I often find myself thinking “is/was there a better business than google search ads?” A majority of users on the internets eyeballs with insane margins/low capx. While search seems cannibalized by chats, is the outcome just a fundamentally worse business? Can you get better than cheap infra serving ads to a majority of the Internet with an essential monopoly?
It makes me feel a bit cynical to say this: but the strength of advertising as a business smacks to me of the general inequality we find ourselves in.
I’d love to live in a world where creating something of real value to average humans outweighs what advertising has been appraised at - which id describe primarily as offering value to businesses looking to acquire customers. Yes, there is some value offered to those customers by an efficient advertising system, but the lions share of value lives with the businesses here.
I’d look to the brief postwar period where inequality was a bit lower as a great example of an era where massive value was captured by those who invented and produced new goods and services improving the lives of everyday people.
I think advertising has soared in valuation over the last few decades because society and technology have evolved to a point where it is viable for many people to own small businesses with a handful of employees, if any. That has led to an explosion in the number of businesses, mostly concentrated in a few sectors (e.g. fast food), and to differentiate oneself in a crowded market you need ads.
I’m not sure this is still the case. An AdWords campaign worth its salt is going to cost a lot more money than some local advertising, and with plenty of bot fraud to boot.
I asked some magazines for print ads and one issue is 60-150€ in my niche. That’s not bad, I think I’ve blown twice that in digital ads before to help a friend and we got a 2 conversions to a paying customer.
Dunno. Maybe at a large scale digital advertising is where you have to go, but small businesses might actually benefit from… small advertising.
Yeah I’d be interested to read more about the reflection of inequality but I kind of chalked it up to how cheap it is to create and distribute an effective ad on the Internet. Never in history has it ever been so easy or cheap to show someone relatively well targeted ad.
I'm generally anti-advertising but I find Google search advertising to be the least objectionable form of advertising because it can be entirely relevant to what you're searching for.
If I search for "how do I fix a shower that won't drain?" then you will get a mix of results that will include articles, Youtube videos, etc. But also links to plumbers in your area seem entirely relevant to that query, no? I find it strange how many of the most militant anti-advertising purists ignore this completely.
As for creating things of value, there's a problem: housing has become the best performing asset in many developed economies and it is fundamentally parasitic and destructive. As an example, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand analytically created the best-performing portoflio and it was... 100% housing [1].
Demand for housing in many places is inelastic. It enjoys huge tax benefits. And you can leverage it better than most asset classes. Plus it's become a political goal of many governments to have ever-increasing house prices.
So if you want to build a factory that makes widgets that you want to sell, that involves a lot of risks. Why would you when you get a better, easier and safer return from just buying more housing?
If you want a healthier, more equitable economy you absolutely have to decommodify housing. There's simply no other way.
The (search query) -> (targeted ad) isn't the part of Google's ad business most people have a problem with.
They take issue with Google grabbing and compiling every piece of data it can get on you into a profile, keeping that forever, and selling that targeting to advertisers.
I think this is downstream of The Debtor's Revolt[1] and antinormative conspiracies expropriating object-level gains[2] from creators. Those closer to the central bank have lower rates to buy out value-creating startups which are assimilated into the antinormative conspiracy. This ancestral mirroring is a fundamental issue with central planning, anathema to the federation necessary for capitalism to succeed.
My initial take to this news was “what about anti trust?!” But I was surprised to learn that DD is essentially non existent in grocery delivery and instacart’s non grocery deliveries are powered by Uber Eats. For two massive brands they really don’t offer the same product.(edit: not effectively, at least) If anything maybe this helps Instacart/DD compete in grocery with the real giants in Walmart and Amazon. I wouldn’t be mad to see DOJ block this but I was just surprised to learn about the landscape of grocery delivery.
For context Walmart, Amazon, and Instacart each have about a quarter of the online grocery delivery market with smaller outfits like Kroger and Albertsons eating up the remaining quarter. If you believe this data, that is.
https://talkbusiness.net/2025/04/online-grocery-sales-rise-2...
I've had failed or missing deliveries from an Albertson's owned grocery chain and when speaking to the manager of the department, they just subcontract the delivery to DD and UberEats, much like McDonald's does. It's not their own employees doing deliveries.
A few Albertsons stores do their own deliveries, but it's increasingly rare. I used to love my Abertsons deliveries. Always had the same guy (who was super friendly), and it came in a refrigerated truc, so cold products stayed cold.
I stopped using them when they switched to instacart -- the instacart shoppers really don't care about service, they're just trying to deliver orders as fast as possible so they can more to the next one. They'll pack ice cream with a warm rotisserie chicken so you end up with molten ice cream as it sits in their trunk for 45 minutes while they make 2 deliveries before yours. And in the half dozen or so times I used them, not a single order was correct.
Now I use Amazon Whole Foods because even though they use gig drivers for the delivery, the food is well packed (and they use foil lined bags for cold products that do a decent job of keeping cold foods cold.
Amazon/Whole Foods in our area seems consistently unable to pack bananas in a way that doesn't result in bruising. I'm beginning to think they train them to put heavy cans on top of bananas for some reason.
It's believable to me. I exclusively use Walmart and Amazon for groceries now. The nearest grocery store is 10+ minute drive away and with gas prices, my time, etc. I'd rather just buy online and wait for someone to deliver to my door. It's much quicker than going around the store looking for items too.
It used to be there was a significant premium for this service and that's why I wouldn't do it but not anymore. In places like NYC - it's actually much cheaper than local options.
I've worked these 1099 grocery delivery gigs and you get paid around minimum wage to lug these very heavy orders of water and juice up stairs, all while adding miles to your own vehicle and bearing the full risk of injury because you're an independent contractor. I hope you tip them well at least.
I wish no one would tip them. Then they'd quit working for minimum wage, then the costs would go up, then I could see the actual cost of the service and make a decision to use it or not.
a tip for an unusual order/circumstance would be fine. Say if you ordered a 50lb bag of cat food, and live on the Nth floor, and the elevators are not working.
I see no reason to think that was the case. They'll work for whatever rate companies pay them. There are many workers in minimum wage jobs who don't get tips at all. I agree that tipping is a bad practice and that it pushes labor costs onto customers. It will take regulation for companies to stop and tipping culture to change. I'm doing my part to try and keep the problem from getting worse by refusing to tip for almost anything except deliveries and being actually waited on. No matter how much companies beg for tips for basic retail purchases and counter service I don't feel at all bad about turning them down.
I guess you're talking a much higher minimum wage then Kansas. Minimum wage here is $7.25/hr, which isn't enough to live on practically, so it's not hard to find a job for significantly more than minimum wage.
This seems to be you choosing to live in an idealized form of your future vs the actual reality of today. My question is, if you're choosing idealized anyway, why stop at a mundane ideal where anyone has to work for minimum wage at all? Unless you've baked the lower class labor category into your ideal future?
You not tipping doesn't improve anyone's material conditions. You choosing to give money to the exploitative companies does affect material conditions, negatively! To me it sounds like you're trying to doordash your cake, eat it, have it, not pay for it, and get paid for eating it, all at once!
I don't actually even have DoorDash available, but I can put my money where my mouth is when it comes to restaurants; PLEASE pay your workers a good wage, and then I won't eat there if I can't afford it. I don't know what your wages are, or your operating costs; don't make me guess how much I need to pay your employees for you!
Nobody actually likes tipping btw, the question isn't whether it's good, but rather whether we should as individuals punish individual workers for our own failure to not raise minimum wage or ban tipping.
Regarding the restaurant industry, I used to run a restaurant, and my conclusion is that the economy is fake.
There is no profitable way to run a restaurant legally. Somewhere in the supply chain, if not in the restaurant then in the delivery truck or farm, there are undocumented laborers being underpaid and working in unsafe conditions. If we actually applied the typical worker protections we've come to expect for other blue collar jobs, with the expected wages, the already razor thin margins of the restaurant industry would completely collapse. The only thing left would be vertically integrated oligopolies like McDonald's.
Every meal out, somebody, somewhere, is subsidizing your meal to make it affordable enough for you to buy it. Adding the 28-32% margin that Uber eats charges is just increasing that pressure to the breaking point. It all barely survives through psychological tricks that make it seem cheaper than it is like hiding the tip or tax until after you actually get the full bill.
I think the only way the restaurant industry could function fully legally is if the government was the only landlord. There's just not enough margin to include the margins a landlord expects, and landlords pathologically increase rent to be just below causing a restaurant to collapse, or simply cycle through restaurant after restaurant, not caring about months of lost rent revenue because the high rent cost increases the value of the property.
I don't tip. I don't believe in the practice of tipping and especially with digital platforms I don't trust where the money goes.
If I am tipping, it will be directly and usually in cash and there's only one person who gets that and it's the person who cuts my hair.
Get a different job if you don't like it. Minimum wage jobs are dime a dozen and have joke requirements to get onboarded. It's not like competing for faang or whatever.
Why does your personal activism stop after the point that harms fellow humans but not before the step of rewarding an exploitative corporation that subsidizes its labor cost with tips and your tax dollars through welfare to its laborers?
You're welcome to leave the job. If you're working a job that has tips - get a different job. I don't work a job that has tips and never have. I have worked from minimum wage to 1m+/yr.
There are an endless amount of jobs out there that don't have tips involved at all, require similar levels of experience/skill/craft/work-ethic, and pay similarly.
You're also welcome to buy from a company that doesn't offload the fair labor price onto the customer, but instead, you actively incentivize these companies to continue the practice, and punish the worker meanwhile by not tipping. You take advantage of the subsidized lower cost that's normally borne by tipping, actively profiting off this broken system.
Why do you hold humans to a higher standard than corporations?
I don't do tips. If the company wants to not pay well, it's up to the person to choose to not take the job.
You realize you're posting on a hyper capitalist website right? Even by socialist or communist standards, it shouldn't be up to the individual to choose to pay more for an arbitrary reason. That's not how any economic system out there works.
I feel like people posting on here have drastically lowered in quality. Am I speaking with bots?
> I feel like people posting on here have drastically lowered in quality. Am I speaking with bots?
It is trivially easy to determine I'm a real person by clicking my username and following through to my site. Within two clicks you can find a video of me talking. But since we're in the business of blame game here, why do you choose to interact with a website where you're not even sure it's humans you're talking to?
> You realize you're posting on a hyper capitalist website right? Even by socialist or communist standards, it shouldn't be up to the individual to choose to pay more for an arbitrary reason. That's not how any economic system out there works.
Your interaction with society isn't just through paying for things. You seem to enjoy a situation where things are cheap because the labor cost is subsidized via financial tricks like tip culture, and you can swim through the culturally established cracks by not tipping, basically the definition of antisocial behavior.
If you wanted to protest tip culture and low wages, you could, for example, protest. Or stop giving money to companies that do this. For some reason you've decided to blame humans for trying to make a living in this broken system rather than blame companies, who have far more bargaining power, for engaging in exploitative behavior.
Your purchase of the cheaper, tip culture goods over the more expensive non tip culture goods is a price signal rewarding the less ethical company. That's the incentive I meant. It doesn't make any sense for blaming people trying to make ends meet. I don't quite understand why people think their Uber drivers and waiters and whatnot super duper love these tip based jobs, there's a million reasons they are essentially forced to take whatever work they can get. Do you really believe working class people have the bargaining power or job opportunities to walk away from the minimum wage tipped job? You are here which means you have access to the internet which means you must know that many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck - that means they can't miss a single paycheck without catastrophic consequences. So no time to quit and find a new job.
YC may pay for the webservers but there's plenty of commies on here :) for some reason they haven't banned us yet.
People have the opportunity to walk away from minimum wage jobs all the time. It's unironically the easiest job to walk away from in this world because they are very common and easy to get hired on/off of. Low pay jobs are very common and easy to not take.
The jobs that are hard to walk away from are ones that pay enough for someone to live.
Man, you really sound privileged and like you've never worked a minimum wage job at all or know anyone in these positions. Stop talking!
I gotta be real with you man, if you acted like that to your actual delivery driver and they happened to harm you or fuck you your food, I'd understand their POV.
You can be sure that delivery fees will more than cover whatever the cost of gas, the cost of the driver, and the time it takes employees to shop for you so you aren't likely saving money, but the extra you pay may still be worth the convenience.
Have you been careful about making sure that the prices you're charged when shopping online are the same as what's on the price tag on the shelves? Online shopping makes it extremely easy for companies to overcharge you based on what they think you're willing/able to pay and provides them with valuable data they can use to decide when/how much to raise their prices.
You can also run into problems where employees will select for lower quality produce, and about to expire foods that in-store shoppers will commonly pass over. It's nice that it means less food gets thrown away, but can also mean you can end up wasting your money buying food you can't or don't want to eat.
> You can be sure that delivery fees will more than cover whatever the cost of gas, the cost of the driver, and the time it takes employees to shop for you so you aren't likely saving money, but the extra you pay may still be worth the convenience.
In theory, batching deliveries should delivery economies of scale on vehicle and labour costs.
Judging from other comments, the costs of gas and vehicle maintenance get pushed onto the drivers so probably aren't added to the cost of orders in fees.
> The local grocers massively overcharge in comparison to Amazon and Walmart
Those local shops might not have much choice. Walmart has been caught forcing companies to charge every other store higher wholesale prices than what they charge Walmart for the same goods. It's actually illegal, but the FTC doesn't bother enforcing it. Amazon has also been accused of forcing companies to raise their prices elsewhere and if companies refuse amazon removes the “Add to cart” and “Buy Now” buttons from their products pages. Last I heard they were being sued for that, so maybe the situation with amazon will improve.
It's really not the case. I'm talking like 2x the price of products. They basically started charging ridiculous prices because they wanted to gouge on whales. Unsurprisingly, these places are empty when I go into them now compared to ten years ago. They also have no one working at them.
When shopping from kroger you can pay extra to get 2-3hr delivery from insta cart. If not your order gets routed through a more efficient planned route that hits multiple houses
I think your first instinct about antitrust is correct.
Out of the group of people who have food delivered, that food mostly comes from restaurants or grocery stores. Instacart/DD will be a behemoth of food delivery.
Whenever this comes up, I really don't care if there is antitrust or not. Delivery is a luxury service.
Whenever I bring this up, someone always goes "so disabled people should starve"? What did they do before delivery apps? Many restaurants still offer delivery that they do themselves (seriously, look it up).
But more importantly, meals on wheels and other services are still a very large, established network.
Anyways, I guess I could be convinced that this is bad for restaurants. But so many restaurants, especially in cities, are offering delivery services where 10 and 20 years ago there were none. And the infrastructure is not set up to handle that.
As a result, city streets are frequently blocked by delivery drivers. I genuinely would love if my city passed a resolution that prevented restaurants within the city center from offering DoorDash/Ubereats unless they had a dedicated parking lot.
And a million other reasons. In old times with a working community, delivery was a luxury, in “modern” days, it is often a necessity for lack of alternatives.
When was the last time you offered the old people down the road if they need help?
On demand delivery where you pay a premium of 30-40% over the actual cost (sometimes even more) is definitely a luxury to me. I can probably afford to do this but I still do pick ups along with my other errands. Only is rare circumstances I get one off deliveries and it hurts me to see the cost each time I look at it!
Doing it regularly is probably wasting money especially in this economy.
Kids + full time - pick up the food on your way home?
Medical condition - arrange for a routine cost effective delivery (like those meal delivery services who tend to deliver on their routes for free even?)
work 2 jobs - pick up along the way somewhere
can't drive? - use that routine delivery or find a way to cook or use a weekly meal delivery service etc.
But buying one off every other day paying the premium seems definitely a luxury. YMMV.
There are more social services for people that need this than there were in the 70s and volunteering appears roughly flat since then.
Meanwhile, people have been getting old, having kids, two jobs, medical conditions and so on for a little while now. A tremendous amount of America isn't even in a food delivery area unless you count McDonald's.
Eating out is a luxury. Getting that food delivered even more so. This isn't about basic needs.
Nonetheless, I don't see the productivity in arguing over generational lifestyle here. I just wanted to highlight that making people work more than ever means less people volunteer. Whether that is a good thing or not is up to the reader.
If volunteering remains flat but the population (and thus, demand)bgrows for 50 years, then the conclusion is that less people are proportionally volunteering.
Having nicer products or the overall state of technology being greater now than before doesn't mean people are automatically overall better off. Yes we can cure more cancers now. Yes we have less lynchings now, by the public or police. But people are, objectively, less financially secure. Cost of home ownership being 5x median income now vs 3.2x in the 90s, trending higher decade on decade, is a decent enough single number to point to. The long and short of it is that these benefits are being concentrated, as anything regarding wealth inevitably is, in the hands of a few.
And there it is. Exactly what I was talking about. 2/4 of those are covered by meals on wheels and the other two are just normal things posed as being some sort of huge obstacle.
You will find that people have worked hard and/or had kids for a while now.
And of course, the pizza place down the street does cheaper delivery than uber/insta anyways, but you conveniently ignore that.
Entertainment is also a luxury service. I don't think that justifies the behemoth mergers/acquisitions we've seen this decade. It's about competition, not necessarily how important the service is to the people.
> As a result, city streets are frequently blocked by delivery drivers.
How is it different than customers driving to the restaurant? Are you suggesting that there should be less restaurants, or people should use public transport to pick up food?
Customers don't necessarily drive to restaurants, they walk, bike, or take public transit. Most frequently they walk to whatever is nearby when they're hungry, in most functional cities.
I just had some American friends visit me in Taipei and now that they're back in the States they're telling me that if they want food they have to drive 20 minutes, so I understand the situation is different for most Americans, but the suggestion then seems to be the obvious ones: the USA should modernize its urban infrastructure.
> How is it different than customers driving to the restaurant? Are you suggesting that there should be less restaurants, or people should use public transport to pick up food?
When you go to sit down for a meal, do you double park your car, and put the hazard lights on?
Occasionally for fun I'll check the price of DoorDash / Uber Eats for fast food and compare it with the normal menu prices. The difference is insane. I don't think I'd pay that even if I were a billionaire. It's absolutely a luxury and I can't believe normal people pay for it.
DoorDash has a ton of grocery delivery, it's the only one i use for that now because instacart has a payments bug. Very weird that the only two big competitors in this space in North America can just merge like this
DoorDash, at least for a while for me, was significantly cheaper than Instacart for grocery delivery, probably because they were trying to fight their way into the grocery delivery market. Now that they're just going to buy Instacart, this can only mean higher prices to me since they need to pay for their acquisition and they no longer need to compete on price. Great!
You're describing what economists call multihoming. The antitrust question gp asks - which I think is relevant - is whether the combined entity would have excessive market power in the relevant labor market.
Antitrust is completely dead with the current President brazenly taking bribes through his son in law and his sons fake crypto company and scamming his own supporters twice with rug pull memecoins. With that level of disdain for consumers who will ever enforce antitrust?
They're very multi-modal. Walmart will send deliveries out via Instacart, their own in-house drivers (1 year+ employees internally), Spark Delivery, and even Roadie ("a UPS Company"), though Roadie jobs are for oversize things that need a pickup truck or a van like TVs from what I've seen as a Roadie driver.
I think a lot of businesses have adopted this. I've seen Papa John's orders on Roadie, but I'm sure they also use Uber Eats or DoorDash and their own in-house drivers.
My car dealership does this with shuttle rides. They've got a couple shuttles with drivers, but they'll book Uber rides for people if there's overflow.
Might just speak to the competitive advantage of vertical integration. I.E “we make so much off the selling the product we don’t care if the sale originates on or off platform?” It is surprising though that they wouldn’t force users onto their service. They certainly have the power to
They tried that with WalmartPay. After about a decade, they gave up[1].
Consumers have a lot of agency. A lot of people get paid access to one of the other platforms by virtue of tie-ins with their mobile carrier, or bank, or whatever. There's low incentive to pay again to use Walmart's delivery service, which will not also bring delicious Thai food for lunch.
I made the switch on mobile a while back and adjusted quickly. I really don’t miss chrome there. I did try to switch from Arc to Safari on my laptop and my experience was much less pleasant. There’s just a ton of clunky ux on safari. I’ll give it a try again but once I made the mistake of dismissing the permissions popup that appears for every video call and it just never came back (subsequent meetings). I’m sure it’s in my settings somewhere but this felt crazy. I’m required to click approve to use my camera on every video call but if I hit ‘esc’ once then I’ll never be reprompted? That makes no sense.
It works quite well on iOS, I am satisfied.
- ublock lite blocks most of the ads, the rest get filtered through an Adguard Profile(no app install needed).
- Not sure if possible with other browsers but you can install userscript extensions too.
- I have a shortcut that extracts the text of any tab(you can run a simple javascript, document.body.innerText to get) to send to my local llm, this javascript execution is limited to just safari.
On a mac though, I only use it to stream 4k,HDR on Netflix.
AFAIK on iOS all browsers are safari anyway. Apple doesn’t allow you to use anything but safari’s engine (WebKit) for browsers so chrome, Firefox, etc all run WebKit on that platform. Might as well use safari as it’s better integrated. And it supports uBlock origin (lite). With that and NextDNS, I have no ads anywhere. For the YouTube app, I use proton’s Albania vpn and no ads there either.
> Mosquitofish were introduced directly into ecosystems in many parts of the world as a biocontrol to lower mosquito populations which in turn negatively affected many other species in each distinct bioregion. Mosquitofish in Australia are classified as a noxious pest and may have exacerbated the mosquito problem in many areas by outcompeting native invertebrate predators of mosquito larvae.
Someone echoed a similar sentiment but in general I think people get great satisfaction and pride out of being told their work is good. When I worked in the food service industry nothing made me happier than hearing someone genuinely enjoyed the meal. It’s left such a lasting impression that anytime I enjoy a coffee, meal, etc I try to look the person in the eyes an earnestly say “hey this was really good.” If you don’t do this a lot you may be surprised to see just how happy this makes the person working. It doesn’t matter if they made the food or served it or even just worked the register.
At first I thought we’d talk about the mechanisms that go into not noticing employees literally not showing up to jobs for years and maybe a larger trend of what allows for that. Tech layoffs are less interesting and feels a bit premature to dub those jobs as useless and not acknowledge these businesses transitioning to very capx heavy businesses.
reply