The $300B Google-Meta advertising duopoly is under attack
To some extent I disagree with this, not that Google+Meta are under attack, but that the threat is coming from competitors.<p>I’ve spent most of the last 10 years earning my living from an e-commerce business I own. The online advertising industry is unrecognisable from when we started. My thesis, in beef, is that the industries excessive uses of personalised data and tracking lead to increased regulation, and then a massive pivot to even more “AI” as a means to circumvent that (to some extent). The AI in the ad industry now, I believe, is detrimental to the advertiser. It’s now just one big black box, you put money in one side and get traffic out the other. The control and useful tracking (what <i>actual</i> search terms people are using, proper <i>visible</i> conversion tracking of an ad) is now almost non-existent. As an advertiser your livelihood is dependant on an algorithm, not skill, not intuition, not experience, not even track record.<p>Facebook, Google and the rest of the industry were so driven by profit at all cost, and at the expense of long term thinking, they shot themselves in the foot.<p>Advertisers are searching for alternatives, but they are all the same.<p>I think online advertising, as a whole, is probably f***ed…