Cellebrum

As someone who has personally spent $500k / mo+ on Google Ads for years, I can tell you with certainty: This revenue growth in Search is artificial & extremely unhealthy for Google’s business long term Search volumes are declining as legacy search is being increasingly cannibalized by non-monetized LLM queries Google’s response? Manufacture revenue growth via short-sighted, highly extractive, customer-hostile tactics. I.e. charge advertisers more for lower quality clicks, including clicks they do not want and explicitly did not approve Google to charge them for A few examples to illustrate: For all of its history until recently, Google operated on a 2nd price auction model I.e. if you bid $5 CPC and the next highest bidder bids $1 CPC, Google charged you $1.01 for the click (one penny more than the 2nd highest bidder) rather than the $5 you bid This was a genius move by Google early on as it incentivizes advertisers to input their true maximum willingness to pay rather than trying to play the game of bidding low and constantly adjusting to try to stay just ahead of the next highest bidder while still not paying too much However recently, Google silently deprecated the 2nd price auction and began charging advertisers as much as their bid and budget caps allow, regardless of what anyone else is bidding It’s a short-sighted cash grab at the expense of the long term health of the advertiser ecosystem Making thing worse, Google also recently nerfed keyword targeting precision Google previously had precise keyword targeting settings that allowed advertisers pick individual search phrases to bid on, defined down to the character w/ exact match or phrase match targeting This was one of the core features that made search advertising magic, enabling advertisers to run extremely precise campaigns based on exactly what their target customer typed But now, even if you bid on a specific term or phrase using the strictest exact -match targeting settings, Google will show your ad across 1000’s of unrelated keywords, labeling them as as “exact match (close variant)” The definition of “close variant” means whatever they want it to and changes constantly. The result is advertisers get billed for clicks that are totally irrelevant to their business and that their targeting settings explicitly forbid Google from targeting. Google does it anyway and there’s no ability to turn this off So now exact match is broad match, and broad match is just meaningless spam This is all very bad for advertisers, but for Google, it allows them to show your ad and bill you for clicks across 1000x more searches that were previously going unmonetized (mainly because they’re garbage queries no one wants) This is how you grow revenue atop declining search volumes Lastly, and perhaps most egregiously, Google quietly stopped respecting budget caps by a factor of 2x. For example campaigns we’ve been running for years with $1000 daily budget caps suddenly began spending $2000+ per day And the extra spend is entirely on the garbage keywords Google arbitrarily throws in as “exact match (close variants)” which have no value to our business, but can’t be turned off Google offers no refunds nor any recourse for overspend or spend on keywords you explicitly did not target These are not the actions of a healthy business. These are the actions of company whose core business is in decline but desperately needs to pump quarterly earnings so Wall Street will continue to fund insane capex while hopefully looking through their rapidly deteriorating negative free cash flow Google operated a benevolent monopoly for the better part of 25 yrs Meaning the value Google captured from Search was but a small fraction of the value it created, and that spread produced a potential energy that justified expectations of high earnings growth far, far into the future This is now no longer the case At the alter of AI capex, Google is sacrificing the golden goose

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Cellebrum

@cellebrum_

3 months ago

@daumenxyz Looks good here

Who to follow

Crypto J

@jelle_g54

Crypto investor and enthusiast

#BNB $CAKE #PancakeSwap Permabull

Cellebrum

@cellebrum_

4 months ago

@bryan_johnson Order some pizza

Cellebrum

@cellebrum_

4 months ago

@WatcherGuru @crypto_bitlord7 lets go

cellebrum_ retweeted

Leonidas 🧡 $DOG

@LeonidasNFT

9 months ago

People need to realize that Binance is just a proxy for @cz_binance CZ owns 90% of Binance When CZ makes statements like "I don't buy and sell" or "buy and hold" this is the exact opposite of what he (Binance) is actually doing For the past 8 years Binance (CZ) has been extorting ~10% of the supply of every project via "listing fees" What do you think happens to those listing fees? Do you think Binance (CZ) and its cabal of market makers still hold all those tokens? Of course not Since they have the insider information that they will list it, they acquire a bunch of a token, pump it with a listing announcement, then dump on our faces They have run this on repeat for almost a decade They literally trade against their own users They can see all of the positions of their users then they use that information to exploit them and wipe out their balances It is all methodical and intentional and has made CZ the 23rd richest person alive The cherry on top is that CZ presents himself as an unaware, naive founder who is just trying to figure out what is going on But in reality he knows exactly what is going on because he is the one who did it!

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