platformer.news

What Google and Reddit's bad days have in common

Google has long pushed back against claims that AI answers are bad for the web by saying that they encourage people to conduct deeper, more expansive searches that result in higher-quality clicks to websites. Today's news suggests that narrative is falling apart: advertisers are getting less from AI Mode than they get from traditional search, and so is a big publisher like Reddit.

stratechery.com

2026.43: A New Era

One of my hangups in terms of advertising is that I take my ethics super seriously, and ultimately, if a company is helping pay the bills, it's hard to be truly objective about them. What I realized, however, is that it's hard for me to be objective about Stripe anyway. I wanted to be a professional blogger long before I started Stratechery; however, I thought I had missed my chance, particularly as it became clear that advertising was not a long term business model for a one-person site.

stratechery.com

A Conversation With Ari Emanuel About Entertainment and AI

So the way advertising is going to work in the future, and it’s already happening, is it’s going to predict what you want. So what you’re going to do is you’re going to get a personalized ad predictor that basically is inside your VM. They’re going to be credibly able to say it’s totally private, because it is totally private.

whyisthisinteresting

The “J Crew Crew” Edition

The models in the catalogs solved murders while trying to sell you cable-knit sweaters. It got passed around avidly on the Buzzfeed-era internet.

wired.com

Meta’s New Feel-Good AI Ad Uses a Song About the World Ending

The clip features the David Bowie track "Five Years," which includes lyrics such as "Earth was really dying (dying)."

stratechery.com

A Script for Mark Zuckerberg

Building a platform is antithetical to building an ad business. A platform's goal is to feature third-parties; an advertiser's goal is to capture attention for itself. Investing in an entirely new technology, including developing hardware, fundamentally limits our addressable market; an advertiser's goal is to maximize its market size.

whyisthisinteresting

The Multi-Player World Cup Ad Edition

It's why you have never seen Messi (Adidas) and Ronaldo (Nike) square off in a World Cup ad, despite it being the single most obvious creative idea in the sport.

noahpinion.blog

You are what you consume

But at the end of the day, it's consumption, not production, that defines you as an individual. That might sound like an odd thing to say, especially if you've grown up believing — as my liberal parents taught me — that advertising is a form of mind control that greedy corporations use to force you to consume things you don't really need.