Seeing these big sites with no ads is strange. CNN, NYPost, etc. This is going to be wildly expensive for Google.
Anyone internal know what's going on? We started seeing GAM not returning responses about an hour ago, yet their status page and accounts were silent till 10 minutes ago.
There are definitely a thousand people here more qualified on this stuff (I write Fortran lol) but I thought JavaScript was all asynchronous now? Shouldn’t the actually desired content load independently of the ads?
Anecdotally it feels like all of these sites are super fast right now. I even reinstalled the heinous Weather Channel app and it’s working wonderfully. With ads that app is essentially unusable on an iPhone 14.
I used to browse without one when I worked on an ad-supported site and had to implement and make sure they were working correctly. Gotta assume it's a similar situation here?
I worked at one of the top ad networks for a decade and blocked them the entire time. Would usually just open a separately configured browser window for testing.
I've been using ad blockers for many years, so for me it's the opposite: it would be extremely strange and unsettling seeing any ads on my own devices at all.
yep... I've started loading pages I want to send to my mom with adblockers turned off just to check how bad they'll be because somehow despite turning them on every time I visit by the time I get back they have been turned back off...
- Lack of experience or awareness that running an ad blocker isn't something weird or niche, but is in fact basic hygiene when on-line.
- Sites that ask, demand, beg or cajole visitors into turning your ad blocker off, many of which provide detailed instructions aimed at non-technical people; your mom may have needed something from one of such sites, and didn't bother or remember to turn the adblocker back on. If I were to bet, I'd pick a link to an interesting article on a news site that employs this technique.
- Perhaps your mom uses one of those cashback extensions to get some money back when shopping on-line? They're somewhat popular and regularly advertised by vloggers and influencers. Disabling ad blocker is AFAIK necessary - for technical reasons - for the service to award you cashback.
My wife uses one of those cashback services, but we did some research on their inner workings and business model first, to be sure she's taking advantage of it, instead of being taken advantage of herself. And she follows a strict routine: she disables uBlock before visiting a participating e-commerce store, does the purchase, and re-enables it immediately afterwards.
I think some people are so annoyed or afraid of tech that once they’ve got something that at least somewhat works they avoid making any changes in fear that it’ll break their workflow.
Ads lower the barrier of entry to the web by paying for content. By blocking them and encouraging others to as well that on-ramp becomes weaker, motivating producers to pack more ads for what audience still sees them.
Funny thing though, I worked in ad-tech for ten years at a small player (outbrain). They're present on most major news sites around the world, which means I got to dig into the source of many of these sires. Easily 90% of their source was dedicated to serving ads or tracking behavior for campaigns. And we're talking a ton of code. It's like they're in an arms race with themselves where their site is an expensive nightmare to maintain so they add ads which makes their site an expensive nightmare so they add more ads.
Damn I tried turning off my adblock just to see but it's probably been years since I've seen those sites _with_ ads so I have no way to relate to this experience
back when radio stations played records, record companies would pay DJ's to play specific songs or albums [1]. I was a scandal at the time. It's almost quaint now.
Interesting question. I probably would not, which might mean I would spend less time on the internet reading useless stuff and more time outside on my mountain bike.
Because advertisers pay more to reach people they know are willing to pay for stuff. It's whatever the opposite of a virtuous cycle is... a race to the bottom?
The conventional wisdom is that offering paid subscribers ad free experiences poisons the well for advertisers. After all, it eliminates the people that have enough disposable income to pay a nominal fee!
Not sure how this translates to targeted ads. Would offering such a thing violate Google’s TOS?
There's a New Zealand Journalist, David Farrier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Farrier) and I actually subscribe and pay a monthly fee to be able to view what he writes. I think he's really awesome (some will disagree) but I just like him. He also has a TV series on Netflix called Dark Tourist if you're able to see that.
He has a new movie out at the moment that I really want to see, but his last movie Tickled was _crazy_ like... Tiger King type craziness.
So yeah - if I know someone who actually puts in the work to give me quality output I'd pay for it. Just like I do now.
Ads are an enabler of bad products. If things required a subscription, half the shit on the Internet would be gone and for good reason. Also, often you get ads anyway regardless of the subscription. This is a false dichotomy.
All newspapers/magazines, VHS/DVDs, cable TVs etc. were are 'subscription' in the sense you had to pay for them. Ads were still there. If paying a subscription for websites was normalized then soon enough they would as well be filled with ads.
Yes. But I wouldn't subscribe to "content" that is used as a minimum skeleton to hand ads on, and I include the google search engine in that definition. I'm happy to pay for something I value. Most web content I value at $0 and may browse opportunistically but I would never pay for it, including by looking at an ad or providing my email
I've spent hundreds of hours of my life contributing to Wikipedia pages and may spend hundreds more on open source projects. Capitalism has made us label any not immediately self-serving as illogical. We are not homo economicus
There is this concept of supporting people you like without them having to charge people. The more you can read upfront, the more you can make an impartial judgement if you actually like them. A lot of people subconsciously convince themselves that they like something just because they spent money on it. If I like a project or open source software that I use then I go support the developers. A lot of other types of arrangements are basically signing a contract waiving your rights before you've even had a chance to form an opinion.
Is the link to a description of the problem, or it is just an example of a dead page? (Not sure if I’m getting a dead page because of their issue or because my ad blocker blocked it, haha).
From their recent 10Q for investors, they list a revenue of $7.8 billion for "Google Network" in revenue for the preceding 3 months before September 30, 2022 [1] There are 90 days in 3 months, so their revenue for a day is approximately
$7.8 billion / 90 days = ~$87 million/day
$87 million / 24 hours = ~$3.64 million/hour
$3.64 million / 60 minutes = ~$60,740 thousand/minute
$60,740 thousand / 60 seconds = ~$1,012/second
And, depending on their agreements with their advertising partners, they might be liable for some of the profits lost by their partners.
I don't think that's the right number to look at, given search ads aren't down. You probably want just the "Google Network" line item, which is about 1/6th of that number.
It doesn't look like it's affecting their search ads (or if it is, it's not fully down for them), so not the full advertising revenue of GOOG. But it's still likely tens of millions per hour.
Use a PC. On mobile it's hopeless - on top of garbage scripts that sometimes lock up even a recent flagship phone, the service does aggressive lossy compression that's hard to work around. If someone uploads an image (whether PNG or JPG, doesn't matter) that has small details like text, forget about discerning them from the blurry mess imgur sends your way.
For single images, imgur will redirect from /<id>.png to /<id> which requires the ton of javascript (you see a message about javascript required to run). Just re-add the extension to the end of the url and you'll access the image directly.
> Google Cloud brought in $6.3 billion of revenue, a 35 percent year on year increase compared to Q2 2021’s $4.6 billion revenue. But the $858 million loss was 45 percent higher than the $591 million deficit recorded last year.
You might ask: "how is that possible, with those same margin-intensive prices that AWS and Azure use?" I have no clue. It makes no sense, given the prices they charge.
What is or isn't cloud is different at every company on top line but especially bottom line. For example how far down the stack are engineers still considered cloud when they are supporting both cloud and internal products? Investors are fine losing money on growing cloud and also love to see ad margins up? Then everyone is cloud.
I don't think salaries are the driving factor behind GCP's balance sheet, but that's just my opinion. I obviously can't wave a magic wand and find out for sure either, but my own back of the napkin math can't see that reasonably working out. They brought in billions of additional revenue, but their losses also increased.
GCP revenue losses from being down are approximately lower bounded by (downtime in seconds * revenue per second). Their costs don't decrease from being down.
Labor costs to keep all of these features/servers/infra running is expensive. Google is probably charging less due to competition from AWS/Azure/Oracle.
Similar to how Amazon.com is subsidized by AWS. GCP is subsidized by the ad biz
P0, page everybody.
But their incident response planning and training is on point so there’s one incident commander and everyone doing individual tasks reports to them. I suspect not more than a dozen cooks are in the kitchen as it were. Any more and people would be getting in each other’s way.
I seem to recall that ads runs on one of the largest distributed MySQL instances on the planet. That’s probably the most complicated component at play here. Then again everything has to have active, secondary and tertiary so maybe it’s something upstream like dns dos protection or cdn.
I like to think that at a certain point, more “hands” doesn’t help solve the issue faster (maybe even counter productive), so that in both circumstances the outages get the same amount of hands — the maximum.
Don't take for granted how many ad supported sites and services you use :)
I have a website with several writers that serves almost half a million monthly pageviews and we are entirely ad supported. The only reason my writers have jobs and we are able to provide the recipes and information that we provide is because of ads.
So many viewers, why not start asking for voluntary donations? You could dial back ads, and thereby tracking, to the same degree you receive donations. Over time see how far it goes.
This is naive. If you don't try, you never know for sure : )
But that easy retort aside, there are many creators, who live off of donations. And as a matter of fact, it also cannot be correct, because I count myself as "people" too and donated to several projects/creators.
We aren't a "project" and we aren't individual creators. It works okay for certain types of audiences, but does not work for my type of audience. I know my business model well and there is a reason none of my competitors ask for donations either - it doesn't work.
It's always weird when something like part of Google goes down. I just don't expect it because of how massive Google is and how much money they put into their site running reliably. I guess it's interesting to be reminded that Google can go down just like any other website, it's just a really big one.
I, for one, are caught red-handed on this. It is so weird that Google's money-maker has been down, especially that I never have remembered when was the last time it was down (maybe practically never?)
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 218 ms ] threadAnyone internal know what's going on? We started seeing GAM not returning responses about an hour ago, yet their status page and accounts were silent till 10 minutes ago.
Grad student, so mostly I use Fortran so it’ll plug into my professor’s code more easily, haha.
No complaints, though. It is a fine language.
I've been using ad blockers for many years, so for me it's the opposite: it would be extremely strange and unsettling seeing any ads on my own devices at all.
All these flashing and moving gizmos and pop up videos. It's so jarring, like having a flashlight flickered in your face constantly.
I have honestly no idea how people manage to work the web without adblock nowadays.
- Lack of experience or awareness that running an ad blocker isn't something weird or niche, but is in fact basic hygiene when on-line.
- Sites that ask, demand, beg or cajole visitors into turning your ad blocker off, many of which provide detailed instructions aimed at non-technical people; your mom may have needed something from one of such sites, and didn't bother or remember to turn the adblocker back on. If I were to bet, I'd pick a link to an interesting article on a news site that employs this technique.
- Perhaps your mom uses one of those cashback extensions to get some money back when shopping on-line? They're somewhat popular and regularly advertised by vloggers and influencers. Disabling ad blocker is AFAIK necessary - for technical reasons - for the service to award you cashback.
My wife uses one of those cashback services, but we did some research on their inner workings and business model first, to be sure she's taking advantage of it, instead of being taken advantage of herself. And she follows a strict routine: she disables uBlock before visiting a participating e-commerce store, does the purchase, and re-enables it immediately afterwards.
— Nah I'm fine.
I was watching live TV, and he just randomly started screaming at me
I was like "Why the hell are you screaming, kid?" and it turned out it was because the TV was so loud and obnoxious
Turned out he managed to go 10 years without watching ad-infested live TV!
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola
Cable, streaming video, etc.
Not sure how this translates to targeted ads. Would offering such a thing violate Google’s TOS?
He has a new movie out at the moment that I really want to see, but his last movie Tickled was _crazy_ like... Tiger King type craziness.
So yeah - if I know someone who actually puts in the work to give me quality output I'd pay for it. Just like I do now.
All newspapers/magazines, VHS/DVDs, cable TVs etc. were are 'subscription' in the sense you had to pay for them. Ads were still there. If paying a subscription for websites was normalized then soon enough they would as well be filled with ads.
The only difference I see is all the money on salaries and expenses related to ads is 100% a pure economic loss in the ad model.
(Of course I'm only talking about the economics here, there's a lot of other bad side-effects of ads not covered here)
They would love to use Google if it wasn't against the TOS and nobody wanting to deal with them because ethical and morals clauses.
Source: Worked there in the past
$7.8 billion / 90 days = ~$87 million/day
$87 million / 24 hours = ~$3.64 million/hour
$3.64 million / 60 minutes = ~$60,740 thousand/minute
$60,740 thousand / 60 seconds = ~$1,012/second
And, depending on their agreements with their advertising partners, they might be liable for some of the profits lost by their partners.
[1] https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/20221025_alphabet_10Q.pd...
edit: It was initially using the wrong row, it should be correct now.
edit: It should be fixed now.
https://i.imgur.com/9n7HuLu.png
Btw, I like your username.
https://i.imgur.com/rnRiF6Z.png
This trick doesn't work for albums.
Try this https://rimgo.pussthecat.org/rnRiF6Z.png
If you libredirect extension, imgur links will be automatically redirected to rimgo.
One of many sources: https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/27/alphabet_q2_2022/
> Google Cloud brought in $6.3 billion of revenue, a 35 percent year on year increase compared to Q2 2021’s $4.6 billion revenue. But the $858 million loss was 45 percent higher than the $591 million deficit recorded last year.
You might ask: "how is that possible, with those same margin-intensive prices that AWS and Azure use?" I have no clue. It makes no sense, given the prices they charge.
Built to scale that isn’t here today ? Resume Padding ? Data centers are expensive and slow unto build
Similar to how Amazon.com is subsidized by AWS. GCP is subsidized by the ad biz
I seem to recall that ads runs on one of the largest distributed MySQL instances on the planet. That’s probably the most complicated component at play here. Then again everything has to have active, secondary and tertiary so maybe it’s something upstream like dns dos protection or cdn.
Not a Google employee, just guessing.
1Blocker: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/1blocker-ad-blocker/id13655310...
AdGuard Pro: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/adguard-pro-adblock-privacy/id...
Or, for something different, Orion Browser by Kagi runs Chrome or Firefox extensions:
https://browser.kagi.com/
I have a website with several writers that serves almost half a million monthly pageviews and we are entirely ad supported. The only reason my writers have jobs and we are able to provide the recipes and information that we provide is because of ads.
But that easy retort aside, there are many creators, who live off of donations. And as a matter of fact, it also cannot be correct, because I count myself as "people" too and donated to several projects/creators.