Advertising is an intentionally complex system so that companies can clip the ticket at multiple stages throughout the process. Google should be broken up, but the whole ad tech system needs to go into the bin if these problems are going to ever get fixed.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/02/15/how-muc...
Some companies like Google are incredible at this. Google is not a "monopoly" in this space. In fact the world has far too many Google equivalents but absolutely no one comes close to Google in generating top dollars for publishers. I am saying this after working for 10+ years competing against Google.
Of course it matters if a middleman is skimming off 70% of the revenue in a given market.
> it is incredibly efficient
On what planet is a loss of 70% of the resources to the matching process between buyers and sellers "incredibly efficient"?
> What matters is how much they are earning compared to the next best alternative.
Right, which is why it is illegal to prevent there from being a next best alternative via anti-competitive practices which is precisely was was proven in this trial after a detailed examination of the evidence.
One where the market maker is taking up the cost of providing a market. E.g. Steam takes a 30% cut for providing the infrastructure required to distribute games. Some people/companies can do it for less but it is the best option for a majority of sellers.
If the market maker did not the seller would get more revenue but would also eat the cost directly instead of paying someone else to do it.
This also neglects the fact that the programmatic market routes billions of dollars intended to be spent on real media (ad placements on real news websites etc), to fraudulent mobile apps and websites and bot traffic.
Does a landlord on a literal physical market take 30% of revenue? I find that unlikely.
How did we arrive here, where supposedly ‘efficient’ digital marketplace is a form of rent higher than actually building physical rent, and expenses on wages and materials for a typical business?
We seen dumb platforms with linear tv. Go watch any TV with an antenna.
Ad platforms too are fundamentally about letting someone perceive ROI lesser than their real ROI, for your own benefit. For me, it falls under the same category as all of the above - zero productivity endeavours.
Maybe we should go back to the previous millenium and make usury illegal. Should fix all of these problems, albeit in a nuclear fashion.
Serving the ads is probably much more expensive than serving the news site, since there is a ton of heavy algorithms to determine what ads to show.
Total costs for each depends on how much it costed to make the news article so is hard to say.
Static text is much cheaper than dynamic content. News isn't anything that couldn't be served out of a .txt or sqlite CMS.
News providers seem wholly uninterested in providing anything better and actually competing with better content providers