The irony of having to pay to show up for your own name

General
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We’ve been noticing this for a while. Even direct searches don’t feel that straightforward anymore, you still have to scroll past a bunch of noise.

Quoting @nithin 's tweet from today:

Search for Zerodha on Google or the app stores, and the first thing you’ll see is ads from our competitors. The only way for us to show up first is to bid on our own brand keyword. So we’d essentially be paying to be visible when a customer is actively looking for us by name, and if we don’t, competitors will happily take that spot.

What’s worse is that ads now show up above and below our own keyword. That tells you everything about where platforms are headed.

The only winners here are the app stores who collect the ad spend on top of the commissions they already charge on in-app purchases. And one way or another, this marketing spend eventually flows back to customers in the form of higher prices.

We live in a world where everybody keeps talking about disintermediation, but these platforms are some of the most powerful and profitable gatekeepers in history. They sit in the middle and monetise both sides.

If you believe in the logic of enshittification, this is just the beginning. Platforms extract as much as they can, for as long as they can, until they can’t. More ads means more scrolling before you hit any organic results, which means brands that don’t pay simply stop being visible. That’s manageable if you’re a large company with a marketing budget. For smaller businesses and startups it can be devastating. They just can’t afford to keep up.

The sheer irony of having to pay to show up when someone is already searching for you by name never stops being absurd.

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But many people have asked me over the years ‘how to invest’ or which broker to us and I have only recc one name. For free (I don’t use referral links).

As long as you don’t spam, sell user info and don’t push 10,000 popups (and better not to advertise as well i think, but i don’t know about that), you will have true support of smart users.

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I hope you see the

You as brokers are exactly in the same middleman business :see_no_evil:

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Don’t play their game, smart peeps ignore the “Sponsored” results and use an ad-blocker. :four_leaf_clover:

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I came across this video that talks about Markov Chains, the math that can predict almost anything.

​In it, they briefly talk about search engines and how Google used something like Markov Chains to provide better search results compared to its competitors.

For search engines, the more time/clicks it took to find the best result, the more money they made through Ads. So it was not in their best interest to show the best result first.

But Google wanted to eliminate this by providing the best result in as few searches or clicks as possible, and believed that doing so would attract more users. And that is probably why they ended up dominating the search engine space.

It’s unfortunate and ironic that Google has embraced the very thing it initially intended to eliminate: an advertising-heavy search experience that dilutes the quality of search and user experience.

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