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All of Vladimir Prelovac's Comments + Replies

Why I Work on Ads
Vladimir Prelovac10

Ad funded houses really can't work, unless we figure out how to make housing much cheaper. An upper bound on the amount it can be worth to advertise to someone is the amount of money they spend, and in practice it's much lower

 

... Or ARPU for ads grows which is the point I am making. It grew from 0 to whereever it is now in 20 years and in another 20 it may match the average mortgage cost of a USA household. This is without taking into account that a lot of people would settle for less than average home, and that ad-homes would probably monetize bette... (read more)

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5jefftk
You're talking about how much one company was able to grow ad revenue, which not surprisingly went up a lot as the company learned how to do ads. At the same time, other companies saw a large decreases revenue per user: famously, newspapers used to make a huge amount of money from classified advertising. Instead, I would look at the growth pattern of total advertising spend per American. Someone poor enough to consider an ad-funded house their best option is not going to have a spending pattern worth $10k/y to influence. Of course, but I don't see what point you're making? Your link goes to a discussion of a change to search results which showed favicons for regular results. I again don't have any internal information on this, but from this looked to me like a change to make search results more informative. After objections, the change was rolled back. I'm not, and haven't, no.
Why I Work on Ads
Vladimir Prelovac-30

Trading a house for ads may seem expensive today but it is only one order of magnitude difference taking median home price,  fact that most people get it on 30 year mortgage and average ARPU for ads.  

Let's also notice that ad monetization is increasingly aggressive which I assume is what most your team collegues have as some sort of OKR - given how we came from the world of 'ads are bad' to a world where nowadays we have entire Google search results beings ads  and Youtube plays a commercial every 30 seconds. With this pace of growth ARPU w... (read more)

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5jefftk
Ad funded houses really can't work, unless we figure out how to make housing much cheaper. An upper bound on the amount it can be worth to advertise to someone is the amount of money they spend, and in practice it's much lower. There isn't much I can say publicly on this, except that this is a huge misunderstanding of the business? A small number of searches where people tend to be about to spend a lot of money have lots of ads. The majority of searches have few to no ads. My interpretation here is that Google has gotten much better at figuring out when to show ads, and when it is not worth showing ads. Again, I don't have internal numbers, but I would be very surprised if ads-per-search today were higher than it was ten years ago. Since my wrists got really bad I've started watching a lot more video, including YouTube. There is no way there's a commercial every 30 seconds; where are you getting that?
Why I Work on Ads
Vladimir Prelovac-10

Jeff, the main premise of your article "better ads than paywalls" is a weak argument. Would you prefer to drive a car, given to you for free, but you have to be exposed to ads all the time you drive it? Would you prefer to live in a home that was given to you for free but every wall, every mirror and every device is recording everything you do and playing ads non-stop? Paywalls are meaningful. The "wall" protect us, our privacy, our thoughts, our sanity and gives us guarantees via a two way contract.  

You can argue that some people would opt-in into a... (read more)

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3jefftk
Cars and houses aren't good examples: they're so expensive that the only way to plausibly fund them with ads (and it's not actually economically plausible) would be incessant ads.