It's a lot like the credit card issuing banks. Two notable big names, Wells Fargo and Bank of America both "illegally used or obtained consumers’ credit reports, and then applied for and enrolled consumers in credit card accounts without consumers’ knowledge or authorization." [1][2]
Banks had each employee need to sell 50 credit cards a month. Employees sold 50 a month.
Banks needed "line goes up" for every quarter. Banks had each employee sell 100 a month. Employee's tried to sell 100 a month.
Banks needed "line goes up." Eventually market was saturated, yet banks said sell 1000 credit cards a month. Employees replied, "we cannot, market is saturated." Bank said "sell 1000 a month." Employee's responded with "make shit up, open accounts without consumers knowledge." Fraud.
Advertisers are locked into an arms race for attention with each other. Even if you were stuck with the same slice of eyeball time, you can still grow by selling it for more, and in many ways that's what google's auctions are set up to do. But google's investment in youtube in particular has steadily grown the eyeball-time they have access to as well. I'm not ruling out fraud but I don't see how these facts prove fraud, it seems more like google continuing to naturally benefit from the decline of traditional print and television media.
Sometimes I wonder what fraction of people employed in advertising think they're making the world better by exposing customers to good products and what percentage aren't in denial about the fact they're weaving dollars out of human misery.
Attention has a common resource problem. If you (google) don't overgraze your cattle on it, the facebook will because they both are getting the same users at the same time. It's a race at this point. I am getting ads from same company being recommended on both Meta and Google ads real estate.
Is total available human attention actually relevant here? It implies that all the possible attention is available already for advertising purposes which doesn't seem true at all.
araes|1 year ago
It's a lot like the credit card issuing banks. Two notable big names, Wells Fargo and Bank of America both "illegally used or obtained consumers’ credit reports, and then applied for and enrolled consumers in credit card accounts without consumers’ knowledge or authorization." [1][2]
Banks had each employee need to sell 50 credit cards a month. Employees sold 50 a month.
Banks needed "line goes up" for every quarter. Banks had each employee sell 100 a month. Employee's tried to sell 100 a month.
Banks needed "line goes up." Eventually market was saturated, yet banks said sell 1000 credit cards a month. Employees replied, "we cannot, market is saturated." Bank said "sell 1000 a month." Employee's responded with "make shit up, open accounts without consumers knowledge." Fraud.
[1] (Wells Fargo, millions of accounts, $3B civil settlement, $3.7B CFPB judgement, 2020), https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/wells-fargo-agrees-pay-3-bill..., https://www.forbes.com/sites/anafaguy/2023/07/11/bank-of-ame...
[2] (Bank of America, unspecified # of accounts, 2023) https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/bank-of-am...
mattnewton|1 year ago
causality0|1 year ago
jumping_frog|1 year ago
xnx|1 year ago
Shifting spend from legacy media, and extracting more value from the sellers' margin.
e6u4u|1 year ago
baq|1 year ago
fire_lake|1 year ago
VyseofArcadia|1 year ago
Yes it does. It scales with population, which last time I checked is still going up.
baq|1 year ago