I mean you are both right, it's been a few years since I have been in adtech, and it isn't black and white. There are few places that will pay for stuff that isn't clicked through, but there are places that are willing to pay on an impression basis for things like video or images. It's just like not worth it to most places to throw those ads on their property since it's fairly low quality advertisers.
More to the point though, if there isn't ads rendered, you can't even get accidental clicks.
The teams spending the kind of money these ad networks care about are doing a lot of upper funnel brand marketing where exposure is more important than clicks and where conversions are expected to be much lower for this segment of spend.
The largest brands (Walmart, McDonald's, Coca-Cola, etc.) put a lot of analytics into their ad spend. I worked on an ad platform with a large audience that these kinds of brands wanted to get their name in front of, but the audience was exceedingly unlikely to click on big-brand ads on our platform. The brands figured this out quickly and pushed hard for cost-per-click rather than cost-per-impression because cost-per-click was essentially free brand marketing for them, even if they were paying $100 per click.
The next tier down was kind of the opposite. They weren't big enough to surface things like this, and they hired agencies for most of their ad spend. When focusing on the top of the funnel, there's this strange incentive with agencies where they often get more budget to spend if they can connect that directly to eye balls. Agencies are incentivized to throw the ads up everywhere and pay well to do so. They love cost-per-impression because we could deliver a large, predictable number of eye balls in a hurry.
All that said, we put no effort into getting around ad blockers as we were serving these ads on our own site/app and we viewed fighting ad blockers as fighting our users. Our ads were served inline in HTML, but clearly identified in the HTML of the page. It took blockers a while to catch on and block them, but they eventually did.
The further away you get from direct marketing where you can track conversions, and the further up the funnel you go, the less and less analytics help. Another way to think of it is that there are tranches of spend - the central tranche is easily attributable direct marketing but there's a limit to how much you can efficiently spend, but the further from the center you go the less effectively you can measure the efficacy of the spend but there are more options to absorb ad dollars.
Maybe 15 years ago multi-touch attribution was the big push but even that only adds minimal insights into how ad spend affects the behavior you're trying to measure. It helps with high-level channel attribution but it's still at best directional.
So once you reach a point when increasing spend at Meta/Google results in superlinear increases in CAC vs. spend, you eventually end up having to move those ad dollars elsewhere and over time (and a lot of money) you get an intuitive understanding of how these other mediums trickle down to the metrics that matter.
You're totally right about agencies and their perverse incentives and how that leads to sub-optimal spend allocation.
The really awesome thing about these being in simple reference designs, is how easy it is to swap out things like that. I really like how they have things laid out, and will be using this as a reference for jr. folks on how to lay out logical blocks in KiCad.
I have often thought how awesome it would be to have a bunch of proven / validated / supported open source blocks for common things like power supplies, sensors, etc. I think that at some point digikey or someone had a modular board that you could mix and match stuff into a reference design, but I can't remember the details.
They have not (re-)engineered their system, even via temporary hacks, in the last 12 months to defend itself with soft failures, circuit breakers, hard quotas, etc.
That seems kinda dumb. I would never purchase a car without physical controls for key things. It is such a distraction to pull your eyes off the road for common tasks.
K, but if these are experts that literally do not exist in the US, why are the salaries not higher than median? It wasn't meant to fill junior level positions.
This program was meant to allow talent that is not available in the US, so that gaps could be filled with experts from overseas.
Things feel like the 2008/2009 time period for hiring, but stock valuations and earnings are still extremely high, which is kinda odd. It feels so strange right now for employment prospects.
I don’t know if anyone else feels it, but the constant under resourcing and do more with less mindset since 2021/2022 have probably made things worse too.
This year, I started actively day trading S&P 500 because of all the volatility. Maybe its biased because I have been staring at charts more diligently than in the past, but IMHO you can almost feel the tension in the charts right now.
2023/2024 would have small swings of like $2-$4, with $5-10 movements on a maybe 1 out of 20 days. Since Trump took office, it has been almost daily $6-$10 moves, with the rare day of only $3-$5.
Its great for day trading, but I don't know how I feel about it in general. I almost feel like this is the oscillation before the car starts to shake itself apart.
Hahaha, CVE was created because industry refused to track and report on things in a consistent and transparent manner. When given the option, business will almost always choose the easy path, and things like vulnerability management programs will be set back years if not decades when the external accountability goes away.
In general, lawyers and CTOs would probably love to see CVE go away or be taken over by industry.
Because CVE means accountability. It’s very easy to shift accountability onto someone for an unpatched CVE. If given the chance to escape that accountability I’m sure every megacorp would jump at it.
Yup. I'd say around 15% of very severe incidents are ever announced publicly. In most cases, the default is cover-up and hope no one finds out.
To anyone who thinks a libertarian/anarcho-capitalist/Network States "utopia" of Retire All Gubberment Employees (RAGE) is a "good thing", thing about air, water, and soil pollution from sewage to arsenic to particulates to lead to radioactivity. Greedy sociopaths DGAF who they hurt, which is perhaps why James Madison observed: "If all men were angels, no government would be necessary." Obviously, this is not human nature and so some laws, enforcement, and regulators is required indefinitely. Anyone who tells you differently isn't a serious person.
More to the point though, if there isn't ads rendered, you can't even get accidental clicks.