Many people would not have found this cleaner without Googling, reading reviews, etc. While that may not be an ad directly, it's part of the marketing budget. So what needs to change?
We've had markets for all sorts of domestic help for centuries before we had computers. Perhaps more relatable, think about how your parents might have found such help.
Before that, there were classified ads in papers. Those were lightly vetted by the local newspaper. Also, with a warrant, the police could generally track down the person that placed the ad, which broke a lot of bullshit scams. (Like house sitters that don’t exist, but are instead getting lists of people that will be out of town.)
That tells me that modern advertising isn’t making things more expensive, otherwise companies that spend money on it would be crushed by companies that stick with the old ways and can undercut them.
No, I can't do it that way anymore: my local paper doesn't have classified ads anymore. There are only different online versions, which are a lot cheaper and globally accessible, thus have a lot more fraud.
You get it. A couple phrases I live by (taught to me by the haggling parents generation); "you never know unless you ask" and "the worst they can say is, NO" These don't need to just apply to goods and services either. They have lead to very interesting and life altering experiences that wouldn't have happened if I didn't ask a one sentence question.
Yep. And sometimes a nearby independant contractor who advertises once or twice a week on Facebook or in the local newspaper is going to provide a better service experience than the one blasting TV commercials on the local channels.
The nearby contractor who gets all their work through referrals is by definition better than the one who needs to blast TV ads. The best people are basically never on the market.
Not really by definition necessarily. But yes, it does seem very likely that referrals are the stronger signal.
In some sparser places there might also only be a couple contractors working anyway. Might be able to get suggestions just by asking around wherever you get permits.
The problem is that Google operates both the buy side and the sell side of the monopoly-scale ad platform. They're the only party in the transaction who sees what both parties are willing to pay (imagine on eBay knowing what everyone's max bid was), and sets the algorithm to maximize their take from all parties.
They've already lost the case with this, and are currently trying to prevent what needs to change: Google must be forced to divest large portions of its ad business to reintroduce competition in the marketing space.
>They're the only party in the transaction who sees what both parties are willing to pay (imagine on eBay knowing what everyone's max bid was), and sets the algorithm to maximize their take from all parties.
Is there any evidence of them abusing that knowledge? Or was the lawsuit over them having a monopoly and/or anticompetitive practices?
I mean, the fact they abused that was illegal and anticompetive, yes. This is not a "they are big" problem, it's a "they're big and doing illegal price fixing with it".
Also, note that Google was caught intentionally deleting evidence they were ordered by the court to retain.
>I mean, the fact they abused that was illegal and anticompetive, yes. This is not a "they are big" problem, it's a "they're big and doing illegal price fixing with it".
(Note the separate case which determined Google is running an illegally anticompetitive operation in Search was a separate case which can be referred to as "United States v. Google LLC (2020)" and there is a third case they lost recently, Epic Games Inc. v. Google LLC, which determined Google operates an illegal monopoly with Android as well.)
I live in an urban area. Most people I know have a cleaner. Most of those people, including myself, found their cleaner via word of mouth. No services, no googling, no ads.
I mean, the person is looking for a cleaner in their area. If all of the cleaning businesses in the area slash their marketing budget to 0, the author is not going to fail to find a cleaner. All the marketing budget is doing is funneling people who want cleaning to one cleaning company over another.
> All the marketing budget is doing is funneling people who want cleaning to one cleaning company over another.
Yes, and anecdotally I've heard of better experiences using services that do not appear on the top search results. The reason being that the top results have already captured the local market and so are less incentivized to respond quickly, accept the job or task, or offer a better rate. They already have their business and may not need yours.
>If all of the cleaning businesses in the area slash their marketing budget to 0, the author is not going to fail to find a cleaner.
You're right, they'll find whatever incumbent cleaner instead. A marketing ban is something that all incumbents would love, because they don't need to attract more customers whereas marketing is basically the only way that upstarts can get a foothold.
When Google has the monopoly on marketing of cleaning companies in your area, from a consumer standpoint it’s effectively the same as if one cleaning company has the local monopoly. The way to win is to pay Google a bigger cut than your competitors, so Google just takes the incumbency premium as its marketing fee instead of the cleaning company.
If a buyer has access to the stored knowledge of trusted peers--peers who have knowledge of trustworthy sellers--supply can meet demand without involving an arms race between predatory middlemen.
The modern web was designed by predatory middlemen who want a cut of transactions they otherwise have no business being involved in. It's a textbook case of rentier capitalism.
So what needs to change is that we need to identify the design decisions made by those middlemen, rip them out root and branch, and fix the gaps with something that takes as an input the trust graph of the users so that the only way the middlemen can stay relevant is to personally gain the trust of each user whose transaction they've gotten in the middle of, and we need to publish the result as a protocol, not a platform, so it can be used without us (the authors of the protocol) being at risk of becoming the problem we're trying to solve.
I don't get it, is google blocking people from making or requesting word of mouth referrals? Or are people switching to google ads because it's more convenient? It just sounds like you're using "rentier capitalism" to describe companies you don't like.
Well yes, that is my main reason for disliking companies. And yes, google weighs in on browser standards in myriad ways which gives themseves and companies like them the ability to elevate the preferences of their customers above the preferences of their users.
It would be nice to block them from doing so, but the real fix is to give those users something better to use. Not much has gone into using technology to amplify the innate peer-to-peer trust/distrust mechanisms that we've spent millenia evolving such that they scale to the demands of our times, and quite a lot (thanks to google and friends) has gone into suppressing them.
>Well yes, that is my main reason for disliking companies. And yes, google weighs in on browser standards in myriad ways which gives themseves and companies like them the ability to elevate the preferences of their customers above the preferences of their users.
What does google's control over web standards have to do with the death of word of mouth referrals? You might not like FLoC or webusb but those aren't the reasons why everyone doesn't bother with word of mouth referrals to hire cleaners.
I'm watching a video sent to me by somebody I trust, and it stops to show me a video about the same topic made by somebody I don't trust, an interference which was targeted by--and an interference that I'm discouraged from preventing by--those standards. The connection is quite direct.
Now I don't know if there are any home cleaners that attempt to reach a wider audience on YouTube. Maybe there's a different medium that might suit their business better. But whatever it is, if it tries to be faster than meatspace gossip, there's some advertising platform selling the ability to interfere with it.
Google ads is a local optima for companies but not for consumers. The trouble is, for Google, the customers are the companies buying ads, not the people browsing the web. It's a classic example of not paying for your externalities
That Google isn't blocking a better model doesn't mean they aren't at fault. Ads are like pollution for our minds, we need a better web
>Google ads is a local optima for companies but not for consumers.
Are you sure you don't have it reversed? Companies would be quite happy if they could enter into some sort of no advertising pact so they don't have to spend any money on ads at all.
>The trouble is, for Google, the customers are the companies buying ads, not the people browsing the web. It's a classic example of not paying for your externalities
No, it's fully internalized, because consumers are getting free content (ie. sites where the ads are placed) and services (eg. gmail) in exchange. I'd be far more sympathetic to your claims of "externalities" if google stuffed its ads into your computer like junk mail makes its way into your mailbox.
> Are you sure you don't have it reversed? Companies would be quite happy if they could enter into some sort of no advertising pact so they don't have to spend any money on ads at all.
That's why it's a local optimum. Any company that try to unilaterally leave advertising will be punished. The global optimum would be no advertising at all, of course.
Anyway the people are already fighting back. I block ads everywhere, at least.
