from Hacker News

All political ads running on Google in the US

by cellis on 10/24/24, 5:16 PM with 334 comments

by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF on 10/25/24, 7:17 PM
Interesting to compare the top ads when sorting "Amount spent: high to low" and "Number of times shown: high to low". Political ads from 4 years ago appear to have been shown many more times for much less cost. This year's ads seem considerably more expensive while also reaching a smaller audience.
by matsemann on 10/25/24, 7:18 PM
In Norway it's forbidden with political ads on TV. Reasoning being that live images can have a huge influence, while also possibly being inflammatory and dumb down the debate. But main reason mainly is that it would give those with enough money to afford these "expensive tv ads" a leg up.
However, this law hasn't been updated in decades. So it's still only TV ads that's illegal. So it feels like a quite arbitrary restriction now.
Not saying it should be illegal on other media as well, but I do like the idea of it not being the size of your pockets determining the election. I guess that would be hard to police anyways now, with how influencers can sway stuff without it being an "ad", or how algorithms drive you into a rabbit hole of tailored content anyways.
by amadeuspagel on 10/25/24, 8:21 PM
Fascinating stuff.
I went down a rabbit hole with this particlar ad: https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR132650406472...
It links to a website called fultongrandjury.com, which I at first thought would be an official government website, and what initially made me curious was the idea of spending money to advertise a government website, getting this additional credibility. Like, if the facts are so strongly on your side that you merely need to spend ad money to point people to official sources, that's a strong signal.
> Fulton County Jury is a project of Our Community Media, Small Town American Media, and Small Town Truth.
None of these are linked, but they can be found with Google. Our Community Media appears to be a website with stories scraped from Google News, one even has the Google News default image. Small Town America Media claims to support Small Businesses, Telehealth in Rural America and Digital Literacy. Their latest news: Anti-Critical Race Theory Laws Are Political Theater by State Politicians.
Small Town Truth is probably the most inspiring:
> For over 200 Years
> American has fought for truth
> Now....
> We need you to help
They have page dedicated to "discovering truth", telling it apart from "russian fake news"[1] which is copied from and links to a medium post.
None of these websites have information about who's behind them. No person. No address. They have contact pages, but these are just forms, probably to add you to some spam mailing list.
[1]: https://www.smalltowntruth.org/discover-truth
by mef on 10/26/24, 2:31 PM
interesting that the company that has the most viewed ads for 2024[1] ("FORCE VECTOR COMMUNICATIONS") has a total of 3 matches when you search for them[2]
[1] https://adstransparency.google.com/political?region=US&topic...
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22force+vector+communicatio...
by Ninjinka on 10/25/24, 8:20 PM
Why can't they show the ads that violated policy on the ads transparency page? Seems like part of the transparency would be seeing what they removed.
by neilv on 10/25/24, 7:16 PM
Kudos to Google. We also need this for all the non-Google outlets.
by morpheuskafka on 10/26/24, 1:42 PM
According to the site, ad targeting is allowed based on gender and age, but not race or religion, for example. All four of those categories were previously used to restrict voting and are now legally protected from voting discrimination.
Why allow targeting some of them but not all? Either all should be disallowed (for the same reason that race, religion, etc are), or all should be allowed (on the reasoning that this is about choosing who to promote your message to, not in any way affecting who can vote or independently search about election issues--which is presumably why age and gender are allowed).
by teach on 10/25/24, 7:25 PM
It's fascinating. I'm at home and my pi-hole ad-blocking rules apparently trigger for that page, so although I can see the titles, all the images just fail to load.
by arnaudsm on 10/26/24, 6:24 PM
In France we limit campaign budgets to 50M$ (population adjusted) and the state fully reimburses it. US presidential campaigns are 60x more expensive per capita!
Have people in the US proposed such a cap to prevent corporations from buying elections, or is that too foreign of a concept ?
by pembrook on 10/25/24, 7:34 PM
Democrat, Republican, or Independent, Google gets rich either way. You can clearly see price per view has gone up dramatically from the historical comparison. $2B in Google ad spend so far this cycle.
Also interesting, the New York Times is the most viewed ad of this election season, having been seen 10M+ times.
It appears the only true winners of US presidential election mania are Google and the Media.
by tgma on 10/26/24, 6:07 PM
Weird that some ads are hidden on that page indicating "policy violations." You'd think in the ads transparency section they would be particularly interested in such ads or at least the reason for their violation for investigative purposes. That seems like a good way to slip controversial things under the rug.
by lysace on 10/25/24, 7:26 PM
From the insights tab, with a date range of the past year, the state where the second most ad money was spent was California (after Pennsylvania).
California is not even close to being a swing state, afaik?
by Dig1t on 10/25/24, 7:15 PM
Am I reading this wrong or does it seem like the majority of these are for Harris/Democrats?
by technotarek on 10/25/24, 8:46 PM
If anyone is interested in connecting with someone working in this space, please hit me up. We’ve been building tools for political media buyers for the last several years. We draw data from the Google Transparency DB, Meta’s equivalent and other disparate sources to allow campaigns to analyze the spending in greater detail. It has been really interesting from an engineering perspective, but also just to learn more about how this industry operates.
by mwest217 on 10/25/24, 7:40 PM
Why in the world is a generic NY Times ad categorized as a political ad?
by kristopolous on 10/26/24, 5:54 PM
I'm still amazed these stock images with highlighted text don't send off immediate red flags in everyone's mind that they're being tricked.
Especially ones that have children, veterans, or old people, usually with big frowns or drooping flags. "Don't disappoint this stock image! Vote no on prop blah-blah"
It works. This strategy actually works
by NotBoolean on 10/25/24, 10:26 PM
If the spend figure is right the difference between the money spent in the USA and UK is larger than I expected.
Highest weekly spend in the UK is just under £1M (Dec 2019) while in the US it’s £50M (Oct 2024). That’s 10 times more spending with only 5 times the population.
by idatum on 10/26/24, 7:28 PM
Early voting has advantages, one being that once I drop my ballot in the local ballot collection box, I can more easily ignore political ads. It's liberating.
by mettamage on 10/25/24, 7:45 PM
Seems like a general handy site in general as a sort of Google Trends alternative. I know it's not an actual alternative but to pick up on certain trends from advertizers.
by hammock on 10/25/24, 7:43 PM
The top-spent ad in the last 7 days included no targeting other than "nationwide, 18+." That seems folly, doesn't it? Huge waste?
by AndrewKemendo on 10/25/24, 8:44 PM
This is the data Googles (and others’) models are trained on
Extreme biases in data mean extreme biases in inference
by swayvil on 10/25/24, 7:44 PM
Talk about normalized bad behavior.
by progrus on 10/26/24, 3:31 PM
Ok, now let’s see the breakdown of winred/ActBlue email getting through spam filtering. IOS only capitalizes one of those, so there’s a clue
by Aeolun on 10/26/24, 5:44 PM
Title: Please vote!
Views: 8-9k
Total spent: $14-15k
This country is doomed.
by googlehater on 10/28/24, 6:38 AM
i kneel
by cedws on 10/25/24, 7:58 PM
Political advertising just makes democracy look like a total joke. If you can buy votes by shoving ads in peoples’ faces that’s not a democracy, that’s an oligarchy.