my experience.
That site loosing revenue mentioned in the post (https://bigtop.co.za/) doesn't even load for me.
If it's loose then you might want to screw it on.
Sorry, couldn't resist! The correct word here is lose, when something is loose it means that it's not fastened or constrained, like a loose knot
As it should be with all things.
I pivoted away from google search (duckduckgo instead primarily) but even then, the majority of "information" I'm looking for goes instead to chatgpt.
The real story isn't that Google Ads stopped working, it's that attention moved somewhere ads can't follow. You can't buy placement in a Discord server or an iMessage group chat. If this is the new normal, the entire ad-supported internet is running on borrowed time.
It wouldn't surprise me if physical advertising, as mentioned in the post, makes a comeback. Especially coupled with magazines etc apparently making a comeback too.
Also, a lot of ads now have QR codes so you can tell which physical ads are driving versus traffic versus those that aren't.
e.g. the "half of my advertising is a waste but I don't know which half" is not true anymore if you are using specific QR codes per location/advertisement.
I assume physical still works. LIDL closed their shop in our neighborhood, so we stopped going unless their paper ads were interesting. Then they decided with a lot of fanfare to go all-in on digital, and as they decided we should want their ads we should install their app. Well, naughty us, we didn't. We simply stopped shopping there completely. A few months later, the paper ads are back (with a lot less fanfare), and no other shop followed their lead, so I assume LIDL was hurting hard.
Logged on to say Kagi[1]
[1]not an employee, sponsor, or autonomous agent of the above company
The article is about using Google for advertising, and that would be a far stretch for Kagi. Thank you for your support anyway ;)
Google is a waste of brainpower.
I wish it would actually die so that all those talented engineers could move on to solving non-ad problems.
I think this article title misled me a bit... Google seems to be fine but it's no longer driving traffic through Ad Words. I think that in particular is really getting messed up by AI since people often don't go to any Web site once an AI agent answers their question.
It's only going to get worse from here. Everything is trending towards zero for any kind of online service as it gets easier to make software with LLMs. There just simply won't any moat left.
One anecdote, but I have a brick and mortar business and Adwords leads have fallen off a cliff year over year. Since AI stuff started getting pushed harder we've gotten fewer impressions and fewer conversions. Some of it is economic headwinds but also Google is just a black box we throw money into and pray it will send us business.
Trying something different myself. Enough is enough, I have said goodbye to AdWords for good now I think
The author should try Google Local Services Ads instead of Google Ads. I think Google cannibalizes Google Ads with LSA.
Thank you I will look it up, never heard of those
If google is dead, I sure hope they won't sell my gmail and google drive data to the highest bidder.
Google never sells your data to anyone. Why would they sell the primary data that they themselves use to determine how to show you ads? Doing so means a deep-pocketed new advertising platform can just buy data from Google and get started with competing against Google on their primary revenue source. It’s like having a goose that lays golden eggs and selling the goose. It’s corporate suicide. I’m surprised anyone on HN even believes Google will sell your data. It takes five seconds of thinking to dispel that notion.
Google gets given significant tax breaks in many countries. Maybe it is selling it to agencies who could not obtain that info legally
Google shares your data with ad-tech companies via its real time bidding.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/google-says-it-doesnt-...
this post is title-gore. Gmail and drive aint going anywhere.
Already did.
Is there such a thing as a good ad? I've always blocked them on all platforms.
Looking at instagram where I don't block anything, most of what it suggests to me are soft porn or soft scams (generic chinese dropships marketed as a unique innovation).
I mean, you mean "I've always tried to block 'obvious' ads in the places I expect obvious ads to be".
The thing is the world of ads is far larger and more complicated than that. Just think of product placement in movies? That is an ad, have you stopped watching most movies?
What about content that is a thinly veiled ad? What about a set of bots that follows everything you post on line, and when it's little AI core figures out you are looking for something makes a suggestion under a post where you're asking questions?
The traffic goes to mobile and AI. Google is much stronger than ever before, in mobile and AI, not just web.
you wrongly assumed about tiktok or shortform content. In last 6 months I only visited google for 2 things. Searching and looking at reviews of restaurants or shops. And of course navigation in maps. Other than that I never use google now a days. I'm sure there are a lot like me.
Kagi
Kagi will be dead if google and alike are dead.
Buying access to web search indices is not the same as having one.
(I love them but this is the hard truth)
Kagi is building their own index. There are also other open indexes. Over time these can replace the big corporate indexes. The hard truth is that the big players in search are dead. They are now the yahoo of search, with landing pages full of ads and results that are primarily ads.
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Kagi depends on their being an open web to crawl. The incentive to publish on the open web is gone though.
Search engines can usually search the closed web as well.
Also, incentives are super high for businesses to create quality content for the open web to drive business. For example a car tire manufacturer could publish reliable restaurant reviews in order to encourage driving.
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Please read the article before commenting. It's not about what you think it is
In case you didn't read the article, it's about Google Adsense no longer being an effective way to advertise.
psa, "is comprised of" is almost never correct. "comprises" means "is composed of". so when people say X is comprised of Y they really mean "X comprises Y" or "X is composed of Y"
Try contacting YouTube creators in your area. Much more cost efficient than any other kinds of ads especially if you pick channels with your target audience IF you can actually get creators to promote you (most won't reply).
Google isn’t dead, but it’s no longer the single answer. Even Mark Zuckerberg recently acknowledged how fast Google is improving, which explains why Meta is pushing AI harder. Still, competing shouldn’t mean replacing what already works.
> Even Mark Zuckerberg recently acknowledged how fast Google is improving
AI. I thought he was referring to how fast Google is improving their AI.
Search though?
But what's the endgame? What if Google has the "best" AI offering if most of their revenue that comes from ads is gone?
They'll presumably monetize their AI (more) on both ends: getting you to pay for more access and getting advertisers to pay to be mentioned more often in the outputs. I mean that isn't really a bad position for them if you "using the Internet" degrades into you just sitting there typing queries in their Web app and never going anywhere else.
Gross clickbait title, do better with your article titles.
I work in private events and the answer is definitely Facebook. Facebook ads have been better for quite some time. Targeting is a harder but also the CPCs are a lot lower so you can spray and pray a bit more.
Thanks, we tried them before but many years have passed and things have changed. Our new Instagram campaign just bore fruit in the first hour (4 WhatsApp enquiries with $1.50 spent!), will be looking at FB also
I was intrigued to see this trending, because it seems to contradict what Google has been saying on earnings calls.
It also made me wonder if this reflects conditions for individuals / SMEs rather than large corporate accounts. And I didn’t expect the story to come out of Durban - I would’ve guessed the US.
I haven't been to Durban lately, but my understanding is that the broader SA economy has been under pressure (high unemployment, etc.), and that can hit smaller/local businesses first. So it could simply be a rough patch for your market right now.
That said, if you’re seeing campaigns picking up on other platforms, you might be onto something, at least for your niche.
Looking at your website/content: you’re selling an experience, and this seems like a product that really benefits from strong visual marketing. Make it easy for someone new to "get it" in the first 10 seconds.
Three ideas: 1) Ride local trends: build demos around what’s currently hot in SA/Durban and showcase that with the Magicpods in short, punchy videos. 2) Consider adjacent use cases: beyond magic shows, this could be compelling for advertising, especially at conventions (e.g., ICC). That might be a natural expansion path if event bookings are slowing. 3) Try Airbnb Experiences, or local platforms, like daddysdeals.co.za :-)
The mainstream leaving Google search and the general web would be a chance for both getting better again. A new equilibrium will establish itself one way or the other.
It's a chance.. But which for-profit environments are not going to do whatever is necessary to try to win that role and how will the worst of them not have the most profitable model?
I would say Kagi but they need to start doing their own indexing for that to be a real future
Well, there used to be altavista but it seems Yahoo bought them out. So I guess Yahoo?
I'm glad as hell not to run a business and never plan to, but it's interesting to think as a consumer where I would try to get information like this. Guy's running a service that provides in-person entertainment for events and parties, seemingly things like clowns and magicians, maybe small-time bands or what-not.
Seemingly you don't want to target children directly. If they ask their parents for specific entertainment at a party, they're going to ask for entertainers they know, not companies acting as brokers and middlemen. They might want a particular clown (but probably not) but will never want a particular local vendor of clowns. You need to target the parents for that. If it were me doing the buying, I'd probably prioritize word of mouth recommendations if anyone had such, and otherwise for a large enough event like a wedding or graduation party, I'd look to professional planners. Assuming that's any kind of widespread pattern, you'd want to target strong relationships with planners rather than trying to advertise directly to consumers.
Did people really ever search Google to find party entertainment, and then ignore the search results and use the ads instead? Let alone Tik Tok videos? I guess I'm out of touch enough that the answer can be yes and I'm just that clueless about how small businesses work, but all the comments talking about LLM chatbot services are tripping me out. Y'all would ask ChatGPT who to hire for your kid's party?
Google Adwords just shows your ad at the top of search results. Someone searches for a clown and I'm on top - worth paying for! (when it worked)
you can buy ads on instagram, fb, tiktok, reddit, youtube, amazon, apple iOS apps, the M$ windows start menu (apparently), and soon OpenAI (gemini gotta be following right)!
Wait I know Google search to content sites is largely dead, but I thought Google ads still worked fine.
-to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.
is this about the second single from Good Riddance?
> Right now, though – I’m broke. Anyone need a website or IOT project built? I am AI assisted, very fast!
Oh wow, this author is tone deaf to the entire situation that is occurring in the world right now. I just had a conversation with my 70 year old Aunt (no tech skills) about AI and its impact on the labor market and I used the example of how for the first time ever I actually believe she could build her own iPhone app by just talking to her computer. This is an hypothetical app that would have cost her $10k-100k or more in the very recent past. I really think the market for the very services this author is selling is evaporating or at least on hold while everyone is at least trying to diy it with AI.
[dead]
An instant drop in 50% means something else is off. The shift to llm's has been happening already for the last years.
Its more likely their your ranking dropped. Or a competitor got ahead of you. Google is still main source of leads for service businesses.
If you are old & previously ranked well the LLM's will also mention you similar to how Google did.
Sorry in advance if this comes off as hostile, that's not my intent. I am genuinely wondering: You're in the business of advertising? And you're upset that Google isn't your golden goose anymore?
maybe the issue is that you site bigtop.co.za literally does not load
GOOG +65% YTD. Opposite of dead.
Though, that doesn't really conflict with the story. He increased his ad spend before he figured out it wasn't working. Which would be more $$ for Google.
is super ineffective, indeed. if you need to pay 20$ to get s.o. to pay you 50$ for a service/product, well in all honesty calling people one by one and giving them 10$ is more likely to result in sale.
The article is specifically about the decline of Adwords, not the company as a whole.
Both of these things can be true:
- Google, the company, is doing pretty well in the stock market.
- Google, the advertising company, isn't generating good ROI for its advertising customers.
From Google's point of view, they've been very gunshy about having ads be their only revenue stream for years; I wouldn't be surprised that the consequence is the value there is drying up.
Let's answer the question. Hard trending data on ads says everything is normal.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-reven...
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unfortunately, google is better than ever
AI Bubble
whats that?
Genuine question: how is Google not losing a tons of money yet?
It never really worked. Most businesses just paid for customers that were going to or already found them anyways.
Not saying ads don't work at all, they definitely increase awareness.
Yet if I turn off my ads my sales drop to nearly nothing, but when I turn them on again I get a steady flow of new customers as well as some repeaters who either forgot about us or needed a reminder to buy again, sometimes literally years later.
It all depends on how big you are, what you sell, and how people can or will find you. I sell something that some people REALLY want, but they will never think to Google if it exists, they just think it's not available anymore/end of story, and I rank #1 unpaid, it's frustrating.
Now I only have one ad platform I can get to work at this point and I've wasted so much money on others, trying again every few months, but they all seem to suck or I don't have the patience and pockets to try and figure them out compared to how I've figured out the one that works enough to make a living off of.
I consider ads to be a cancer I hope it will die in every possible way.
Same. This blog post is actually good news
OK, but the poster is a party clown. How is he supposed to get business? He can't just show up to kids' birthdays when he hears them down the street.
Perhaps, click fraud?
Is there any new powerful platform/aggregator in your market?
I don't know what click fraud is but it's a very small entertainment agency market in Durban, South Africa's 3rd largest city. We only advertised locally (specified in AdWords)
Click fraud is malicious activity where someone runs bots that click on ads for specific category keywords. For example, if this is a villa rental website, someone like competitors or a large platform, might use ad agencies that perform click fraud against the villa rental website to exhaust their budget and therefore get more traffic themselves. In the case of an entertainment agency, it might be other competitors interested in your traffic.
The first step you might take is to check that you are not advertising with AdWords partner networks, as they might be the reason for the clicks on your ads.
Second, you can check your server logs and verify clicks from Google Ads, especially the geolocation of those clicks. If they are not from your region and the visitors perform no action after viewing the first page, this is most probably click fraud.
I use our own open-source security platform (I'm a co-founder) for this purpose (1), as it's server-side and works even if bots aren't running JS. However, your website analytics might also be useful if they can collect events without JS.
1. https://github.com/tirrenotechnologies/tirreno
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unlikely but they should check their invalid click rate to be sure
Invalid click rate is not always a reliable metric.
I've been dealing a lot with click fraud on Google Ads, and it's usually hard to detect it without special tools.
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How long have you lived in Durban? Nice surfing pics.
Where do you go know - maybe realize that ads make everyone around miserable and with this bitter understanding go through painful but necessary process of finding other means of earning money.
PS. Seriously.
Maybe someone should tell Google.
Instagram (one of the potential targets of the author to replace Google Ads) became unusable for me with this last update, where they make you wait for ads to finish.
Not that I ever used it much (in fact, after all these years, I still didn't wrap my mind around anything but simple posts), but now, I basically only go there to do a post about a group I have (and that I had to remove from Meetup because Meetup is equal shares of terribly bad and terribly expensive) and answer some messages.
There's a generation (in fact several) of people that still want to meet in person, and the platforms that allowed us to create and join groups for it (Meetup was great for that during a golden period of 3-4 years) are all turning into garbage.
Google is dead the day they remove their moto: Google is not evil
And by the way announced the world they are the source of evil!!
Your campaign on Google is dead.
Here's the business model in a nutshell: If you want AI to recommend your business for some purpose, you must pay to have it included in the training corpus. And you will pay fees every time those vectors get used for outputs. And if you don't pay, you don't get mentioned.
Contextual ads is the answer. You sell shoes, go and advertise on fashion related sites. I don't want to see a shoe ad while I'm browsing a gaming site just because I did some relative search a week ago. It's so fucking annoying and I never understood why Google never bothered to try some alternative too. I don't mean completely replace behavioral targeting but at the very least try some contextual one too.
A few things to determine if what you're experiencing is actually Google "being dead"
1. Check your search volume. Use Google Trends or the method I will share below. 2. Check how you spent in December vs how you spent during a previously great time. Understand if it's a volume issue or a conversion issue 3. See if anyone new entered your auction. If they did, find out what they're saying
-- 1a) Search Volume
Checking search volume: In the era of broad match, this is one of the most underrated approaches to diagnosing issues. Take a look at your `search exact match impression share` relative to your impressions on a few of your top keywords. Then measure out if search volume for your business is actually decreasing. Then, use the following rubric to diagnose futher:
1. Not decreasing. Move on to the next item 2. 5-10% decrease and competitive auction. If you have a decrease AND a competitive auction, a 20% drop in efficiency could be explained. 3. 5-10% decrease and a not-so-competitive auction. If this is the case, the drop in volume may not be what's causing your issues.
-- 1b) Click volume
Check your exact match impression > click rate. Similar to the last approach, this helps diagnose if there are SERP feature changes which could decrease the amount of clicks you're receiving despite demand remaining flat.
If this is the case, take a look at the SERP and find the new winners.
-- 2) Segment comparison
Compare December YOY and see what changed. Are you serving to a different age range? Different search term mix? Increased spend to search partners? Are the headline combinations which are serving different?
-- 3) Auction changes
Have you checked your auction insights? Are new competitors being more or less aggressive? If so, what are their headlines? Are they offering an easier booking experience than you are?
And... if Google is actually dead, you might try:
1. Meta ads. Turn off audience network, make sure you've got the conversions API set up, and see what happens. Expect leads to be lower intent. Make your creative dead simple. "If you're looking for kid party entertainment in Northdene..." Start with $20/day optimizing for leads.
2. Improve your form. I see typeform-style-forms do better than the long one you have.
3. (Maybe) If you don't already track `closed (won)` conversions into your google ads account, that could help. I find when I start tracking which searches turn into deals, I can restructure my account to de-prioritize the junk leads.
4. (Maybe) Add a soft form to each of your service pages. Basically an embedded form which starts by asking people softball questions like "How Old Are The Kids At Your Party." Once people start a form they're much more likely to complete it, even if the questions are very basic.
5. (Maybe) Add a way to give a phone call. Phone call leads convert 30-50% better in my experience. But, this isn't an option for every
Thanks for the info. Will definitely be doing a post mortem after I finish scrambling for new work opportunities
Well, the cycle is over.
I remember the rise and the fall of AltaVista search engine.
I remember the rise of Google that was able to circumvent all the "old days" SEO efforts by spamming keywords in the HTML headers. Then everyone was trying to guess how to game Google page rank algo.
Finally people learned how to cheat Google, searches on many topics are returning endless pages of spam, marketing content that is supposed to earn AdSenens money (Google's "disruption" of online ads, better than all those cringe banners, that, eventually, destroyed Google search).
Right now Bing is working better for me (Bing! WTF?), for some stuff I use Yandex (shrug), but most of the stuff goes through AI, if you ask them to provide source of the information and you check it, this seems to be working fine...
For the time being, until people learn how to feed AI bots with the manipulated content they want. This will be probably more complicated, but it will happen (gaming page rank was also harder than adding "right" words to HTML keywords), unless AI providers will be careful with what they give as a food for their hungry Nvidia GPUs.
But this will be more expensive than blindly scanning the internet. That's why I see here a proper place where governments should step in, finance curation of the content for AI, as this will benefit society in a big way.
I see here an opportunity for smaller players, like Mistral, who can get some gov/EU funding and provide more quality than others who will devour whatever they find.
the site is loading forever now. hn crashed it hehe
Great, now my server is crashing again. I thought Cloudflare was supposed to take care of this stuff
are you caching the HTML response or just the assets?
I can't remember I think it's just the assets though - seems to be surviving so far. How do you get it to cache everything, is that a paid thing?
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Because everyone asking AI to do websearch for them
Can we also talk about how dogshit YouTube Search has been the last 2 years? Some videos have turned to shorts, but they're not searchable through their search API, making the feature pretty useless.
Google and Google Ads are not one and the same.
The jump from the op's "i screwed up my google ads campaigns" to "Research shows that many young people are getting their information from short video platforms like TikTok"....
i mean, c'mon
If Google Ads was cut off from Google, would they still be profitable?
Judging by the post this guy advertises his kids entertainment business to young people. With recent crackdowns on age verification etc. it could be his ads are no longer reaching the audience they used to.
Now I wonder how long until AI chat tool are riddled with ads, and with shitty content because of people trying to game them just like they've been gaming search engines.
You become a trusted source of data for AI chatbots (hopefully in somewhat ethical way for end users). Look into generative language optimization.
Can someone explain why GOOG is still sky high despite this?
Another explanation is that when the cost of living is high, people reduce their spending on entertainment. If that's the case, no amount of advertising will materially shift your bottom line.
I am glad to not be the only one to come to a similar conclusion. But we need to go one step further: I believe that Google has become harmful to the world in its present form. I'll skip listing all reasons, as there are many other websites that detailed this already, as well as (ironically) youtube videos. The problem goes much deeper than "merely" Google's monopoly in regards to all that ad-money. This is indeed probably the biggest reason why Google sucks so much nowadays, but the problem really is much bigger than that; it also taps into politics, what with the orange King meta-protecting these mega-corporations and the tech-bros ruthlessly abusing the rest of the world. We need real change, substantial change. Fixing Google is one important step but not the only one - but let's focus on Google mostly here, to simplify things a little.
The big underlying problem is that Google has no real incentive to change the way how it operates. Its search engine, which they crippled, is not really that important to Google anymore compared to the ad-revenue and other business ventures here. AI is the current insanity rage and Google went for it too. When you cripple the search engine, you can sell more bullshit to people, fake-generate and hallucinate a world wide web that is controlled by these walled garden corporations (Facebook is probably the best example of a walled garden, but there are many similar; twitter run by a crazy oligarch too, "bla bla bla log in to read news bla bla bla" - never going to do that, so they cut off my access to an open world wide web here).
I do not think Google can be fixed with the current setup though. It will just continue to steal money by taking our data and interconnecting this with other greedy private interests, now represented by lobbyists running the USA (and also other places, of course; just the USA being bigger than the other places, economically).
Google has to be split up and removed. There is no other way to fix it anymore. They want down a path from which they can not change anymore, because any change means less revenue, and no corporation wants to do so on its own.
> Research shows that many young people are getting their information from short video platforms like TikTok and Instagram. We are trying ads on there.
Well - circusscientist adds to this problem. They depend on ads, so they contribute to the overall problem. The issue is not just Google here; it is also commercial interests who think they have a right to pester-harass people via irrelevant crap (aka ads). Google killed ublock origin. Google controls the web virtually via chrome. We have a conflict of interests here. Google has no reason to change this, and many companies think they need to use ads. This is a problem. I believe in an ad-free world. I don't want to see any ads. Many years of commercial interests confused people into thinking ads are the way to go. I disagree. I think ads are evil and must die. And companies that have no alternative business model, who rely on ads, also have to go. Google is just sitting on top of it all, acting as a greedy parasite.
> We have an email newsletter
They still think anyone cares about email spam. I never subscribe to any "newsletter". A better model is to read up on things WHEN YOU VISIT THE WEBSITE. This works on many private websites too such as github. I can read when I want to, not when some bot spams me down with this irrelevant stuff (and admittedly I would not read ads anyway, but my point is about DELIVERY versus VISITING something here).
> We also plan to do some actual physical advertising
So he chose confrontation.
> I am AI assisted, very fast!
Why would I want to give my money to anyone using ads or wanting to lower the overall quality via AI? That makes no sense. Some people are beyond hope.
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Look, the 90's Internet isn't cool anymore. Sorry. Things are cool for a while and then they're not.
Franchises die. It's still cool to say "The originals were really cool", and always will be, but now we're talking about now. Star Wars is uncool. There are people who sort of automatically praise it and subtly put down those who don't like they're aligned with a magnetic field, sure, but they're in their own world. Indiana Jones and Ghostbusters are uncool now. Star Trek is almost there. AI is not cool and never will be. Tiktok is cool, but soon everything that is uncool will descend upon it.
Sorry. Bananas blacken and apples get spots. Time moves on.
Downvoting isn't cool. Reply instead.
You're joking, but they're really trying hard to make cool things uncool.
I think it's not directly in their interest to make anything uncool. They're there to suck away some of it for themselves, that's all.
I don't know why people are so aggressively downvoting this. It's the honest truth.
I grew up before Google, I remember when it was just a useful search tool. Then an industry grew up around exploiting it in various ways and ads became a major revenue source for Google, completely changing the platform. I witnessed this entire online marketing/ad industry come into existence.
I have friends who worked in SEO for years. Very talented, smart people. But that industry is gone now. Likewise Google ads is clearly not long for this world as Google will probably get a lot more money leveraging their AI for product recommendations/sales etc.
People used creative thinking to create this industry, so the answer to "where do we go now?" is find the next one. It won't just be the same thing repeated, just like SEO and ad optimization where fairly major departures from the previous world of advertising and marketing they came from.
>I don't know why people are so aggressively downvoting this. It's the honest truth.
There you go.
Did you read the page? The context is very clear: a small business that had for years gotten a lot of its leads/customers from Adwords is seeing that Adwords ("Google" in context) is not working. They are then asking (other small businesses in the same situation, "where do we go now?").
There nothing about nostalgia, no real concern for Google as a company, or how the web used to work, etc. Just a small business trying to stay afloat.
Yes, Google is no longer producing good results for them. That is what I'm addressing.
"Cool" is precisely the problem. Cool is completely irrelevant to whether something is useful or valuable.
God no! Useful and valuable is incredibly cool! How could you write this?
It seems you didn't read the article, which doesn't tell anything about google being cool or uncool.
The title is "Google is dead".
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my vote is for ATProto
let's take back the interwebs and have a single account where all apps store their data about you, which you can move around and also swap out clients for any data without companies blocking you
Haha no wonder, check out the website its dodgy as f. https://bigtop.co.za/
This is actually the most legit thing I can think of that could be behind an ad. It looks like an actual small business that is using ads as a replacement for the yellow pages, presumably when people are searching for party entertainment. I had assumed that basically all online ads were just straight up scams.
That said, I don’t ever want to see ads for it either. If I lived in Durban and wanted a juggling act, I’d like to be able to find it, as I’m sure all their clients would. I wonder if the market is just very competitive, or if they don’t show up on regulular searches for some reason.
Checked out as instructed, it somehow made me empathetic towards the OP. Not only the business completely harmless, it's the opposite: their job is trying to make people happy, and it's lovely.
Off-topic reply but I don't want to start another comment:
The problem about Google and AI has deeper layers: AI answers has trained users to not look into the source information (a.k.a websites), and websites are combating it by making themselves harder to crawl (for example, by enabling Cloudflare protection/verification), which in turn makes creating new search engine harder.
This down circle is currently unbreakable, which is a hellish situation for new comers, but great for established players such as Reddit, Facebook etc since they have internal search engine as well as mountains amount of content to provide.
If one day the big platforms (there are only handful of them) completely blocked Google from crawling them, that will be the true death of Google.
Funny how a simpler and self-made website is seen as "dodgy af" but geocity 90s mash of stuff is "nostalgic".
It's not the neatest but it feels real, like these guys are into entertainment for parties, not web design.
I’m not handing over money to 90s geocities.
Not enough layers of SPA and Tailwind for your taste?
Serious question: why do you find it dodgy?
Well, it's harshly put... bu not entirely untrue. The website would probably need to be refreshed.
I agree, that site looks like the owners lack basic self-awareness. Surely they must use the modern internet and recognize the difference?
And if they’re unable to invest in their site or they’re simply shut out of the modern world, I’d assume the same applies to other aspects of their business as well.
I knew about duckduckgo for years and it was always too much friction to switch. I tried like 4 times but always went back to google when I had to research something quickly. Eventually the friction of using google became high enough though that the friction of switching was not that much higher. I’ve been using ddg and occasionally duck ai for over a year now.