[HN Gopher] The new dot com bubble is online advertising (2019)
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The new dot com bubble is online advertising (2019)
Author : 1vuio0pswjnm7
Score : 260 points
Date : 2021-10-02 00:18 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thecorrespondent.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (thecorrespondent.com)
| mlinksva wrote:
| Not a fan of advertising (online or otherwise, wish online wasn't
| exclusively...targeted) (tax it!) but bubble accusations seem
| unfounded. It's possible to find negative or uncertain returns to
| spend but that doesn't make a bubble.
|
| Relatedly the first and third results for
| https://hn.algolia.com/?q=bubble are
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17060085 (2018 GDPR Will Pop
| the Adtech Bubble; didn't happen) and
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10572863 (2015 The Adtech
| Bubble; the end was not nigh).
| cubano wrote:
| Meet the new boss.
|
| Same as the old boss.
| fsckboy wrote:
| this new dot com bubble, if it exists, is really a subdomain of
| the .com tld, it would be the google.com bubble.
| [deleted]
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| so much previous discussion when this was fresher:
|
| 1 year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23101883
|
| 2 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465873
| axegon_ wrote:
| Annoyingly I feel like it's true. Personally I never had anything
| strongly against online advertising - there are tons of website
| and blogs where you can see that people have poured their hearts
| and souls into their work and the only thing they get in return
| are a few peanuts from ads. There's the case for trackers and
| cookies and whatnot but let's be realistic-the analysis and
| processing is done by a server in the dark corner of a
| datacenter, not an evil mastermind going through every website
| I've visited: no one is that interested in me or anyone else for
| that matter. Frankly I'd be flattered if someone showed that much
| interest into me but no... But at some point the over-saturation
| and overpopulation of certain species will cause cataclysms and I
| feel like we are close. While I stay away from all social
| media(I'm sure it's a similar story there), the thing that
| crossed my line was Google and more specifically Youtube. You
| open up a video, at which point you are already forced through
| two ads, one of which is unskippable, then you get to the
| "sponsored message" then another two ads if the video is slightly
| longer. If I wanted to watch TV, I'd watch TV. And this is what
| ultimately pushed me over the edge: Brave browser ftw and the
| hell with all that. And I see more and more people going that way
| for similar purposes. It's a question of time before enough
| people have had enough and ads become a financial burden to those
| who advertise online.
| kwanbix wrote:
| I pay for google music, or whatever the name is today, and I
| see no ads. Bandwidth, servers, the employees, etc. have a
| cost, so it is only natural that companies make money somehow,
| either through ads or by subscription.
|
| EDIT: it is YouTube Premium.
| axegon_ wrote:
| Music is a different thing(I'm also a subscriber), I'm
| talking videos specifically. I'm sorry but the fact that I
| have to go through a minute of ads for every 4 minutes of
| videos watched is absurd. The worst thing I've had to endure
| was Antena 3 in Spain in terms of content-to-ads ratio. At
| this point if we include sponsored messages in videos, I'm
| willing to bet the ratio is worse on youtube.
| kwanbix wrote:
| I am talking about videos. You pay YouTube Premium and you
| don't see ads.
| rciorba wrote:
| that deal is (was?) only available in few parts of the world,
| sadly
| heurisko wrote:
| I have had the thought that there is something wrong, that I can
| access nearly any song of my choice on YouTube, with the small
| penalty of skipping an advert after 5 seconds.
|
| Many of the adverts aren't even for products I'm interested in.
| They're either get-rich-quick schemes, or repeat-ad-nauseum ads
| for software like Grammerly, which I will never use.
|
| If Google has some sort of complex picture about me, by invading
| my privacy, then they're certainly not using it to sell me
| anything I am interested in.
|
| I guess if Google are funalling cash from advertisers to the
| record companies, then it will continue. But I have to wonder
| what would happen if advertisers actually look at how effective
| their advertisements are.
|
| I feel I'm getting a good deal out of this arrangement.
| kubanczyk wrote:
| > skipping an advert after 5 seconds
|
| YT ads are not shown on Firefox with a plugin such as uBlock
| Origin. Just in case you're one of today's lucky 10,000.
| diarrhea wrote:
| Among Firefox, uBlock Origin, AdGuard Home and buying (for a
| couple dollars) ad-free versions of apps I use frequently,
| the web is virtually entirely ad-free for me. It blows my
| mind that it's different for most people.
|
| Every time I use YouTube on Amazon FireTV, I lose interest in
| the video content very fast. Just atrocious to sift through
| the ads, popups etc.
| [deleted]
| ksidn wrote:
| >Grammerly
|
| Well, you should look into it...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I think the typical commentator on HN is unaware of how they
| think very differently from the typical American.
|
| Advertising definitely works. I've seen it work among many
| people in person. Even people who agree that ads are dumb, I've
| seen decide to get some candy after seeing an ad for it on TV.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I get an even better deal, I see no ads on YouTube because I
| use uBlock Origin.
| asddubs wrote:
| and sponsorblock for blocking in-video ads
| durnygbur wrote:
| > choice on YouTube, with the small penalty of skipping an
| advert after 5 seconds.
|
| YouTube is now in the last stage, cashing out their popularity.
| Now it's 20 seconds unskippable ad, then ad skippable after 5
| seconds, then video interrupted with an another ad. I basically
| download the video and watch it on my computer or shutdown the
| browser tab with youtube.
| busymom0 wrote:
| If using iPhone, iOS 15 extensions let's you block those
| video ads. If using android, use Firefox browser with both an
| adblocker like uBlock and an addon to allow video playback in
| background along with another addon for auto skipping the
| "continue playing" Popup. Both have made my life so much
| easier!
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I've always wanted to inquire the significance of advertising
| from the standpoint of the business, and yet its failure to
| please users. Advertising sucks from the standpoint of the user,
| and some say that if you want to scale any online business from 0
| customers to N, advertising is pivotal and word of mouth won't
| do. Whether it comes in the flavor of give $10 to sign up a
| Paypal account, banner ads, search engine ads and these days also
| social ads (YT promotion, sleezy product reviews, IG celebrities)
| - it's important. So how come we have not solved the problem of
| user hostility in advertisement? Blendtec's "Will it blend?"
| series blends entertainment and advertisement. Engineers go to
| trade fairs and conferences _voluntarily_ to seek out new
| suppliers /companies. People pay to go to Disneyland. Another
| genius in advertising is products/services that self advertise
| (Louis Vuitton). My gut feeling is that there is a deeper, more
| fundamental trade-off between advertisement effectiveness, and
| user hostility that always persists. Most of the time, we just
| adandon further inquiry and call it off as "It is the way it is
| because it damn well works".
| pm90 wrote:
| We haven't "solved" user hostility because the industry still
| relies on user data collection and tracking on a massive scale
| with default opt in rather than opt out. Consumers are spooked
| by that and the industry has (by and large) failed to convince
| them of the utility of targeted advertising.
|
| It's the original sin of online ads that nobody really wants to
| address. Because of that, we have a lot of rather shady players
| in the industry making the problem even worse.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I feel like there is a distinction between targeting ads
| based on the profile you've created on their site (say,
| Facebook) and targeting ads by tracking users all over the
| internet.
| pm90 wrote:
| Almost every web property with a significant user base uses
| "identity resolution" to personalize ads. Without
| regulations forbidding organizations from doing this it's
| not going to stop.
| system2 wrote:
| If it is a bubble, whom is it going to affect? Dotcom bubble was
| the investor's money. What is even ad bubble supposed to do when
| it pops?
| Hendrikto wrote:
| Also investor's money. If ad revenue suddenly tanked, so would
| the stocks of Google, Facebook, etc.
| AreYouElite wrote:
| and it would tank anything financed by ad-revenue A lot of
| things are financed by ads: entertainment... music..
| sports...
| rossdavidh wrote:
| There are two different assertions that should be distinguished:
|
| 1) most online advertising doesn't work
|
| 2) the revenue from online advertising will soon decline, perhaps
| precipitously
|
| I believe (1), but not (2), hence it isn't a "bubble". If you
| tell a CEO "hey, you're not going to be able to solve your
| problem with advertising", then you are in effect telling them,
| "there's no easy solution to your problem, you must do the much
| harder work of making your goods or services better".
|
| Not many CEO's will want to hear that. They will continue, I
| think, to spend money on advertising, including online
| advertising, not because it works well (it only occasionally
| does), but because it's easier. It's like selling someone a diet
| aid that says they can lose 50 pounds without having to work
| hard. Regardless of whether it works or not, people want to
| believe it does, so they will keep buying.
| tflinton wrote:
| I used to work for a B2B advertising agency, we did a campaign
| for the largest teleco in the US targeted at C-level executives
| to by their enterprise products. Our engagement team said
| (privately) that they had spent 20k per click. And had no idea if
| any of those targeted VERY expensive clicks resulted in leads let
| alone sales.
| tonmoy wrote:
| But wouldn't a single purchase more than pay for the entire
| campaign?
| amusedcyclist wrote:
| I don't think you can build a new consumer facing business
| without advertising on facebook and google. A lot of the moden
| consumer internet was built by advertising on those platforms and
| diverting dollars away from brick and mortar. Some well known
| examples include Airbnb and all the kardashian family brands.
| Advertising metrics might be hard to measure for large well known
| companies, but for startups/ solo entrepreneurs the numbers tend
| to be much clearer.
| rossjudson wrote:
| Ultra-clear for small businesses, at times. I was once a
| partner in a shop, and there was that time that we had a
| account problem/billing error on the credit card, and all the
| advertising stopped for the better part of a month. Worst month
| ever.
|
| The whole article reads like something the author wishes was
| true, but that's predicated on the notion that everyone buying
| advertising is just stupid.
| Qi_ wrote:
| Digital advertising is much more accessible for the small fish
| too. If a business has a Facebook presence, $10/day can get a
| campaign going, and scaling it up is trivial.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| One thing I don't get: if in the entire industry $273bn were
| spent on ads in a year, how come that one company which derives
| most of its revenue from ads, such as Alphabet has a market cap
| several times larger?
| nlitened wrote:
| Market cap assumes that the company captures revenue over
| multiple years of its future existence. Therefore it could
| easily be more than one year ad spending, especially if it is
| assumed that year over year the spending would grow, and the
| company would continue to successfully exist over decades.
| Hermel wrote:
| Earning 273 billion per year is much more valuable than owning
| 273 billion.
| KoftaBob wrote:
| Because market cap isn't based on how much a company makes in
| one year.
| bradwood wrote:
| I thought it was DeFi, Crypto and Web3...
| rsync wrote:
| It's an idea that just won't die ...
|
| If we concatenate enough garbage: (subprime loans, training
| inputs, consumer information)
|
| then the result: (MBS tranches, AI, targeted ads) is _somehow not
| garbage_.
|
| This appears to be a wonderful model for separating gullible
| investors from their money so I suspect we'll keep seeing new
| incarnations of it ...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > This appears to be a wonderful model for separating gullible
| investors from their money so I suspect
|
| The original model, selective investment funds with management
| fees, seems to be doing quite well a century on.
| glenstein wrote:
| I think you are right, but the process you describe is so
| similar to the way we actually create value. Transforming or
| changing something from less into more. Normally we might call
| it work, or a patent.
|
| Making garbage can look similar to doing work and making
| something of value in the right circumstances.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Transforming or changing something from less into more.
|
| "Less" rarely means garbage, and usually it takes more work
| than acquiring more more more.
| sb057 wrote:
| In 2020, newspaper, radio, and magazine ad spending was $85
| billion compared to all online ad spending (which is far more
| targeted and thus more valuable) at around $500 billion.
| Television advertising was around $193 billion. Unless we're in a
| generalized advertising bubble, I'd say online advertising is
| still in healthy territory
|
| https://www.marketingcharts.com/advertising-trends/spending-...
| 3np wrote:
| Note that these are forecasted metrics specifically for the
| USA.
|
| I wouldnt be surprised if they underestimate online ad spending
| - there may be a lot of $ going through channels and companies
| that are not included.
|
| It's not like they have insight into revenue of all ad
| companies even within the US, right?
|
| How about sponsored YouTube/Instagram/TikTok/blogspam for
| example?
| slater wrote:
| 6 November 2019
| klyrs wrote:
| Wild. From the title I was guessing 2008.
| tofukid wrote:
| _What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital
| advertising?_
|
| The effectiveness of online ads is easily measurable: Return on
| ad spend (ROAS) = (revenue from ad referrals) - (money spent on
| ads)
| cratermoon wrote:
| > revenue from ad referrals
|
| And exactly how do you get accurate figures for that?
| tofukid wrote:
| It's simple. You use a URL with the campaign id, and store
| that when the customer clicks through, then when a sale is
| made you count that towards the campaign. In offline
| advertising people would achieve this using campaign-specific
| phone numbers or discount code given in the ad.
|
| Online advertising math is not rocket science. If ROAS is
| positive you continue the campaign, if not you abandon it or
| try other methods.
| fieldcny wrote:
| Maybe if your business is simple and purchase cycle fast.
|
| For the majority of companies that's not the case.
|
| There are other confounding factors, like the margin
| attached to that revenue.
|
| Sometimes understanding the actual profitability of a sale
| can take years.
|
| As others have said for big brands it can be incredibly
| hard to do real attribution.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Direct conversion to sale via clickthroughs are an almost
| invisibly small part of online ads . No advertiser uses
| only that metric for determining ROAS.
| tofukid wrote:
| Which metrics are you referring to?
|
| I can't speak for ad agencies, but every company I've
| worked with to do advertising measured ROAS using
| customer attribution (which ad campaign brought which
| customer, and how much did that customer spend).
| cratermoon wrote:
| > which ad campaign brought which customer
|
| And how do they determine that?
| klvino wrote:
| Guess we'll skip branding and awareness campaigns, ignore
| all post-view purchases, not use cross-device or cross-
| channel attribution, and not look at attribution of offline
| conversion/visitation activity.
|
| If the only thing you do is Search and Email Blasts, the
| query string on your URL might work okay.
| namanyayg wrote:
| The query string method will not provide stats for the
| above point; but the newer methods e.g. using the FB
| pixel that tracks users based on the user's email/userid
| you create can accomplish much of that (only offline
| conversions are difficult, but there are still modern
| ways to match an offline customer with their past ad
| exposure e.g. if you get their email/phone on
| purchase...)
| erostrate wrote:
| TFA spends a long time belaboring the point that this is
| not correct. Because many people who click on your URL
| would have bought the item anyway.
| Qi_ wrote:
| Facebook for example has a "tracking pixel" script that can
| be included in your website to get detailed info about
| conversions from Facebook ads.
| fieldcny wrote:
| If it were really this easy people would be doing it, the
| world really is a complex place.
| newshorts wrote:
| Exactly what the marketers thought.
|
| The point I took from the article is that you have to factor in
| what you would have gotten for free.
| sangnoir wrote:
| You can stop advertising for a while and compare the outcome.
| Or take 2 similar markets and only advertise in one of them.
| Online tracking enables fine-grained analytics, there's
| little left to guessing - especially for small or medium
| businesses who do not (yet) have high brand familiarity.
| jokoon wrote:
| I feel like advertising was always a scam.
|
| I don't think it really helps the small entities reach an
| audience, and it only allows the largest companies to remind
| everyone they are the biggest.
|
| I'm not sure there are thorough studies that show advertising
| increase sales.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Word of mouth is usually the most trustworthy. Yet people need
| to learn of alternatives from somewhere. Perhaps if those
| serving ads were more liable, much like friends risking their
| reputation to recommend something, the negatives of ads could
| be better mitigated.
| WhisperingShiba wrote:
| Word of mouth is king. I've only seen 2 ads in the last year
| that were even relevant, and only 1 of 2 of them turned into
| a sales conversion. For the other product, I went to a
| competitor.
| zbuf wrote:
| The article explains why eBay shouldn't advertise against the
| term "eBay", all very logical.
|
| ... Until a competitor starts advertising against the the term
| "eBay".
|
| At which point, online advertising becomes protection money.
| allendoerfer wrote:
| Click-through rates will be very low. In most countries you
| cannot impersonate another company, so they cannot call
| themselves ,,eBay" in the ad copy.
| zbuf wrote:
| They may not be able to call themselves by the competitor's
| name, but what about the "alternative to <company>" that we
| see a lot.
|
| Furthermore, Google will "dynamically" assemble an advert
| based on the current search to 'optimise' click-though (and
| they recently sent a mail out making it clear this will be
| the only type of text ad going forward)
|
| They think they're optimising "click through" rate.
|
| But what they're really doing is using heuristics to find the
| advert that's most likely to be confused with the top search
| result.
|
| Either way, the ad platform wins.
|
| And companies pay their protection money.
| gingerlime wrote:
| Did anything change there? I remember Basecamp's Jason Fried
| complaining about it[0] but I wasn't aware of any policy
| changes that prevent someone from bidding on their
| competitor's names and essentially placing their brand ahead
| of yours when searching for your brand name...
|
| [0] https://fortune.com/2019/09/04/google-trolled-search-ads/
| WoahNoun wrote:
| If your brand is a registered trademark, you can have
| google stop your competitors from referencing it in search
| ad copy.
|
| https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/6118?hl=en
| youngtaff wrote:
| Bit that's only in copy...
|
| You can't stop them using it for targeting, and that's
| how part of the ad extortion market works
|
| - someone advertises against you brand as a keyword so
| now you have to advertise against it too... Google wins
| in revenue terms
|
| - it's also the source of scams e.g. people advertising
| against searches for free public services on say gov.uk,
| but charging for the same thing
| somedude895 wrote:
| This is the strongest antitrust case against Google in my
| opinion. They are the monopoly search engine. Tons of people
| google a website name instead of typing in the URL. Tons of
| people don't know the ads are actually ads and Google is making
| it harder to tell them apart from the every year[0]. It's
| basically like the mafia telling you to fork over money or else
| they put up your competitors' billboards in front of your
| store. Not a very scary mafia, but still.
|
| [0] https://images.app.goo.gl/WjafWzujgjHT32Y17
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| This is also an issue in Apple's app store.
| smilekzs wrote:
| A relatively friendly jab: at one point if you search "emacs"
| you could see an ad along the lines of (forgot the exact
| wording):
|
| escape meta alt ctrl shift AAARGGHHHH.... try VIM.
| avalys wrote:
| I remember reading this article back in 2019 when it was
| originally written. Unclear why it is being dusted off now when
| it is still just as wrong as it was then.
|
| Yes, it is probably hard for a large, well-known brand like eBay
| or Procter & Gamble or Coca-Cola to measure their return from
| online advertising. If Coca-Cola stopped all advertising for 1
| week, would anything really change? Probably not. And it's not as
| if anyone is clicking Google search ads for Coca-Cola and
| ordering a 6-pack right there. This is the same problem that
| these companies have with TV advertising.
|
| But anyone who has ever run a small, consumer-focused startup
| with low brand recognition can very easily measure their return
| on ad spend, and will spend a lot of time doing this. You can
| easily tell which specific ad referred someone to your website,
| and how much money they spent once they got there.
|
| If they're not convinced by this data, at some point most
| startups will find the opportunity to simply turn off all
| advertising for a week for one reason or another. And can usually
| see the drop in revenue immediately.
|
| I was involved in a consumer hardware startup where our COO
| shared granular ROAS numbers in our all-hands every week for
| Google, Facebook, TV advertising across multiple networks, etc.
| They regularly A/B tested different advertisements and messages
| across different media and directly optimized for revenue. It was
| clear beyond a doubt that this advertising worked. The company
| would not have been viable without it.
|
| The fact that this proof is easily and readily available from
| small, lesser-known companies is part of why large companies
| continue to spend money on advertising despite the benefits being
| much harder to measure.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I have a suspicion that the great majority of businesses have
| no idea whether their advertising is effective or not. Of
| course this is encouraged by all the dark patterns you see in
| the Adwords control panel.
| theyx wrote:
| Not providing proof and just anecdotal experiences won't do
| your argument any good. Especially because that's exactly how
| Ad companies/agencies got here in the first place, by saying it
| works without clear, verifiable ways to prove it: "yeah, it
| works, trust us, but we won't let you see the data"
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| This rings true completely from my experience.
|
| I run an eBay store that has pretty decent revenues but no
| brand recognition, and we make pretty heavy use of their
| Promoted Listings function.
|
| We've generally found for competitive items that sacrificing 5%
| to ad spend allows us to increase the price of the item by 20%
| without experiencing any reduction in sales. There is no way to
| fake that.
|
| For my other business, though, (Low-cost USB Oscilloscopes) I
| found Google, Facebook and Amazon ads to be completely useless.
| Even then, though, it didn't cost a lot of money or take a
| whole lot of time to get a definitive answer and cancel the
| campaign.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I think the audience makes a huge difference. I mainly sell
| to a technical audience and Adwords stopped being effective
| for me years ago.
| firecall wrote:
| I've worked with and for brands with multi million dollar
| budgets.
|
| My general advice, which I borrwed from somewhere...
|
| Advertising is like an Aircraft. You power up, use a lot
| fuel(budget) and you get airborn!
|
| Then you cut the engines (reduce budget) and you start gliding
| and you think, well OK, everthing seems fine! I dont need to
| keep burning fuel!
|
| And then all of sudden you either smash into the ground or you
| have to use that rapid fuel burn all over again to get back on
| top!
|
| YMMV!
|
| On the flip side, I've cut Google Ad spend for a large tourism
| brand and traffic to the website continued to grow even 24
| months later.
|
| Traffic is one metric of course....
|
| Marketing and Advertising are complicated and hard! It requires
| nerves of steal and it really helps when it's someone else's
| budget! :-)
| tcmart14 wrote:
| I think with a company like Coca-cola, it is a little bit of a
| different approach. Taking Coca-cola as the example. My money
| is their ads are not placed there to get you to buy a 6-pack
| online. It is so when you see it, you go, 'damn a coke actually
| sounds really good right now.' And then you proceed to walk tot
| he fridge for one or next time your out and about buy one.
| However I would say that a product such as coke is a specific
| case. Some ads are for targeting people to go to their online
| store, then I am sure ones like coke exist to put the idea in
| your mind next time you stop for gas.
| pm90 wrote:
| For commodity products, It's all about creating a
| subconscious association so eg when you're at the store you
| choose coke because you're heard/seen it so many times it
| seems "familiar".
| MarkMc wrote:
| > And it's not as if anyone is clicking Google search ads for
| Coca-Cola and ordering a 6-pack right there. This is the same
| problem that these companies have with TV advertising.
|
| Supermarkets already have a loyalty card program where you
| receive a small discount and in return you agree to receive
| targeted advertising based on your purchases.
|
| Why don't these loyalty programs add a clause saying that they
| may also share your personal information with Google? That
| would mean Coca-Cola or Proctor and Gamble could see how much
| they spent on advertising to a particular person, and how much
| that person spent in buying the company's products.
| the-dude wrote:
| Just some anecdata : AFAIK this is not allowed in The
| Netherlands. Retailers are not allowed to mine purchasing
| data on an individual level.
| satellite2 wrote:
| Even for seemingly obvious things this article is wrong.
|
| Maybe in 2009, when the market was playing ball, was it okay
| not to buy your own brand (eBay) as a keyword, as this is an
| audience that already want to go to your site. Now all your
| competitors are buying your brand and you'll end up in fourth
| or fifth position with your own audience if you don't buy it.
|
| And while most will still scroll it through, you will end up
| losing a small but consistent share of clicks to competitors
| time to time. And if they manage to make their service slightly
| more sticky than yours, you'll end up losing small market
| shares over time.
| ZhangSWEFAANG wrote:
| What's the concept called when something persists even as it
| scales?
| GeneralMayhem wrote:
| To be fair, the point of the article is that ROAS is not a very
| good metric, and while most of the article is wrong in that it
| effectively calls _all_ advertising worthless as a result, it
| 's not wrong about that one methodological point. What matters
| is _incremental_ ROAS - not the conversions following exposure,
| but rather the conversions that would not have happened but for
| the exposure. For small companies that have no existing
| awareness, they 're close to the same thing. But like you said,
| it is very hard to measure for the large brand advertisers that
| are very well-penetrated.
|
| If Coke switched off their advertising they would eventually
| lose market share, but it would take more than one Christmas of
| not seeing the polar bears. For companies in their position,
| advertising is about _maintaining_ dominance. Spending on a
| Superbowl ad is a way for them to say "we're the best, we know
| it, and you know it, and when you want a drink, you're going to
| buy Coke, not RC Cola". It takes a long, long time for that
| indoctrination to wear off, so there's no way to experiment on
| it - there's no untouched part of the market that's never seen
| a Coke ad against which you can do an A/B test.
| midasuni wrote:
| Whenever I buy woodstain I buy ronseals quick drying
| woodstain because it does exactly what it says on the tin.
| This is because I watched tv in the 90s as a teenager and it
| was ingrained.
|
| The benefits of brainwashing can pay dividend over a
| lifetime.
| csunbird wrote:
| Your point actually proves that, advertising gets the
| customer through the door, but, your product needs to be
| actually decent to keep the customer.You saw the
| advertisement, you bought the product and it worked as
| described, and continued to work in that way in the future.
|
| The product is successful not because of advertising,
| because it is actually good. I find it weird that, most
| people spend huge on advertising, but sometimes neglect the
| product.
| PKop wrote:
| A lot of products are good though...So your point isn't
| very convincing that products aren't successful because
| of advertising given the zero sum game of hooking a
| customer for life that OP describes.
| midasuni wrote:
| I have no idea. It's rare I stain wood, I have never
| compared any other stain, I don't know if it's any good
| or not, or indeed the price. They may charge twice as
| much as bobs woodstain but it's not worth me thinking
| about.
| ghaff wrote:
| What you're describing is pretty typical though. You buy
| a product either because of advertising, because it
| "looked" like a good choice in the store for whatever
| reason, it was recommended on Wirecutter, the Home Depot
| worker or a contractor pointed you towards it, etc. And
| it seems to do the job and, for the amount you spend on
| that item annually, it's not really worth doing your own
| comparison which you probably aren't in a position to do
| scientifically anyway.
| jasode wrote:
| _> What matters is incremental ROAS - not the conversions
| following exposure, but rather the conversions that would not
| have happened but for the exposure. [...] there's no
| untouched part of the market that's never seen a Coke ad
| against which you can do an A/B test. _
|
| Sophisticated advertisers like Coca-Cola are aware of the
| concept about _incremental ROAS_. They can 't do the exact
| A/B test scenario of isolated consumers you're talking about
| but decades ago, they did do A/B tests in different tv
| markets where one city had more ads than another and the city
| with more ads had higher sales. (What the industry jargon
| calls _" lift"_ from advertising exposure.)
|
| So even brands that are _already very well-known by most of
| the public_ still constantly do A /B tests to measure
| _incremental_ conversions in all media including digital,
| magazines, sports sponsorships, etc. Back in the late 1990s,
| many advertisers noticed that running banner ads on Yahoo
| didn 't work which contributed to their stock price crashing.
| Recently, a lot of advertisers (e.g. Proctor & Gamble) quit
| spending ad dollars on 2nd and 3rd-tier ad exchanges because
| their A/B measurements showed they were a waste of money.
| (The "1st-tier" ad exchange examples would be Google &
| Facebook.)
| somedude895 wrote:
| > Recently, a lot of advertisers (e.g. Proctor & Gamble)
| quit spending ad dollars on 2nd and 3rd-tier ad exchanges
| because their A/B measurements showed they were a waste of
| money.
|
| Can you share a link? I work in digital marketing and would
| be super interested in more info on this.
| sanketsarang wrote:
| You make a good point. But there is one more reason for
| advertising than just conversions. If Coca Cola were to stop
| advertising, it would free up substantial ad space allowing
| for their competition to advertise cheap. These large brands
| don't just advertise for branding/conversions. They plan
| their spend budget so as to actually influence the bid rate.
| This makes it harder for newer brands to compete and get any
| viable ad exposure at affordable prices.
| fdwrt wrote:
| That's why these companies invest so much in advertising.
| Market share is gained or lost in an instant.
|
| If Coke switched off their advertising they would have gained
| this market share in recent years?
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/225464/market-share-
| of-l...
| GhettoComputers wrote:
| Is there a control to prove it was advertising? They bought
| a lot of brands and there isn't evidence that online
| marketing was the reason.
| shostack wrote:
| TY. Incrementality is king. Measuring that as a marketer and
| advertiser is getting more challenging for a variety of
| reasons. The future, primarily for large brands, but
| increasingly accessible for smaller and smaller companies is
| in statistical analysis with properly controlled experiments.
|
| It is the only path I've seen that can account for all the
| noise in the measurement ecosystem. And even then it is far
| from easy to do "right."
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > The future ... is in statistical analysis with properly
| controlled experiments.
|
| The future? No, statistical analysis was always at the core
| of advertising, from the moment statistics was invented.
|
| It's only recently in the last few years that people forgot
| this, and only because techies and programmers without
| statistics knowledge successfully "disrupted" the
| advertising industry.
|
| But internet advertising sucks balls compared to classical
| advertising forms, especially from the point of view of ROI
| to the client.
|
| So we will eventually "undisrupt" this mess and make
| internet advertising more like the classical forms.
|
| t. working in ad tech for the last 17 years.
| shostack wrote:
| Fair point about statistical analysis. My comment was
| more that the tools and data to provide that visibility
| are starting to trickle down to smaller companies, sort
| of like how GA did it for web analytics. For better or
| worse.
|
| Disagree on traditional vs digital though. It is totally
| circumstantial which performs better.
| namanyayg wrote:
| The point you're talking about ROAS/incremental ROAS is quite
| moot actually. Every online ad tracks the user from the
| moment they click the ad to whatever events they make (e.g.
| add to cart, purchase, etc). So the measured ROAS is exactly
| for the users who'd come via the ad and not any others.
|
| I don't want to be offending but this is honestly a very
| basic point, of course one would only measure the Return On
| Ad Spend from the user's acquired by said ad and not any
| others... Advertisers are familiar with all such basic
| statistics and Google/FB ads give you very easy tools to
| track any person who clicks on an ad throughout their entire
| journey.
|
| Edit: I was mistaken as described in the comments below
| GeneralMayhem wrote:
| Yes, obviously ROAS is only computed over the people who
| saw the ad. That's not in question. The point is that
| knowing how many people saw the ad and then bought the
| product doesn't actually tell you how effective the ad was
| at improving your business.
|
| Imagine a product, let's call it Oxygen, that every single
| person buys $10 worth of every month. It has 100% market
| penetration.
|
| One day, Oxygen Corp decides to take out a $1M ad buy. They
| reach 1 million people, all of whom then go on to buy $10
| of Oxygen, as measured by cross-site conversion tracking.
| $1M ad buy to move $10M of product - that's a whopping 10.0
| ROAS. Must be the most effective ad campaign ever run,
| right?
| namanyayg wrote:
| I see what you mean and stand corrected; I wasn't
| assuming the case where the product sells without
| advertising at all.
|
| From a gut feeling I can say that the customer came from
| some result of previous advertising (as we're talking
| about products like sodas not life-essentials like
| oxygen), but I guess there's no way to know since those
| previous ads being tv/print ads were not tracked.
|
| If we suddenly stopped all other forms of advertising and
| only used online ads, in 10-20 years each customer can be
| tracked exactly to what ad created the first impression
| about the brand and thus be more accurate (still
| excepting marketing like word of mouth though)
| jefftk wrote:
| You can run that same study with a control group, and
| sophisticated advertisers do. Show some of the users ads
| for your product, and other users ads for something
| unrelated, and compare their purchases of your product.
| auggierose wrote:
| You are not understanding the point. You cannot actually
| measure incremental ROAS with basic statistics and easy
| Google/FB tools, because you would need to know how much
| they would have spent WITHOUT being exposed to the ads.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| You can run lift tests on Facebook which measure exactly
| that.
|
| You can't measure it across multiple advertising
| platforms very effectively though.
| auggierose wrote:
| I don't know what lift tests are. It should be easy
| enough to devise a tool for measuring incremental ROAS
| under the following assumptions: a) all purchases happen
| online; b) I have a complete history of ad impressions
| and ad clicks for each user who made a purchase
|
| As you said yourself, b) breaks down for multiple
| platforms. It also breaks down if users have disabled
| tracking.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Lift tests are these things:
| https://www.facebook.com/business/m/one-
| sheeters/conversion-...
|
| They are essentially what one needs to measure
| incremental ROAS of one's advertising.
|
| Now, there are obvious caveats (online, tracking etc) but
| they're much much better than what's available for other
| platforms.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> It also breaks down if users have disabled tracking._
|
| Almost all users who disable tracking also block ads, so
| you are still correctly measuring the effect of your ad
| spend.
| namanyayg wrote:
| Well, if we are talking about a recently formed company
| who (1) doesn't do any offline advertisment and (2) only
| does fully tracked online ads, you can calculate ROAS
| fully right? (The only exception would be word of mouth
| sales)
| auggierose wrote:
| It's a big exception; otherwise you are just assuming
| that the only way people can get to your product is
| through ads. But this is equivalent to assuming
| "incremental ROAS = ROAS". So you propose to solve the
| problem by ignoring it. ;-)
|
| PS: Of course that works if the difference is indeed
| small enough in your case so that it CAN be ignored.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| I assume there must be some effect in getting new drinkers.
|
| I've tried lots of colas. I'm never buying a Pepsi if there
| is Coke. I will always buy soft drinks in this order: Cherry
| Coke, Cherry Dr Pepper, Dr Pepper, Coke, maybe I'll just have
| water. At this point no amount of advertising will change my
| mind.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| The advertising doesn't simply need to affect your personal
| preferences to affect your buying habits. If you were
| buying a few different packs of soda for a group of people
| (e.g. for a party), how much cheaper would the case of
| Pepsi need to be than a case of Coke for you to buy it
| instead? Could that be affected by advertising that made
| you feel like, regardless of your personal affinity for
| Coke, Pepsi is the acceptable default choice?
|
| Imagine further that this isn't a product category that you
| feel quite so strongly about (most people don't have a
| 4-deep ordered list of brand preferences for common product
| categories). If you were making a quick choice between
| Sprite and 7-up (again, for a party), are you sure that
| advertising couldn't possibly influence which of the brands
| is most accessible to your brain?
| avalys wrote:
| This is a common anti-pattern when smart people start
| thinking about (brand) advertising.
|
| "I have such strongly held opinions about my favorite soda!
| No amount of advertising will change my mind. I am immune
| to advertising!"
|
| And then they go to the grocery store, and remember their
| girlfriend told them to pick up some fabric softener, which
| they know nothing about. So they look on the shelf and they
| think "Ok, Downy, I've heard of that one. It's probably
| fine." And away they go.
|
| And the next time they need fabric softener, they reach for
| it again, because it worked fine last time, and what's the
| point in spending any more time thinking about fabric
| softener?
|
| This is what brand awareness advertising is meant for. It's
| meant to change your weakly held preferences, not your
| strongly held ones.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| This is precisely my point about getting new buyers but
| couldn't think of the terms. There must be some clear up
| shot to spending so much on advertising.
| oakfr wrote:
| Incremental ROAS is the right metric in theory, but very hard
| (or impossible) to measure in practice, in particular for the
| small businesses with smaller ad traffic. Hence the industry
| falls back on measurable proxies such as ROAS.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| It also doesn't mean that the advertising is money wasted.
| Coke spends that money to _remain_ the go to brand, and
| surely values being the cultural default very highly. Saying
| "Coke would still sell without ads" really misses the point
| for why Coke advertises.
|
| It reminds of car ads. Apparently (correct me if I'm wrong),
| but OEM ads aren't about converting new customers, but
| they're about trying to convert recent buyers into lifetime
| buyers. It's to build in the consumer the attitude of "we're
| a Ford household", not to convince a Chevy driver to buy Ford
| for the first time.
| GeneralMayhem wrote:
| I don't disagree with you. My point wasn't that Coke-style
| brand advertising was worthless, just that it's extremely
| difficult to measure without much longer experiments -
| specifically because it's been so successful.
| popcube wrote:
| I remember an experiment about coparing cola and psi,
| they found advertisement of cola was so successful that
| people saw a cola bottle will let them feel it more
| delicious. I assume they want to keep this advantage in
| internet era
| GhettoComputers wrote:
| Wouldn't it be better just to have it as product
| placement rather than advertising? Warren Buffet makes it
| look great, 5 cans a day. With his longevity and
| investments he's great for them.
| GeneralMayhem wrote:
| Product placement is a subset of advertising, not a
| different thing.
| a4isms wrote:
| The automobile analogy brings up another benefit of
| advertising. Items that are sold as socioeconomic status
| proxies don't work unless everybody knows the brand.
|
| It's not just that Volvo wants me to think I drive a safe
| wagon that is a sensible choice for middle-class, educated
| people who watch public television.
|
| I want my neighbours to think these things about me even
| though they drive Ford and GM. That advertising assures me
| I'll get both a car and a cachet.
|
| If Volvo had a way of only selling to people who want Volvo
| cars for the utility, but few others would have heard of
| the brand, it would have less value.
| throwawaylift wrote:
| The first thing one has to face when considering such
| experiments is that they fundamentally have an inherent cost.
| Because in order to get that measurement accurate, quite a lot
| of your ad impressions have to be withheld. This is a cost, a
| cost of the lost opportunity. (provided that the actual impact
| of the ad campaign is positive, that is).
|
| So, as an advertiser, you end up coming up with some meta-
| strategy: when to perform those experiments and when to forgo
| them and rely on your educated guess.
|
| Google, Facebook and alike developed support for performing
| such experiments throughout the last decade. But this meta-
| strategy kind of judgment is firmly in the department of
| advertisers.
|
| Certainly not a new dot com bubble as the title suggests, and
| the article even mentions Randall Lewis, so I guess it's just
| the style of journalism these days...
| amelius wrote:
| > You can easily tell which specific ad referred someone to
| your website, and how much money they spent once they got
| there.
|
| This is how Google and other advertising companies leak data.
|
| If I target an ad about Y to a group X, then I know that
| someone who clicked it is in X. For any Y.
| treebot wrote:
| Tangentially related, I think political advertising actually does
| work. Not just ads ran by candidates, but all the different memes
| and infographics and whatnot. At least in America. Most Americans
| are sort of middle of the road, but in recent years, the right
| has gotten very good at drawing people in through media. I know
| many people who are now all wrapped up in all sorts of right wing
| conspiracies and viewpoints that they were not wrapped up in
| before, that if it wasn't for seeing it on Facebook, Twitter or
| Reddit, they never would have believed this stuff or even thought
| about it.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Is that advertising? And would it mean that they would vote for
| a particular candidate?
|
| The typical consensus I have seen among political operatives is
| that TV ads very clearly move the needle, whereas online ads
| don't seem to.
| tsavo wrote:
| Oh wow, this is an older article. Read it before, it was much
| discussed and here we are 2 years later.
|
| Market effects from the pandemic have reinforced the reliance on
| online advertising (more hours spent online by individuals
| working remote, growth of streaming services).
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| If I had had a needle that would pop the dot com bubble, I'd
| hesitate before using it. Maybe there are cool things that were
| brewing and they just need a bit more time to incubate before we
| can benefit from them.
|
| If I had a needle that would pop this bubble, I'd use it
| immediately. Advertising is all about making people do things
| that, when left to their own devices, they don't want to go.
| Whatever survives this bubble may need to be hunted down and
| exterminated.
| JacobJans wrote:
| That is actually the definition of bad, inneffective
| advertising. Good advertising comes from a deep understanding
| of what people want to do, and then presents them with an
| opportunity to do just that. This is literally why Google is so
| valuable. Their ad business is largely based on understanding
| "intent." As any decent advertiser knows, you can't create
| intent, but you can harness it.
| IronWolve wrote:
| No tv, adblock, ad skip, filter ads in email.
|
| But then I watch youtube of tech hardware, and want the new
| shiny.
|
| Oh look, sponsored video...
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Oh look, SponsorBlock: https://sponsor.ajay.app
| groundpepper wrote:
| Past discussions:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465873
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23101883
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Expanded a bit:
|
| _The new dot com bubble is here: it's called online
| advertising (2019)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23101883 - May 2020 (152
| comments)
|
| _The new dot com bubble is here: it's called online
| advertising_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21585364 -
| Nov 2019 (24 comments)
|
| _What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital
| advertising?_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465873 -
| Nov 2019 (358 comments)
| ZhangSWEFAANG wrote:
| "Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, Google's founder and its CEO
| respectively, were already seated in the conference room when co-
| founder Sergey Brin came in, out of breath. He was wearing
| shorts. And roller skates."
|
| Why do tech guys always try and act like they don't care when
| they obviously do?
|
| Why would Google tell Karmazin how they made money?
| potatoman22 wrote:
| Don't their data scientists do causal inference to determine this
| stuff?
| [deleted]
| otar wrote:
| I don't believe in this. Ads really work.
| AreYouElite wrote:
| Oof! Think about it, when was the last time you saw an ad, and
| went on to buy that product or service?
|
| Who are these people who see an advertisement on the side of the
| road and then go out and buy that very thing?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Very different from most people on HN, but very common in
| reality. I've witnessed this exact thing multiple times: see an
| ad for something, immediately have to go get it.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Advertising on the side of the road was Burma Shave's schtick -
| and it was highly effective.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| I can make at least three people IRL that do this regularly.
|
| My business has had huge success with promoted listings on
| eBay. People will gladly pay 20% more for a sponsored item
| rather than scroll down literally one inch to get better
| organic results.
|
| Even if these people are a tiny minority population-wise, they
| make up a disproportionate percentage of people that waste
| money on frivolous or overpriced goods.
| AreYouElite wrote:
| Intriguing! I am new business, and my online ads campaign
| seen by 4000+ people produced maybe about 2 installations.
| Appealing to people in real life was much more effective for
| me. I know my target audience is in the hundreds of thousands
| but I just cannot reach them through more or less blind
| online ads.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| As someone else pointed out in a different thread, it
| depends a lot on what your product is. If you're selling
| something aimed at a highly tech-literate, "elite"
| audience, ads will likely be much less effective than if
| you're selling, say, decorated cupcakes.
| [deleted]
| nikkinana wrote:
| Nobody clicks on ads. They're just an excuse to track you. And
| money laundering. That too.
| kbrackbill wrote:
| This sounds great and I want to believe it, but it feels like
| another case of someone saying the sky is falling when it clearly
| hasn't. What will it take for this advertising bubble to pop? Is
| it even a bubble?
| missedthecue wrote:
| Funnily enough, the ad based tech companies have the most
| reasonable stock prices. Facebook and Google are massively
| profitable, still growing at double digit rates, and each have
| only mid twenties PE ratios (the same as Caterpillar Heavy
| Equipment, or electric utilities like ConEd and PG&E).
|
| Meanwhile there are companies out there like Lordstown Motors,
| Lucid, and Nikola, which have never sold a product but have
| billion dollar market caps. Nikola is universally known as a
| fraud, somehow has negative _revenue_ , and is still worth $5
| billion. EVs are the real bubble.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| They are naive, they really think advertising doesn't work.
| It works it's ass off. You can't find one identity that isn't
| influenced by it.
|
| Real programmers use vim. I could sell that for ages. Don't
| play games with advertising, you are just as much of a cuck
| as everyone else (rhetorically speaking, not you
| specifically).
|
| Anyways, real programmers read HN. I could sell that forever.
| You think you're smarter than all of this? Real programmers
| _______, and by god, you will fucking buy it. Here's some
| Rust for you, you real programmer. I'll inundate you, this
| stuff works.
| baby wrote:
| The stock price of facebook is just weirdly undervalued.
| somedude895 wrote:
| There's significant risks from possible regulation, anti-
| trust measures and such.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Some EV brands are clearly frauds, but with Ford introducing
| its second EV next year, calling all of EVs a bubble is a
| huge leap.
| missedthecue wrote:
| I'm not saying EVs are useless, or vaporware. Maintaining
| the comparison here, you look back and can see that the
| internet was clearly incredibly valuable and impactful in
| essentially every describable way, but there was still a
| dotcom bubble full of egregious excess.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| https://www.currentmarketvaluation.com/models/price-
| earnings...
|
| I agree with some of what you are saying, but on a deeper
| level I don't think a 25 PE ratio is particularly healthy so
| I'd say the real bubble is an everything bubble we are
| currently in. Facebook and Google have some of the lower PE
| ratios right now because they actually have earnings.
|
| >The current S&P500 10-year P/E Ratio is 37.8. This is 91%
| above the modern-era market average of 19.6, putting the
| current P/E 2.3 standard deviations above the modern-era
| average.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > What will it take for this advertising bubble to pop?
|
| Browsers shipping with uBlock Origin included.
| jefftk wrote:
| Browsers want to be popular with users, but they also want
| websites to make money: if sites can't make money, there is
| no web to browse.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > they also want websites to make money
|
| By allowing them to abuse their users?
|
| > if sites can't make money, there is no web to browse
|
| There are other ways to make money other than advertising.
| If they insist on ads, they _should_ disappear.
|
| Besides, not everyone creates a website for profit.
| Sometimes people just have something interesting to say.
| The web used to have a lot of those before these commercial
| interests started infesting it.
| Zerverus wrote:
| 90%+ of relevant traffic is mobile 95%+ of mobile traffic is
| native
|
| Don't delude yourself
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I'm sure 99% of Apple users would be happy with a popup on
| first use of Safari that asked "would you like to block
| adverts?". It would be no skin off Apple's nose.
| phreeza wrote:
| Even if they end up being blocked by many ad funded
| sites?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| We'll just block their blocking attempts.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| I never cared about what that website had to say that
| much in the first place. If the entire web gets killed
| because of this, I'll go read a book.
| somedude895 wrote:
| Their app ecosystem would implode as nobody would develop
| or maintain their ad supported apps anymore.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Does Apple care?
|
| They already essentially killed off "ad supported apps"
| with App Tracking Transparency, and Apple doesn't earn
| anything from ads anyway (as opposed to paid apps where
| they take a cut).
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Yeah, for now. I'm doing my part to change that. People
| love the fact uBlock Origin blocks the idiotic YouTube ads.
| There's always Brave if for some reason they can't stand
| Firefox.
|
| And hey, if Apple will crack down on Facebook's espionage
| over privacy concerns, who says they won't do the same to
| these advertisers and their abusive surveillance
| capitalism? Maybe they'll realize that advertising is pure
| noise nobody cares about and block all ads in order to
| improve usability. Maybe one day they'll get pissed they
| aren't getting their fair 30% share of advertiser revenue
| and block them out of spite. Maybe they'll wake up one day
| and simply decide to kill the ads industry. Now that's a
| delusion worth having.
| gingerlime wrote:
| Apple's privacy stance is questionable (see the recent
| content scanning debacle).
|
| Plus, I would say they profit more when the web
| experience on their devices is inferior to apps, which
| means annoying ads and popups help drive people to use
| apps, which Apple profits from... (and some companies,
| like Reddit, actively participate in annoying their own
| users to get the app).
| NeoVeles wrote:
| There is the book on this called 'Subprime Attention Crisis' by
| Tim Hwang that tries to argue this point.
|
| It is only partially successful in its goals of saying the sky
| is falling.
|
| The overall message I came away with was that online
| advertising has some serious issues that need addressing - but
| they aren't anything that cannot be solved.
|
| If there is a bubble then I suspect it isn't anywhere near as
| big as it is made out to be and that any "crash" will be more
| of a slow correction than the bottom suddenly dropping out.
| bserge wrote:
| You mean the second one? First one was in 2008-2009 lol
| wombatmobile wrote:
| Cheap advertising, you're lying
|
| Never gonna get me what I want
|
| I said, smooth talking, brain washing
|
| Ain't never gonna get me what I need
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9M3b9lh-7s
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| I used the exact title from the article and someone changed it.
| (I did forget to include the date. That was a mistake and thank
| you to whomever fixed it.)
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