schwinn140

Same. thought this was an april fools joke.

Might as well charge most of the AdTech/MarTech space for gross fraud over the past decade. ALL of these vendors were saying that they were using AI well before the general availability of such technologies. It simply wasn't possible without massive costs to access the compute required to deliver on their false promises.

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Aren't there companies like Televerde that 100% of the product offering is based on low cost labor supplied by prisoners?

https://therealnews.com/corporations-are-making-millions-of-...

These companies have a well well orchestrated PR effort though that attempts to flip the narrative towards all the good they are doing for these people.

In my mind, both are likely to be true.

Giving prisoners a purpose and minimum wage is far better than prison laundry rates ($0.50 per hour). That said, obfuscating the fact that your customer-facing pricing and incredible margins are based on what we'd all consider to be a form of slave labor is disingenuous a best. Transparency (think home page of their site) vs. back channel PR aimed at arming lobbyists would go a long way.

This is some brilliant, next-level, content marketing here. Nicely done.

Link is just hanging.

Also, anyone notice the OP posts the same couple of posts constantly?

You ignored my statement. I asked you to think of your favorite site...not mine. I'm in no way saying that what I prefer is somehow supposed to be preferred by you.

"Think of your favorite site with the best experience possible."

Regardless of the site experience that you prefer, I can assure you that thought, testing, and iterations have occurred to deliver the experience that you personally prefer.

I dont know how i feel about this comment. It's almost as if there's the perception that the general public are a bunch of robots/sheep incapable of making their own decisions. I can sympathize with that perspective but need to draw the line and believe that people have a choice. Perhaps I'm being too naive.

If we look beyond Amazon, Apple has basically built their entire business model under the guise of "convenience." It's so convenient that you never will leave their ecosystem. If/when you attempt to leave, they'll make it so painful that you'll give up in frustration.

Check this out! I happened to see these folks just launched a business doing exactly what you described. I doubt they have any traction but there's hope:

https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/04/fewcents-raises-1-6m-to-he...

How do you think a UX person knows what works? It's not that they were born jedi's worthy of understanding good design and human intuition. They test, test, test, and you know what...they tested more.

Tracking what button or page layout works better from a conversion perspective is not a privacy issue. It's a user experience benefit.

Having a SaaS business and not understanding the exact user funnel, conversion, abandonment, etc. will directly translate into a loss of your job and/or the failure of your business.

This isn't about personal preference which you have every right to. This is about building a business, which is why we're all here, and understanding how to successfully delight our customers.

Wow, thats a bit much.

Think of your favorite site with the best experience possible. That is possible because people tested countless times what works, what didn't, what is the most efficient path to a rewarding UX, and so on.

Yes, there are a ton of garbage lazy marketers in the world. Saying that marketing shouldn't exist would immediately render every refined UX you have navigated, purchased from, and or loyally stream content from.

Throwing out the good because of the bad is too far of a reach IMO. Anywho, that's just little old me and my opinion doesn't mean much.

I'm not in the affiliate landscape but this kind of thing could have detrimental impact on publishers driving traffic to various commerce sites. If you're a person that makes an occasion purchase through publishers (small or larger)to support their content, this will immediately kill their earnings.

Publishers are desperate to monetize their audience anyway possible. Affiliate revenue always seemed to be lesser of evils, IMO, in comparison to programmatic/display. After all, the user intentionally is making a purchase vs. having their data sold out from under them with zero knowledge.

Here's to hoping that I'm misunderstanding how inclusive this will be to stripping parameters.

Their campaign execution is brilliant...love it.

That said, nothing about this is new. Whether Facebook, Google, or any of the other countless (yes, thousands) of players in the AdTech ecosystem, this kind of targeting can be done with ease and for pennies per user.

The deprecation of third-party data, cookies, and cross-domain tracking couldn't happen soon enough. It's not a perfect solution but it's certainly a step in the right direction.

I find it deeply disturbing that this was known by the US intelligence community the entire time yet they were suppressed from sharing publicly because of certain people being compromised. Ugh.

I knew this in loose terms but it's insane to see the revenue sharing percentages going to the creator vs. the publisher.

"My contract with the publisher specifies that I get 25% of publisher revenue from ebooks, online access, and licensing, 10% of revenue from print sales, and 5% of revenue from translations."

Imagine a world where the creators actually are the primary financial beneficiaries and the pipes/infrastructure (aka Publishers) are compensated appropriately for their value. Without creators, Publishers cannot exist.

Taboola, Outbrain, et al are the bottom of the barrel as it relates to the space of monetized and amplified content recommendations.

Literal clickbait designed to pray on the poorly informed.

From an advertising perspective, their targeting "AI" is nonsense.

The fact that they are cashing out isn't upsetting. The fact that countless, I would assume tens of millions of users, have been duped to click on this drudge is most disheartening.

Nicely done!! This is mindlessly fun. I comically created something halfway decent sounding. I might have found my calling. ;)

"Ultimately the auction is completely irrelevant since Google decides which ads will show and by extension whose ad money they'll pocket."

And which Publishers will receive their share of the scraps.

Good point regarding the incumbents. This clearly isn't a simple problem to solve...some one will always lose.

Sadly, we cannot trust our political leaders to simply do the right thing. To the contrary, we need to have these types of discussions in an effort to govern the government. :(

Fair enough. What do you propose?

Simple solutions:

* Block all political ads all the time.

* Require all political parties, and their PACS, to register as a known Advertiser account within the system. Any time an ad runs, and regardless of the source, the associated party will be heavily penalized with a removal of their non-paid content.

There needs to be ramifications for their abuse of the platform. Being that Facebook can't charge them a fine, penalizing their organic exposure is the only thing that they can hold against them.

Multiple offenses will result in longer and longer periods of their content being "muted".

I wonder if they're getting interested in this again after seeing Algolia and Elasticsearch take off? I suppose this was only a matter of time.

My data does not support that conclusion. To the contrary, the vast majority of business decision makers are still on a Windows based machine in the US.

I can validate this directly as we operate the largest library of long-form professional/technical content library on the web. Over 700k professionals per month are registering and downloading content specific to their needs.

Below is the current breakout of their device factor for 2020:

Windows = 97.26% Mac = 8.21% Linux 2.92% Chrome OS = 0.27%

Clearly just one perspective into the market but we've never seen Mac approach any level of critical mass within the US professional marketplace.

The same way countless business, government, and philanthropic leaders were all duped by Theranos.

Group think and greed are powerful drugs for those unable to perform their own critical thinking/research.

PREACH. This is hands-down the single largest reason why I abandoned my Gmail. I receive countless people's credit applications, loan details, new credit card details, bills, etc, credit collections, etc.

All because they have the same last name as me and opted to use a period in their email address.

This is happening across multiple countries as well. Sadly, none of these people ever receive their important messages because I gave up trying ages ago.

How they continue to explain this away as a feature is beyond me. Google is constantly pushing forward with various, and perhaps superficial, security/privacy oriented initiatives yet here's one of their core products offering up the most private details of others without zero care to fix it. SMH

Agreed. Think of the countless companies, arguably most, that will never publicly acknowledge their layoffs.

"Corporate double-speak" is still far better than not saying anything and/or hoping that nothing leaks.

Public acknowledgement in difficult times is near impossible for most companies, especially those that are private, to accomplish.

Agreed! How about possibly converting this to an in-browser web app to get around the platform hurdles?

Yikes is right. Seems like they said the quiet part out loud.

Congrats to the SO team. That said, I'm struggling to understand how/why a they could possibly need to raise now a total of $153MM.

All the content is community generated so there's no costs there.

The core Exchange product is extremely templatized and I would assume be quite scale-able to spin-up as they need additional ones.

I don't believe they have much in the form of paid outbound marketing initiatives.

I'm assuming that I'm completely missing something here. Educate me. ;)

I'm not experiencing this and I would assume anyone employed at a larger or established company would mirror this.

I've seen our company quickly react to the reduced office related costs and have reallocated that to cover employee's home office needs: internet service, phone, supplies. If you needed a desk at home, that also was accommodated.

Being able to take our work computer(s), including dual monitors, was also immediately available to everyone.