Online ad auctions generate billions of revenues for Google while annoying billions of customers every year. They are omnipresent - disturbing and distracting - especially when the algorithm always recommends the same ads that exhaust all my patience.
Obviously, Meta has a big budget cause I have seen this ad multiple times already. But also, I already had Instagram installed on my phone years ago. Meta is wasting their ad campaign budget on me… sorry bro.
The Instagram ad is well-filmed and acceptable, but sometimes YouTube makes you watch some super awkward Grammarly ad video which lasts for 15 seconds without an option of skipping after 5 seconds. Ew.
I personally have 360-degree immersively rich experience with these online ads. As a Gen-Z I grow up watching these shits evolve from simple keyword sponsored searches towards spreading across the corners of various web pages like psoriasis. While I was doing my internship in TikTok, I worked closely with the (human) ad bidders and saw them spend more than $5k on a single SKU per day. Now as I’m googling about this topic, tiny YouTube ads pop up on the web page and attempt to win my attention.
When I was in the SITE market design session at Stanford, one particular talk was about the incentive compatibility in auto-bidding of Google. I talked to the speaker and somebody happily gossiped about why Google shifted from second price auction to first-price auction in ad bidding, AND how recently Google had been accused of overpricing, etc.. Back home reading some papers relating to auto-bidding and talking to my advisor about possible research topics, I recalled that conversation and thought… Well why not read it, even it’s just for fun? So here’s a comprehensive link collection of news and blogs that relates to the juicy Google Ad Gossip: (marked up for future reading, which I promise will finish them)
The Wall Street Journal news “Google Violated Its Standards in Ad Deals, Research Finds”
"How Buyers Deal With First Priced Auctions" | Publift
First Price Auction vs. Second Price Auction | SetupAd Blog“https://setupad.com/blog/first-price-vs-second-price-auction/")