| The article is so wrong. This is part of the reason why I do not take main stream journalists very seriously. I wish same issue was taken up by some hard core economist. What is wrong with the article : - So one small Psychiatrist is losing business to other Psychiatrists. It is perfectly possible that Ross is an inefficient Psychiatrist here and patients are better served by other Psychiatrists. This is a loss for Ross but barely a "complication". Also it is not clear to me if the market was divided 50-50 between say Google and Bing why would it be any difference. From over 10 years of experience in ad industry I have realized that it is a ruthlessly free market system where the inefficient player will get punished very quickly. What Google has done here is that opened up a lager pool of customers for the suppliers and that has resulted into fierce competition among suppliers. The customers invariably will benefit here as they have more options. - The rant about smart campaigns This is one of the real bad arguments. A couple's councilor is upset that Google is unable to differentiate between a PTSD councilor and couple's Councillor. Will the world be better served if a couple's councilor has to compete with a florist or a nanny ? [That it what yellow pages were]. The article laments that customers have more choice and it is not easy for the suppliers to rely on information asymmetry to make profit. They take some fictional futuristic scenario and compare google against it and blame those problems on Google. But in reality it is a good problem to have. PS. This is by no means to claim that Google's ad algorithms are perfect, but it is without dispute that they are better than all available alternatives. |
Perhaps you're approaching this from a technical standpoint because you're a computer person. He's not supposed to represent the entirety of the problem. He's there to illustrate the problem. Journalists do this to "humanize" the story, to make it more understandable by the audience. This is done all the time. If there's space available, several people are added. Or there may have been several examples in the reporter's original writing, but they were cut for various reasons like lack of space.
As an HN reader, you're probably not the audience.