As with most folks here I was struck by the wholesale adoption of the 'brilliance applied to clicks' meme. For those who aren't aware of it, its the 'pay the best and the brightest minds to figure out ways to get me to click on ads.'
It makes for a great sound bite, but it is completely and utterly wrong. To a first approximation, these internet services don't write ad copy or design ad banners, and that is where all the effort goes into figuring out how to get you to click. So don't work for an ad agency :-).
Now what the folks at Google do (I have no direct experience working at either Facebook or Twitter) is make it so that the system they have can reliably and efficiently serve advertisements into designated spots on the pages. This problem is a combination of bin packing and economic theory and systems design. Trust me when I say that the engineers working in ads (and they are a small fraction of the company) probably don't care at all whether or not you 'click' they care that they can see the query/page, do the auction, and provide an ordered set of results in under a few hundred milleseconds. But lets talk about clicking for a moment.
Ads are a 'tax'. They are a way to subsidize something so that it costs the consumers less. They do that by selling access to the consumer's eyeballs. Taxes, like prices, influence consumer behavior (just ask any town in California (8.75% sales tax) borders Oregon (0% sales tax)). So the upper limit on ads (as a tax) is when they start driving consumers away.
Like many people I find that some advertising levels are intolerable. I used to regularly read some gaming web sites until the tax of dealing with all the advertising became too high. (even with Adblock for web sites, or arriving at the theatre 10 - 15 minutes post start time so that you can just see the movie, avoiding ads has a cost too). I wrote a local radio station and explained to them that a particular ad they played caused me literally to change the station when they played it, generally leaving me on their competitor's station. You can't tax your way into a successful business model, and if you can't afford to offer the service with a combination of upfront cost and tax then you just quit while you are ahead.
The original post reminded me of John Cuzack's line in "Say Anything" - 'I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that.'
I don't understand why providing a relevant set of ads in the shortest possible time is unrelated to encouraging people to click on ads. It seems clearly to be quite closely related to me -- provide a better ad experience, and people are more likely to make use of the ads. Whether the engineers optimising the system realise this or not is somewhat irrelevant.
Ok, I agree that providing a better ad experience makes it more likely that people will use those ads. Would you agree that that might be expressed by saying, "If the probability of someone clicking on an advertisement is X then increasing the number of people who see/visit the page proportionally increases ad clicks by factor X ?"
If you agree that this restatement adequately captures your claim then I'd like you to consider the difference between "creating a desirable web site", versus "getting someone to click on an ad."
Using examples, someone who designs an advertisement to 'appear' underneath my mouse as my mouse traverses a trigger point is "trying to get me to click", whereas someone who designs a web page on widgets which includes an advertisement for something associated with widgets off to the side, they are not working on 'trying to get me to click.'
My claim is that engineers at Google (and presumably Facebook and Twitter) are working on making your experience with their products the best it can be. This increases the number of people who use their products, and if the probability of someone clicking an advertisement is fixed, the higher traffic rates will result in more clicks. And yet, unlike the original author's posting, they worked not on 'getting people to click' rather they were working on 'being more useful to more people.'
Its important to remember that advertisements are not 'evil', not even a little bit evil. I used to subscribe to BYTE magazine and Computer Shopper in part to get access to the advertisements. These represented companies who had things I would likely want to purchase and knowing about them was a service, not a burden. The consumer 'cost' of advertising relates to how much the consumer cares that its 'part of what they are looking for' or not.
Abusive use of advertising decreases your readership which reduces the rate your desirability as an advertising platform. Its a negative value coefficient in the feedback loop so it self corrects.
It makes for a great sound bite, but it is completely and utterly wrong. To a first approximation, these internet services don't write ad copy or design ad banners, and that is where all the effort goes into figuring out how to get you to click. So don't work for an ad agency :-).
Now what the folks at Google do (I have no direct experience working at either Facebook or Twitter) is make it so that the system they have can reliably and efficiently serve advertisements into designated spots on the pages. This problem is a combination of bin packing and economic theory and systems design. Trust me when I say that the engineers working in ads (and they are a small fraction of the company) probably don't care at all whether or not you 'click' they care that they can see the query/page, do the auction, and provide an ordered set of results in under a few hundred milleseconds. But lets talk about clicking for a moment.
Ads are a 'tax'. They are a way to subsidize something so that it costs the consumers less. They do that by selling access to the consumer's eyeballs. Taxes, like prices, influence consumer behavior (just ask any town in California (8.75% sales tax) borders Oregon (0% sales tax)). So the upper limit on ads (as a tax) is when they start driving consumers away.
Like many people I find that some advertising levels are intolerable. I used to regularly read some gaming web sites until the tax of dealing with all the advertising became too high. (even with Adblock for web sites, or arriving at the theatre 10 - 15 minutes post start time so that you can just see the movie, avoiding ads has a cost too). I wrote a local radio station and explained to them that a particular ad they played caused me literally to change the station when they played it, generally leaving me on their competitor's station. You can't tax your way into a successful business model, and if you can't afford to offer the service with a combination of upfront cost and tax then you just quit while you are ahead.
The original post reminded me of John Cuzack's line in "Say Anything" - 'I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that.'