Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by eastbound 998 days ago
Not a googler, but it sounds important that ads compete against no-ad bids.

Example: On search results, if all bids are 0.01$, then it’s worth showing no ad, because it will annoy the customer to have low-relevance ads. But what is the ceiling? 0.10$? 1.00$? Sounds reasonable to have a ghost bid which represents the weight of customer fatigue.

1 comments

It’s hard to believe that google cares about customer fatigue as the search results are littered with ads.

I think the issue that the floor varies depending on google sets and there’s no visibility to how they do this.

If there’s only one bidder and the minimum price is $1 for one ad but $0.10 for another, why is that? It’s because google knows that one person can pay $1 while the other won’t.

It hasn’t been a proper auction for many years and is really just whatever google wants to charge. Because they have monopoly pricing power, customers don’t have any real alternatives to search ads.

It would be like if there was one magazine that had 90% of all readers and they charged whatever prices they wanted.