My first thought was Google, and it's started to plateau in the recent years:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOGL/alphabet/rev....
Meta also took a dive, and while it was from a sharp turn of the business focus, I'd argue it comes from an attempt to avoid staying on a stagnating market.
[1] This recent post on @bloombergbusiness for instance, it just takes 1 fold of comments to be all scammers, multiple accounts, same or near same message, pointing to the same account.
Sometimes in app its swipe up to go to the next thing, sometimes its swipe left, sometimes i have no clue and trigger an ad event.
And then the "game" ads I get, cant seem to tell IG the ad irrelevant enough times.
For instance sister comments are mentionning TikTok growing in revenue, but if Google/Meta were already saturating the market, it means that growth is eating from the other less successful players (Twitter/Reddit ?), and at some point Google and Meta will also see dramatic decreases or TikTok's growth will stop.
That also
Even if you don't mind the changes to the content, there's a constant pressure driving up costs and driving down convenience to continue avoiding ads. If you're paying for an ad-free experience then you have money, and you're willing to spend it. You are essentially forced into a bidding war for your own attention.
> After the last recession in 2008, the US ad market declined by 13%. Newspaper ad spend fell 27%, radio spend 22%, magazine spend 18%, outdoor spend 11%, TV spend 5% and digital 2%.
And yes, it happened this time too. From https://simonowens.substack.com/p/the-advertising-recession-... :
> Digiday published a recent overview of media earnings reports, and while earnings overall were a mixed bag, nearly every single company reported a significant dip in advertising revenue:
> Publishers reported declines in digital ad revenue from about 9% to 30% — worse than the 3% to 27% drop in ad revenue year over year reported for the fourth quarter of 2022. Executives continued to cite macroeconomic conditions and a soft ad market as major challenges to their businesses.
[1] https://www.ibisworld.com/us/bed/total-advertising-expenditu...
At some point, you literally have no more people you can get in your service.
Attempting to shore up revenue by trying to show even more ads is begging for your business to crumble and die a quick, painful death.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profit_maximization?wprov=sfla...
Finding the right level to decrease supply by would be a tricky calculation to get right, but in no way could the right move be to further flood the market with supply.
Even worse - they never had good ad revenue.
If ad revenue model is dying it would suggest companies like facebook and google see ad revenue dying.
While it may be efficient from the perspective of a spreadsheet, its inefficient due to the external costs, ie pollution from shipping, the delicate nature of just-in-time shipments, etc.
Your fruit cup might cost a bit more if it was to be done all in one place, but I would call that a cost for a less fragile system.
With 0 AP, the industry is in equilibrium, with no companies dropping out, and no companies entering the market.
Junk bonds have high yields, why don't why all buy them?
As for reddit and twitter it's not the efficiency and room for profit, it's the cost to provide said content outweigh the revenue gained from ads. Hosting and maintaining global social media is expensive, which is there's no many players in that field.
Long term, when renewables have displaced fossil fuels, then profits will fall. But that only happens after the renewables get investment.
I thought the whole idea behind Reddit and other sites was to keep people browsing with algorithms that keep them interested. Wouldn't that be what makes them efficient?
I have a different theory.
But first...
New projects have stalled because of permitting bottlenecks. 1/
Investment in '22 was $1.1 trillion dollars. Another record. https://about.bnef.com/new-energy-outlook/ 2/
There's plenty of other investors. Like utilities, NGOs, govts, and customers. Here's the list of projects in Bhadla Solar Park. https://cms.mercomindia.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/List-... Where's Big Oil, Vanguard, Blackrock? Scanning some dozen other marque projects tells a similar story.
Further, IIRC, the ROI for mega projects are largely predetermined via PPAs and such. Think of them as bonds. There seems to be no shortage of investors (for feasible projects).
Okay, back to my theory...
Big Oil knows this is the end game. But they want to compensated for all their soon-to-be stranded assets, real and (more likely) imaginary.
So this is a hostage negotiation. They've redoubled their efforts to up the stakes. "Pay us! Or we kill the planet!"
It's just straight up extortion.
I have no sense for how it'll play out.
My vote is for nationalizing all the fossil fuel companies. Then put all their execs (say Director on up) and board members in solitary confinement for life. Stage some show trials at The Hague for ecocide or whatever, to add a veneer of legitimacy.
Though I recognize opinions may differ.
--
0/ I prefer my socialism to be advocacy-oriented, vs whinging, but tastes differ.
1/ Separately, post IRA, the billionaire funded reactionary astroturf campaign is now in full swing. For instance, every single offshore wind farm has been opposed, farmers adopting solar are being harassed, ad nauseum. So even as permitting is reformed, brain worms will likely slow our transition.
2/ Early reports post-IRA suggest new investment, in everything, has gone bonkers. With potential for even more as the Biden Admin firms up the implementation. David Roberts' Volts podcast is one of my primary sources, highest recommendation. https://www.volts.wtf/podcast/archive?sort=new
Well it used to be "Pay us! And we kill the planet!"
My opinion is that the "or" operator is an improvement over the old. It implies that there is a chance to save the planet.
>My vote is for nationalizing all the fossil fuel companies
This will have exactly the opposite effect as you are envisioning. Having every citizen benefit from fossil fuels will make them much harder to keep in the ground.
If you haven't already done so, read Kim Stanley Robinson's article on this topic: https://www.noemamag.com/paying-ourselves-to-decarbonize/
Sure.
Or not.
At some point, like with coal before it, oil's price will fall thru the floor. What then?
The fate of the countries listed will vary.
Foreseeing the inevitable, some of the Gulf States and Norway have been diversifying for a while. China is racing to create the post carbon future, hoping to outrun the bear. Russia is choosing oblivion. The others will fall somewhere in between. Or in the schizophrenic USA, somewhere(s).
> read Kim Stanley Robinson's article
Ok, have done. Meh.
Aside: "The Ministry for the Future" presents an absolutely best case scenario, in all its terribleness. Pretty unconvincing.
There's no reactionary movement actively thwarting progress, no emergent right wing eco-fascism.
Technological progress always begets social upheaval. Globe spanning wars were fought over much lower stakes (than climate crisis).
That said, I have no idea how any of this will play out. Can't even guess. But I expect the worse.
And I'm an optimist.
Same. That KSR article just made me more pessimistic about fossil fuels. Politicians in the West need to quickly show some leadership towards a carbon tax.
Tons of products are made with byproducts from the refining process, much of the research done by these companies over the last century was focused on inventing new products and creating markets to sell them to.
Replacing transportation use of fossil fuels with renewables doesn't actually replace all of the profits in the fossil fuel industry, and doesn't explain how those products we've now grown to expect will be created if we aren't refining oil for gasoline and diesel.
Fun fact: Gasoline only became the fuel for cars because it was a refinery byproduct that had no real economic value, and so was very cheap. Before that, cars ran on alcohol or electricity, but oil refining was still a pretty large business anyway.
If we stopped fueling cars with gas, refineries would still operate to provide all of the other products we need, just as they did before gas was a thing.
Modern oil companies are extremely proud of the additional revenue streams they have invested to consume oil byproducts. The most disgusting of which, in my opinion, was the humble bragging that Hershey's chocolate includes petroleum products in the chocolate bars.
If we stopped consuming oil for gasoline today massive industries would collapse, both due to the loss of byproduct inputs and the transportation required to move products across the country. It wouldn't be the world returning back to a nineteenth century era where trains all ran on coal and lamps were fueled by whale blubber.
But all of that would only be for the good.
The website was actively user-hostile. Multiple things popping up all over the place, the works.
Is there any other destiny for content like that? Long since written, but owned and served. Why not enshittify as much as possible, one performance review cycle at a time?
I disagree. Elon doesn't care about ad revenue. He stated multiple times that the goal is to make Twitter a superapp.
Superapps are self-limiting, because the app-size is too large for many user's phones (Uber has famously had this problem too, and thus split up their apps [0]).
The UX also tends to be a bit weird. Everyone wants to use the superapp differently and so the interface ends up being the lowest common denominator across all product families.
[0] https://apps.apple.com/in/developer/uber-technologies-inc/id...
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-name-shame-adverti...
By shifting your debts on the company you bought with that debt, so other people take the risks of his failures.
https://i.redd.it/6m0sgmktewab1.jpg
Yeah, sounds super focused on free speech.
And Threads censored from Twitter search and before that Mastodon?
Where did you get that conspiracy theory from?
To verify your information, I did a search on Twitter with the keyword threads. The search returned thousands of tweets. In fact, the very first tweet is a WSJ article describing how Threads may kill Twitter soon. Further, I searched for the hashtag #threads. The search returned all the tweets hashtagged with #threads.
All the shit you do on the web, but controlled by one company, in their app, so they can rent-seek the hell out of everyone else's business.
I’ve frankly not seen any difference, at all. If anything there’s slightly more activity
At their scale and in their market the premium subscriptions model doesn't appear to work, unless their costs can be reduced much, much further.
Sharing revenue with creators is great. Not everything being done is bad. On the whole it just doesn't seem sustainable and sometimes even petty and foolish. Almost appears as if he's trying to bankrupt the company.
What I'm trying to say is it seems like the world is "demanding" too much from Elon. Additionally, there is a weird trend of people rooting for his failure. This is something I strongly stand against.
Why would I want to live in a world where "a superapp" is needed?
Why would I want to live in a world where you have one company in control of the "town square"?
Personally, I just wanted Twitter to fail because I think that any ad-funded business is bad for us. But if you tell me that Elon's long term game is to make it something even more dystopian than it ever was, then yes I will do everything in my power to see him fail and fail catastrophically.
Rooting for someone's success is not about personal preferences or endorsing their actions. It's about fostering a positive and supportive environment that encourages growth and achievement.
> Why would I want to live in a world where "a superapp" is needed?
Super-apps already exist in other markets. Entrepreneurs want to create ones in the US market to foster the diversity of options. This is a healthy process. You live in the world with wars, but you want to do everything in your power to see Twitter fail. That's strange. A world catered only to your preferences is unlikely, so you have to be realistic.
> Why would I want to live in a world where you have one company in control of the "town square"?
I don't know. You don't have to live in that town.
> Personally, I just wanted Twitter to fail because I think that any ad-funded business is bad for us.
Pretty much every business in the world is driven by ads, one way or another. However, as I said, Musk doesn't care about ads. In fact, he wants even fewer ads on Twitter. That being said, his goals kinda align with what you want.
Not when this "growth" and "achievement" is something that affects part of the society negatively, or when there might be unknown consequences.
> Super-apps already exist in other markets.
And they are enablers of authoritarian states and continuous centralized power over a handful of corporations.
> You don't have to live in that town.
Just on another thread I was being accused of being "socially inept" for refusing to use WhatsApp.
If we live in a world where so much power is centralized into a few corporations, they affect everyone's lives, even if they don't participate directly on it.
> Pretty much every business in the world is driven by ads
Does it help you sleep at night to be telling yourself this kind of bullshit, or are you just apathetic?
> he wants even fewer ads on Twitter.
You forgot to capitalize your Lord's name.
Emotions are the enemy of a constructive dialogue. I bail.
That honestly sounds more like the goal for an elementary school class than the goal for an adult society.
We don't necessarily need to support and encourage development that we don't agree worth, or even see as dangerous. And the idea that growth and achievement are always good things and should be wholly supported and encouraged sounds lovely on the surface, but there are plenty of things that could be considered achievement that we are better off without.
Like, common he set expectations by himself. He was the one bragging and running his mouth how everyone before him was an idiot while he is going to clean and fix the place.
> Additionally, there is a weird trend of people rooting for his failure. This is something I strongly stand against.
I really really hope for failure of his, quite apparent, political project.
There's way more ads. Now every blue checkmark tweet is an ad, paid for placement. So I click on a tweet and all I get are pages of ads with the real tweets buried at the bottom.
Ads aside, there are host of other ways he's ruined twitter from censorship to blocking anon access to amplifying his own terrible tweets.
It's not "opinions I disagree with," I hope. Because labeling that "unsafe" is a new level of Orwellian.
It also depends on how you define "killed". I dont think twitter will be gone, but there is a chance it will become a lot more similar to truth social or parler.
Do you think Hackernews would do better or worse if they introduced a paid tier that put your comment above others every time?
If a paid tier alone puts your comment above others, then the result is negative. However, I do not believe Twitter's algorithm simply ranks by the presence of a blue checkmark. It is a signal amongst other signals and not a sole criteria. My feed has improved after all the changes, which is why I could not share your observation.
Truth social exists because of a censorship. The idea of a social network with high censorship results in a state of content being a walled garden. While the intention behind censorship may be to create a safer and more controlled environment, it often comes at the cost of limiting diversity of thought, stifling creativity, and hindering the progress of society.
Censorship, when implemented excessively, can lead to a state where only certain viewpoints and information are allowed, effectively creating an echo chamber that reinforces existing beliefs and discourages critical thinking.
Twitter has the potential to become the next Truth Social. If Meta enforces excessive censorship in Threads, people might perceive it as a more "positive" social network, offering the illusion of a better alternative. With media support, people could gradually migrate towards Threads, leaving Twitter in decline. However, if Elon achieves his super-app goal, Twitter's current form will no longer exist, rendering these social media-related issues irrelevant. Consequently, Twitter and Threads would evolve into a completely distinct applications.
The only good thing about it is that I spend more time reading books now.
> Most people i know don't use it anymore.
Twitter hasn't really changed much. If you know people who no longer want to use the platform, then their decision is likely driven by the propaganda. In a way, it's not their personal decision, but the result of influence from elsewhere.
In addition, Must is not even trying to stand up to regimes and such. It became completely meek.
Also, twitter is not "balanced". It is right-wing in the sense of "we use right-wing as euphemism for nazi and such".
1) fake/shell drop shipping companies dominate the ads with nonsense names and computer generated logos. An endless stream of low quality ads as opposed to real companies that used to advertise there.
2) Low effort facebook style posts have began to dominate any reply section, as users who typically had bad posts that saw no engagement, now pay to force people to look at their low effort/hateful/uneducated opinions. (still not gaining many followers but users are now forced to see it over higher quality users).
3) Bot issues are still very much there, every time I make a post with more than a dozen likes, I get 2-3 bot follows that are always a vaguely feminine name and a single post, following hundreds of accounts.
4) API cost increases have hurt positive bot accounts(ie OpossumEveryHour, various "every lot in x" accounts) while tons of crypto scam accounts, tshirt bots, etc have taken over.
5) The general changes to the checkmark system has destroyed the meaning behind the check, it used to serve to ensure accounts were not imposters. Now its simply every guy who watches self help entrepreneur videos has a check.
Just a handful of aspects of the overall degraded experience. Every day the site becomes more hateful and zenophobic, looking more and more like low effort boomer facebook groups every day. Regardless of opinion, the site used to be a place that you could get news from verified sources, follow public figures, and not be inundated literal Nazis. If you own a bar and a couple Nazis are made to feel welcome, you now have a Nazi bar.
Only from bots. I mean, this is not even disputable, saying that twitter has more genuine activity now or somehow better content is in the reals of fan fiction.
For more than a decade the fed has spoiled VC to expect that money could just be borrowed for nearly free.
Depending on where one lives, but many people have access to "free" government services, ranging from roads, education, unemployment security, healthcare, and more. The costs of these services are payed by taxes.
Some "free" services are sustained via donations. Wikipedia is a good example of this.
Some people might say that those are not examples of "for free", because someone is paying for those things, either via taxes or donations. They do have a cost for society. Yes, but in that case then ad-based services are not free either: the advertisers are putting the money to run those services, and the society is also paying a huge cost in thousand of hours of people's lives wasted down the drain, promotion of harmful products, scams, etc.
Require something in return.
Flightradar24 gives ad-free subscriptions to users who pay $20 or so for an RTL dongle and feed it data.
YoutTube is making money, somehow, off of us. Is it not our right to reclaim the excess value we are creating for them? Why is only okay for trillion dollar companies to have free lunch?
Excess value is real, measured not from the margin, or even money that goes back into the org, but value that is 100% extracted from the organization, often at the detriment of the org for the sake of shareholders. Its very often just parasitic.
People are so entitled now, "nooo i need my investments doubled at all costs". I have little sympathy for professional investors that have tied the global economy to short term private gain over long term sustainable growth. Its a rich child's game.
Say, for example, a certain bank where to listen to the Fed and invest massive piles of cash deposited after currency debasement into federal notes and bonds. If those notes where purchased when the story was interest would remain zero only to face 4-6% interest months later, the investor could well need a quick win to dig out from those now toxic assets that can't be sold at face value.
> other times it's to cover existing bets
This is my issue. Our economy has become a casino for these professional investment firms with lots of capital to try to strike it rich. This is not a healthy way to run a system that determines who lives or dies in a big picture sense.
The economy has become a game for people with connections. It no longer matters if a business is healthy or profitable, if it does not work within this grand casino. The search for constant growth is killing us all.
Because it does not make any sense. No one wants to be shown something he does not find interesting or important, even if they say that they will. So if you believe people should watch, read, or listen to your ads, you've been living in a bubble.
> They want everything free.
It would be nice if everything were free, but only small children believe that. People know they got to pay for cars, houses, clothes, and education. And they do because it's valuable. They also pay for apps that are valuable to them. If they don't use something unless it's free, that's because its value is 0.
> This just encourages subscriptions.
There are subscriptions in the real world, like phone, internet, and electricity. I do not mind subscriptions, for music streaming, or apps that require continuous maintenance (support fees). But most apps are done (or should be, apart from the bugs) and they should just provide a license. New feature requests should be added to the backlog for the new version.
Take Duolingo, I could have paid $3 a month for the service (that's their value to me). But no way, I'm paying $7 a month. However, they say: "Hey, you can use it for free". So, I do. And the ads are just so ugly that they bring the whole app down to their level. So now, I'm even less appreciative of their service. And when the ads will get too irritating, I will just stop using their "free" service. And I've paid the 273 dollars for a Michel Thomas course. Because no ads, just good content.
I'd say that it is because the value is less than the transaction cost of any payment, not zero.
It's either watch some ads, or work slightly harder to make slightly more money, to afford a subscribtion (or forgo some other pleasure, and reallocate that money to subscribtion instead). Both options are unpleasant, but of the two, majority of people seem to prefer ads.
A more valid experiment would require all users to be new to the platform.
Or using it with an ad blocker
Personal blogs, passion sites filled with resources where they might sell a couple products, open source resources built by a community, etc.
I can say its almost rare I get the answer I need on a commercial platform besides reddit, but that's only because reddit replaced forums where ads were generally small and unobtrusive.
Yes! I would say 90% of the useful stuff I find on the web is this sort of site.
YES. Not only would I find more pleasant sites, but they'd likely be of higher information quality.
Of course Google's business is those ads, so they cannot fix the problem. They are the problem. Google's raison d'être is spam, so of course they're going to return a bunch of spam to you. Same deal with email. I get plenty of spam to my gmail inbox with things like, literally, "THIS MESSAGE CONTAINS ADVERTISING". Obviously, Google is not even slightly trying to filter spam from emails, even the spam that labels itself as such.
You might prefer to, but Google and others know better when it comes to B2C pricing.
Look at Netflix, Youtube Premium, HBO etc. The price increases every year, consumers get pissed. That's because:
a) these companies are bad at forecasting their margins
b) the real cost of pricing these services is MUCH higher than consumers would tolerate, and is thus heavily subsidized at the early stages ($10/mo), in the hope that future revenue deals (cable TV syndication, IP rights etc) will offset those losses later. The subscriber base isn't part of that equation here.
This is much easier to accomplish with a B2B model, i.e. ads. That's because advertisers and companies have budgets available, and aren't as sensitive to price changes.
There was a comic (an Oatmeal comic, IIRC) where the guy goes into Starbucks and orders a $5.00 coffee, and then while drinking it picks up his phone and it asks him to pay $1.00 to access a news article and he says, "$1.00! Who do they think I am, Mark Zuckerberg?" (or something like that).
While I get the _sentiment_ behind it (especially from a webcomic guy who's producing entertaining content and not getting anything back from it), it misses a lot of the subtext of why paying for things on the internet is such a hassle. Yes, I'd probably pay $1.00 to read a news article - I pay $5.00 to buy a print magazine when I get on a plane after all - small transactions on the internet are a huge hassle. There's a lot of friction around tracking down my credit card, typing in the number, typing in all my personal info, hoping that the site doesn't store it stupidly and leak it... I don't know what the solution is there, but the way it works now ain't it.
I wouldn’t exactly say he’s not getting anything from it. Per Wikipedia,
>Inman said in 2012 that The Oatmeal had a revenue of $500,000 a year.
For a webpage, the marginal cost is approximately zero. Certainly there was an upfront cost, in that somebody had to write the thing, but the cost to pass it from the server to my phone looks like rounding error.
I'd be one of those people. $1 for a single news article is outrageously overpriced, where the coffee is only moderately overpriced.
https://workspace.google.com/products/gmail/
No ads in workspace, they don't mine your data for advertising.
Users understand this just fine. They pay for Netflix, Disney and others.
It's Google that has failed to position Youtube as something worth paying for. Youtube is free because it is basically a public access tv channel full of amateur content --- consumers don't pay for public access, so they're not going to pay for Youtube. It's on Google to change people's minds about that.
Google could have carved out obviously premium content and put that behind a paywall, but instead they built this ad-based revenue system, thereby positioning its content library as commoditized and interchangeable. The only upsell they provide is to pay to get rid of the ads. It's a terrible offering.
Why do you think that people don't understand this?
> This just encourages subscriptions.
Which is the lesser of the two evils.
I dont have a problem with ads, just dont sell my data to everyone who knocks on your companies doors. Happy to support ethical ads.
Twitter ads are aweful, showing unknown, click bait ads on its platform.
In addition to which - they were never that solid in the first place. They (and Facebook) are mostly just "dumb hosting" for other people's content - if the content producers leave, they don't have anything to offer. They don't even really own the content that was produced on their platform and it wouldn't have any value even if they did. There's a weak value proposition there: "we'll let you put your stuff up for people to see and even sort of promote it, but we'll run ads next to it to offset our hosting costs", but neither seemed to realize just how precarious their position is/was.
One can suggest that recent decisions were "blunders" due to the problems they have encountered, but maybe there just was no path forward for them simply because there's not much value to be extracted from this business. Now we just see the entire house of cards collapsing around them.
Instead they wanted to be Facebook Jr, killed all of their interesting and niche aspects, ignored the things users and mods were asking for, and hamfisted general ads in people's faces while adding expensive, unneeded (unwanted!) features like live chat and video hosting.
Reddit is an example of what happens when you put people in charge of a business who are both greedy and stupid.
No, it's what happens when your investors are VCs who need to 10x on their wins because most of their investments fail. As a result, stable, long-term profitability isn't the goal; big IPOs are, or at least explosive growth. There's no room for a company which is moderately successful when VCs are involved.
I think this is just the way of the world. Usenet -> Slashdot -> Digg -> Reddit -> Discord -> ???
Look at the facebook ads platform from the perspective of a small business looking to advertise. It is incredibly effective in how it can target people.