It's been some years since I've had to put ads on the web, but I found Reddit ads insanely effective. Really, Google ads have been dead for a long time. I found them hardly effective at all since maybe 2011.

A surgeon in our family got basically all his (private) clients from Google. Spend was multiple k per month. If you consider that one surgery brings in 7k in revenue, then those numbers actually make sense. He's retired now but did this up to 2y ago.

This is a Kshaped example that’s solid. Some SMBs can afford per keyword large spend in focused high reward arenas. The rest can’t do anything.

> Really, Google ads have been dead for a long time.

For you perhaps. I work with a huge amount of businesses whose profits are still driven almost entirely by them, who have seen not even a blip and make money hand over fist.

I wish I knew the difference. I’ve ran or been close to tens of businesses over the last 20 years and we’ve always paid the Google tax, but I’m not sure it’s ever had a positive ROI.

> When I hear "Google" I assume search, oof (sigh of relief).

If Google Ads is dead/dying the search is soon to follow...

Search died ages ago [1]. Ads dying is a direct consequence of that.

[1] https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

> Search died ages ago

You might want to let Google know that, because the number of searches on Google appears to continue to be growing massively:

https://searchengineland.com/google-5-trillion-searches-per-...

Those numbers look like the exact opposite of dead or dying to me. As does Google's growing stock price over the same time period.

‘Numbers go up’ is the exact type of thinking that caused the death of search.

From a user perspective, google search results are awful and almost always a complete waste of time.

Again, this "death of search" I hear so much about, but doesn't exist in the numbers.

If search results are such a waste of time, why do people keep using Google? In ever-increasing numbers? What's the explanation there?

Dead internet theory explains this perfectly well.

Google search results are a wasteland of ads and content farms, with vanishingly small value for humans

Again, then why are people using Google more than ever?

I don't really see how "dead internet theory" explains that. If it were as bad as you claim, surely usage would be plummeting? But it's just the opposite.

Are you sure it’s _people_ driving this increase?

Dead internet theory means real users are declining while bot users are skyrocketing.

For example google search is such a terrible experience these days that I’ll often ask an LLM instead.

That LLM may do multiple google and other searches on my behalf, combine, collate and present me with just the information I am looking for, bypassing the search experience entirely.

This is a fundamentally different use case from human traffic.

> Are you sure it’s _people_ driving this increase?

Most likely - yes. If Google has been dead for years people wouldn't pour hundreds of billions of dollars into ads there. The Search revenue keeps increasing, even since ChatGPT showed up. It might stagnate soon or even decrease a bit - but "death" ? The numbers don't back this up. One blog saying he stops paying for Google ads conflicts with the reality of around 200 billion yearly revenue from Search.

Exactly this. Businesses decide whether to pay for ads based on clickthru rates and conversions. Bots don't click through. They don't convert. If these rates fall, advertisers will pay proportionally less as their max bid, and Search ads revenue will fall substantially.

That hasn't happened. Google continues to grow with real users.

You get what you measure.

It does not follow that people making more searches means people are having more successful searches. If google found the exact thing you were looking for and put it top centre in the results, would the number of human searchers stay the same but the number of human searches drop?

The design of Chrome is such that people use Google search instead of entering the tld.

The policy described in my link is literally about making each user search more to get the results they want in order to drive more ad revenue. That would create more searches and a less good user experience.

That is good evidence that Google is dying because it takes more than one search query to find what you want.

You should let Google know, given their business is really humming nowadays. Along with their stock price.

Gemini is the new search.

AI is not and cannot be search. Search is dead and has been for a few years now. Search has seemingly been subsumed into the LLM monster, considering how "fuzzy" queries have become (probably because they're not hitting the search algorithm without being massaged by "something else"). Significant portions of the web have been purged from Google's index, which means that neither Gemini nor Search can present those pages to users.

It's over. Sorry.

When people say "search is dead", I feel like you and I live on different planets.

If I have a Google idea of what I want, Google search works great. On the rare occasion I don't know the specific thing I'm looking for, Gemini points the way.

It had never ever been easier for me to find what I'm looking for on the internet, since 1993-1994.

Search -> click on website -> read website to find the information you wanted; is dead/dying.

I agree that paradigm is over and using Google search feels antiquated. It’s not a good outcome for website owners, but I want info retrieval.

I believed these sorts of statements a few years ago, but not anymore. Results were hit-and-miss enough to give the benefit-of-the-doubt. They're now so bad that I assume bad faith, either on the part of the speaker or Google.

But Gemini doesn't bring much visitors to your website. Also, optimizing for AI is even more "black magic" than normal SEO.

Google considers the consumer's side, not just the publishers. Users often don't want to visit someone's website (and then dodge ads and cookie/newsletter/notification popups). If the query can be answered without veer visiting a website, so much the better.

Instead sites adds Gemini integrations, which are targeted based on prompts. When you pay enough, Gemini recommends your shop and AI buys the stuff for the target audience.

Yep, I use it when I run out of free usage on ChatGPT or DeepSeek, or for simple queries, once ads show up I’ll block them or use something else

Google search died years ago already.

I forgot YouTube has ads, thanks.

I do occasionally post (free) on Reddit, it's not that big here though

Occasionally post reddit content or occasionally post reddit ads?

content, in r/Durban - gets a few views

for personal, I'm on lemmy now

How are you finding lemmy community compared to reddit?

what community? There's almost nobody there! (it's nice)

By "here" I think you mean SA. Reddit is big in the U.S.

Reddits been building up its user base in India the past few years.[1]

I’m permabanned on Reddit so I only consume via the default not logged in feed and I run into some comments in what I assume is Hindi(might be marathi or one of the multiple other languages on the continent) or posts from subreddits explicitly about some aspect of india

[1] https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/catalyst/inside-reddits...

How are permabanned? Can you just change the handle or create a new account?

I had a few alt accounts, they were all banned and I wasn’t able to make a new account with existing emails.

I assume, with no evidence, that they just used the same data tracking for ads, to enforce the ban. I think Meta turned on the real banning tech during a panic in Covid iirc

I noticed I was shadow banned on youtube (for comments). I have no idea what was the reason because I rarely comment and am very civil when I do. It doesn’t bother me much though, I was just curious how it happened.

I got a few strikes. They were in one of two main categories

1: my true beliefs 2: directly quoting the president

I laugh at any current supporters of this admin who complain about censorship while this is happening and we’re doing shit like having multiple media companies being sued by the king left and right.

Yes, I agree with you. It’s become quite ridiculous. I expect things will turn for the worse and comments would be used against people in various ways if it’s not already happening, eg. being scanned on social media upon entering the US. Dark times…

Could be using time links and/or commenting too much.

Their ban system is really hard to get around. They use a massive amount of different signals to try to detect anyone trying to get around a ban.

(Reddit has two forms of bans, shadowbans and permabans, both have essentially the same effect)

Hm good point but if one were to try to reach visibility via let's say contacting the creators themselves or making reddit showcases themselves?

I am not sure what might work better, sponsorships or Ads. Of course some are definitely icky sponsorships but if one were to align with small youtubers who develop their own things and you enjoy their content and there might be an overlap etc.

I personally have an ad blocker so I don't really know what might work for. I guess organic marketing? But how does one achieve it?

Any good books / ideas on more sustainable forms of marketing aside from paying the large corporations a sort of land tax basically?

Google ads is dead precisely because their search product is dead.

Ever since Google bought double click, their ads business has been their search business. They are the same product.

> their search product is dead

Do we have any evidence search volume is down?

Don't get me wrong, I'm an avid Kagi user. But I'm sceptical anyone outside tech is using anything other than Google.

I watch people search for PlatformName Login every single day because they don't know how URLs work.

Google isn't search. It's a crutch for people with too much time and money.

p.s. not google labs, not tpu's, but specifically search.

> Google isn't search. It's a crutch for people with too much time and money

…wouldn’t this make it an advertiser’s dream?

Google search ain't dead at all: it became so good something silly like 99% of all the queries have to be answered by the Google AI before the very first "result". And for those who want more, there's the "continue this discussion with Gemini".

Now this may not be great for Google Ads (dunno about that) but Google search now works better than it ever did.

Try to double check the AI inline response. Got it wrong way too many times to trust it now.

The AI summary is good enough often enough that it's tempting to rely on it. But, at least as of a week or two ago when I finally decided to block it, it still gets things badly wrong. (Sometimes seemingly inexplicably, but often because the results don't obviously contain an answer and yet the LLM is desperate to provide one.)

> Also, In my own experience for my business ( also entertainment) I have found reddit ads to be useful.

Reddit is very hit or miss depending on your target audience.

Depending on your Reddit target audience, a lot of people could have adblock installed. They might be loyal to communities that have approved vendor lists where everyone parrots the same vendor recommendations back and forth in every thread, so not being part of that game means you're left out. In some niches, the subreddit moderators have a financial relationship with vendors and they'll put their weight into swaying every conversation away from competitors.

For other niches, none of this applies and Reddit can be a good ad destination. It really depends

Let's be honest, most "Reddit marketing" isn't about on-site ads, it's about posting UGC that promotes your product in some way.

100%. My business is in the smart home space. I peruse various smart home subreddit communities, and they all have a few brands that are aggressively celebrated on Reddit. Market research, financial disclosures, and other public data largely indicates that these brands are not all that popular, especially in the biggest-spend markets.

We don’t find Reddit ads valuable.

I run a large marketing agency and Reddit is terrible for advertising across most verticals.

Based on personal experience, I would be wary on spending much on Reddit ads without carefully measuring the results. Some real world data:

https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/08/11/what-i-learned-spe...

I’d suggest that the title should be, “Competition for Google AdWords is so strong that unsophisticated advertisers can no longer get a good return. Where do I promote my business now?”

He had presumably used it for 10 years successfully. Surely he gained some expertise over that time period.

He probably just got a new competitor in the space. Easy to see good returns on online ad spend when all traffic just goes to you by default.

Or returns gradually went down until it stopped working altogether.

Ad noob here; how would you test this hypothesis?

I have a feeling that it is mostly unsophisticated advertisers bidding up the price of AdWords.

As someone who leads large parts of ad tech for TikTok and worked at Google for 10 years, it’s the K shaped economy that is pressing SMBs out. Pure and simple

Everyone can make up some complex theories but I see it in the numbers every day. Spend distribution is now k shaped and SMBs simply can’t compete at top end performance levels.

This seems one of the more important comments here - a K shaped economy (Rich get richer up the rising arm of the K and the rest of us are on the down arm) dominates everything (ie asset price inflation means if you had assets in 2020 you probably still do else good luck) and this just is one of many ways the playing field has tilted towards the richest.

And it is always a choice - we choose platforms and regulations and spending priorities. If “we” choose a different set of tech regulations the K shaped economy can be put back in its box.

For me the problem was most clearly outlined by Cory Doctorow “developers did not unionise or rebel in time because they thought of themselves as temporarily embarrassed entrepreneurs”.

Presumably with apologies to Steinbeck: “Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.”

Can you share any numbers ie roughly how different the spend is? SMB spends $1k on ads but grandes spend $1M or something? Idk how it works.

SMBs broadly spend 200-400 dollars a month on ads and see marginal to negative returns against 10 million in spend for large clients. Even 1000-5000 see marginal returns at best unless the target small demo high return (local premium services). They lack the budgets for learning and optimization let alone optimal price per placement.

This combined with SMBs targeting everyday joes with increasing less demand availability for anything it leaves them crushed on both sides.

Wow so 10,000-100,000x spend difference. That is a wide K.

Do you think there’s any hope for SMB? Eg I’ve seen some companies tout AI advertising optimization for SMB but when I looked into one for investment the numbers weren’t very compelling.

What is the proportion of spend of SMBs vs large clients? Would you say that large clients are responsible for most of the advertising revenue? I always assumed that would be something like a 50/50 split, but these numbers made me question that assumption.

I have a colleague who runs growth for a big consumer company driving value through their apps. They spend over $100m/year on install ads.

And the fact they price smbs out should be unsurprising: they're better at making money from a user; users are worth more to them; so they pay more.

Wouldn't the K shape only affect targeting of affluent users that are desirable to luxury brands?

Think through the net margins of the bottom of the K left to them. And then the spend against their own K economy on the business side.

Makes sense, thanks

Not all companies that have massive budgets only sell to affluent consumers. For example, walmart, amazon, most streaming services, coca-cola, pepsi, mcdonalds, etc.

It affects everyone. It's always been the case, also in traditional advertising. As soon as a company gets rich it defaults to massive marketing (at a loss) to stay on top and drown the underdogs. That's why I think marketing spend should be capped by revenue by law. The current system stiffles competition

I lke it. It would be wonderful if the cap was gradually reduced to 0.

That would make it easy to implement: a simple payment receipt to a journalist who visited a "demo" would be enough to start fining them. Imagine the honesty of the press when it can't get bribed by the oligarchs anymore. Or imagine charities needing to court local producers instead of poison-cola for endorsements. It would be a different world!

There is probably an element of truth in that however when I looked at the people who outbid me on keywords half were selling high value products where they had enough margin to make it viable. The other half seemed to be spaffing their money up the wall.

Nobody goes there any more. It's too crowded.

-- Yogi Berra

it's not "competition"

it's bots creating too high noise-to-ratio for feedback loop

Without search ad revenue Google is dead.

for my life, I haven't found ads useful at all, so I block them

Any suggestions for local business? Things that operate only within a specified area. Google worked well for those.

How did you run campaigns on reddit? Reddit ads had the worst performance among all platforms I tried, literally zero conversion.

Thank you. This is a perfect example of clickbait. I trusted the HN crowd, clicked the link, and immediately realized the trap. I'm upset at how effective it is. And also commend the author for publishing an article specifically engineered to waste the viewers time.

In truth, I have never seen a company doing such an insane 180 against it's traditional suppliers as Google is doing against the websites populating its search pages which now Google milks as mere training data. Google Search is dead, from the perspective of the websites, and there is less and less incentive to spend effort and money to appear on the first pages.

Google better have a good strategy because this is bound to have 2nd order effects down the road, like, why would I pay money for advertising on a dead internet search engine? If AI is killing organic results, then AI better make money itself, because dead websites don't buy ads.

I think he's aimed in the right direction with the observation about short videos.

I tried to load his website. It took a full minute to come up. Maybe that's the HN hug of death or something, but this is surely issue #1 to resolve.

Beyond that I would ask whether targeting the "young'uns" directly is the correct strategy. His business is party entertainment, kids' birthday parties could be the biggest slice of that, but the kid isn't the purchasing decisionmaker, and there are all these other opportunities (like corporate events) too.

And then I would consider whether paying for ads in shorts is the right or only way to approach the world of video. The thing about video is it's huge, lucrative, and eating up more of people's time every year. People are moving from the text Internet, to watching videos. I would think given the nature of the business this guy has raw footage which can be turned into entertaining videos, or can produce it pretty quickly. I'm increasingly surprised by how much some people can earn on Youtube, by creating videos that also function as marketing collateral for their business. He will ultimately need to geotarget to get customers, so yeah that's probably paid ads, but a good YouTube channel would build authority, making sales easier to close, and might also make him more money than you'd expect via ad revenue.

It loaded in far less than a second for me, almost immediate.

Hmm, the URL appears to have changed since I commented. It was originally a .co.za. Now it's fast.

Perhaps there was a CDN issue (I am in a country that is definitely not material to his business)

I updated CloudFlare settings, yes. Seems to have worked?

Looks like it, site loads within 1 second now!

My entertainment website typically gets 10-100 visitors per day, yesterday it was more like 1000 per hour. The only reason it's still online is because of CloudFlare CDN!

My content is best live and in person but you are right, will be concentrating more on video content for yt and others going forward

I see paid ads as a short-term goal; the business seems to be local, so people should find this when looking for this specific service in their city.

Remember when people wrote things online because they had something useful to say and share and that was enough?

Now it’s slop factory of people having a writing quota to get enough ads because they don’t want to work. Particularly true for tech writers who praise things like leetcode then can’t get a real job.

Now it’s supercharged by ai and they’re upset how accessible their slop job is. I just find that funny I suppose.