Comment by hansvm
15 hours ago
That misses the point though. Google and Meta have designed systems which capture nearly the entire surplus. In a non-monopolistic environment you'd expect somebody to be willing to step in at a bit less than Google's rates and offer the same outcomes.
The parent comment did a sneaky thing and gave the advertising budget then pivoted into rants about Google and Meta. They never actually said “All of this money goes to Google and Meta”. It was just expected that on HN everyone would assume as much because that’s what everyone is familiar with.
In the pharmaceutical industry, I can guarantee their advertising funnel is much wider than two social media platforms. Think about all the places you see pharmaceutical ads: TV, billboards, even ads on buses, that sketchy doctor’s office full of company swag. That $40 million is not going all to Google and Meta even if the GP comment tried to imply it was.
> In the pharmaceutical industry, I can guarantee their advertising funnel is much wider than two social media platforms. Think about all the places you see pharmaceutical ads: TV, billboards, even ads on buses, that sketchy doctor’s office full of company swag. That $40 million is not going all to Google and Meta even if the GP comment tried to imply it was.
Having worked adjacent to ads... yes, there is more than social media ads. But the amount of everything not social media has massively shrunk!
Local newspapers are effectively dead except for local businesses (and even these are reducing their spend - especially the food delivery services fully rely on Uber, Just Eat etc) and so is radio, and even TV has been hit hard. You got newspapers and broadcast stations getting hit left and right, sliding into bankruptcy and/or being bought up by larger companies for pennies on the dollar. The fact that all across the Western world government/citizen funded public broadcasts are under attack makes it even worse, the diversity of media and, most importantly, the amount of people holding government accountable is collapsing as we speak [1].
Globally, Google, Amazon and Meta suck up over half of the global ad spend and it's not going to look better [2].
[1] https://lizfarmer.substack.com/p/how-the-decline-of-local-ne...
[2] https://www.marketingdive.com/news/global-ad-spend-rise-fast...
What's the spending distribution for pharma ads? Hypothetically, if $35 million out of $40 goes to Google and Meta, OP is still right.
They have all the control and no competition. The time for breaking these companies up or hamstringing them at least a little bit is many years past due.
The problem is that monopolies are extremely profitable and are as "American as apple pie," despite the prevailing healthy competition myth that goes alongside it.