All political ads running on Google in the US
123 comments
·October 24, 2024amadeuspagel
jodacola
Small Town Truth says it's a registered 501(c)(3). I just found it by searching here: https://apps.irs.gov/app/eos/
It leads to further rabbit holes I don't have the time to dig into now, but I might later, because now I'm very curious where it leads.
vharuck
That sounds like a Russian misinformation webs-
>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.
Okay, so maybe not. Or maybe it is, and they expected people to be suspicious, so they're the wolf in sheep's clothing warning the other sheep about the wolf to gain trust. It's all too much.
fakedang
Vote Trump or vote Harris, at the end of the day, the American population is irrevocably split, serving Russian interests.
cedws
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.
primitivesuave
Political advertising emerged within a decade of the birth of the republic. Abraham Lincoln famously had his face plastered everywhere, and his campaign monikers like "Honest Abe" are still in use today.
The real push toward oligarchy, in my opinion, is the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United vs FEC. The only available remedy at this point is for the American electorate to stop relying on political ads and make a decision on policy alignment alone (like the Founding Fathers did) - this is a totally unrealistic goal in today's polarized environment.
outside1234
This. Something like 5 people are almost entirely funding Trump's slump (hard to call this mess a campaign) towards the White House and for sure they are going to want pay back. This is what oligarchy looks like.
pawelmurias
The alternative to buying ads is buying newspapers and other media outlets.
tgv
Bezos simply told one of the leading newspapers what to do. Musk buys votes. Oligarchy is about to become reality, and it's powered by useful idiots.
evantbyrne
Well there is no way to ban political messaging in-practice, so we have to regulate it. Also, imo, making education accessible to the masses is important for combating the effectiveness of straight-up misinformation. Right now a good chunk of the population doesn't even seem to understand why they believe things generally, so there's plenty room to improve.
unclad5968
Well anyone can buy ads so it's not really an oligarchy.
What alternative would you propose for candidates to get they're name out?
Biganon
Equal time on national television, by law. Like they do in France for example.
addaon
So replace oligopoly with gerontocracy? Who consumes national television?
thrance
Honestly it doesn't work that well. Far-rights channels will push left-wing candidates to graveyard slots, or put them against 3 trained "interviewers", etc.
Maybe it's still better than in the US? It's far from perfect.
digdugdirk
Ah yes, I'm extremely glad that both myself and Charles Koch have the equal right to buy ads. I see no problems that could ever occur because we're equally legally allowed to spend unlimited money on political advertising.
Now... How many ads will 5 bucks buy? I'm pretty deeply in debt, but I could probably skip a meal in order to fully exercise my political freedom.
gosub100
Yet when another country does it? "You're meddling in the election!".
Mhmm, okay.
hfdgvvff
Yeah, freedom of speech is a joke.
readyplayernull
Circenses et panem
Loughla
I'm confused how that applies to political ads.
Dilettante_
There is a perspective from which all politics is just entertainment with audience participation, while The Powers That Be control the things that actually matter.
(I'm not saying I endorse this view, I'm just trying to explain)
t. Kooky conspiracy theory collector
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF
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.
jsheard
The politicians are having to bid against Temu this year and by god do they spend a lot on ads.
Semaphor
It's kinda crazy. We are in Germany, so no US ads. But even 8€ eCPM floor still makes temu show up.
CSMastermind
The only Temu ad I've ever seen was during the Super Bowl. I'm guessing I'm in the wrong demographic?
alwa
Competition might be part of that too: more money chasing the same number of eyeballs as the election season ramped up (for that matter, probably chasing a smaller number of eyeballs, as critical segments of swing voters became more clear)
rsynnott
More targeted, perhaps. “Meh, whoever” has always been cheaper per view than targeted.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF
I think you're right. I've been comparing these two directly:
2020: https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR123656109299...
2024: https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR104621681140...
Looks like it's primarily the "location" demographic that is actually different. Neither ad excludes any demographics for Age or Gender but the 2024 includes specific locations for advertisements. So maybe fewer people in Europe and elsewhere seeing American political ads, which I'd assume is preferred by the advertisers. I can see how that would compound to this effect; fewer valuable targets and more value per target.
(Another thing I notice is the ad run length. The 2020 ads ran for a single day (with over 10M views!) and the 2024 ads have been running for weeks or months. Not sure if that's relevant to the expenditure but it's interesting to note.)
xnx
Inflation is part of that.
candiddevmike
Nah, I think this one is just greed.
jpadkins
what caused this sudden change in greed? Were these actors not greedy before 2019?
Ninjinka
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.
neilv
Kudos to Google. We also need this for all the non-Google outlets.
mkmk
Here's the equivalent from Meta: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=active&a...
throwaway29812
Here's one from X via CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/04/politics/doj-alleges-russia-f...
lysace
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?
swatcoder
California is strongly "blue" on the national issues these days, but that doesn't mean that there aren't hotly contested elections and ballot measures at issue within the state.
Seperately, it brings potential as a source of funding to spend elsewhere specifically because some of the national questions aren't really open. If you are confident in the ROI, you can run ads there to drive fundraising -- especially early on -- and then spend those raised funds in contested elections elsewhere.
The same dynamic happens in soundly "red" markets, although that may not be apparent in this dataset because of the specific demographics of Google advertising.
tivert
> Seperately, it brings potential as a source of funding to spend elsewhere specifically because some of the national questions aren't really open. If you are confident in the ROI, you can run ads there to drive fundraising -- especially early on -- and then spend those raised funds in contested elections elsewhere.
Exactly. A lot of the ads are fundraising ads, like this one: https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR059412260615...
johnnyanmac
I'm probably going to mail my ballot on Monday. Are there any particular hot button issues in California to look out for?
Rebelgecko
IMO this year the ballot props are much more meaningful to the average person than usual. The perennial niche prosp about kidney dialysis aren't making a showing for what feels like the first time in a decade.
There are some big proposed changes to how local bond measures work, rent control, and the criminal justice system, IMO those are the ones spending the most time researching and considering the consequences.
As far as the more niche ones this time around, there's the same-sex marriage prop (which I believe is purely symbolic and doesn't have an actual impact on same sex marriage in California) and the prop designed to force the AIDs Healthcare Foundation to spend more money on AIDS healthcare (IIUC currently they spend most of their money on political causes like lobbying against rezoning that would allow denser housing)
null
sangnoir
> California is not even close to being a swing state, afaik?
California has a lot of political donors - likely the most registered voters for both major parties since 1 in 12 Americans are in California. Those many small-value & high-roller donors help finance the swing state operations, but need to be activated. Donors are why both Republican and Democratic party candidates held events in California, when it's not in play.
candiddevmike
California has an enormous economy and holding office at any level of government there opens a lot of "doors".
entropicdrifter
There are a ton of smaller races in California that end up hotly contested. The state has big money on both sides of those smaller races.
pchristensen
California has over 10 million people more than Texas. It’s huge, so absolute number comparisons are often confusing.
As usual, XKCD (can’t find the comic) - https://x.com/xkcd/status/1339348000750104576?lang=en
lysace
Sure, but it's a winner-takes-all situation.
(That tweet is excellent.)
mananaysiempre
> can’t find the comic
The tweet quotes the alt-text of https://xkcd.com/2399/ “2020 Election Map”:
> There are more Trump voters in California than Texas, more Biden voters in Texas than New York, more Trump voters in New York than Ohio, more Biden voters in Ohio than Massachusetts, more Trump voters in Massachusetts than Mississippi, and more Biden voters in Mississippi than Vermont.
fallingknife
There are lots of people on the ballot besides Harris and Trump.
technotarek
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.
teach
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.
mwest217
Why in the world is a generic NY Times ad categorized as a political ad?
mettamage
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.
hammock
The top-spent ad in the last 7 days included no targeting other than "nationwide, 18+." That seems folly, doesn't it? Huge waste?
silverquiet
Wouldn't an essentially untargeted ad be the most expensive to run? Meaning that something like that will always be the top-spent?
mh-
Not necessarily. If you bid low, you're effectively picking up "remnant" inventory that no one else was willing to pay to target.
hammock
How “expensive” (in the sense of total spend) an ad is is entirely driven by what budget you allow for the order.
But without targeting constraints you will get essentially remnants and are unlikely to reach any of your actual target, e.g. undecided likely voters in swing states
nradov
A lot of nationwide ads aren't intended to directly influence voting. Rather they are campaign donation solicitations to get more money to run future ads targeted to undecided voters in swing states. Just about everyone 18+ nationwide could afford to make a small campaign contribution if they care about the outcome.
matsemann
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.
acomjean
Kind of new in the US, you can't stop people in the US from spending money on ads that amplify there speech. [1]
Political spending is regulated, but we now have "political action committees" that can support candidates but can't coordinate with them. They can accept money from anyone in any amounts. Its brought tons of money from wealthy doners into polics in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
Comedey Centrals Colbert Report (Colbert playing a Conservative pundit) once set one a PAC with a political lawyer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colbert_Super_PAC
I'm not a lawyer..
As someone who is "swing state adjacent", and avoiding them mostly this year, I feel for those under the crush of political ads.
kldx
How are TV ads any different from MDG posters or the AP ads at bus stops? We allow the latter in Norway and they're not that much cheaper than TV ads.
matsemann
They're different as in a video can influence you much stronger than a poster. But maybe you misunderstood me, my point was that the way we have it today isn't necessarily good either. Just curious about how one can give people good information, without it being too inflammatory, and without making an election a race about who has the most money.
kldx
No, I agree with your remark completely but I'm still ambivalent about the tradeoff.
We agree there should at least be one medium of advertising for political parties. But where do we draw the line?
For instance, I would be happy with making all ads plain text, standard font and size so that the ads won't abuse human attention by showing bright colors, happy images etc.
fallingknife
Also media outlets are free to propagandize all day. You can't restrict that because we don't want to restrict freedom of the press. But then that begs the question, don't all companies and individuals have the same freedom of the press that media companies do?
ggregoire
This is the most shocking part from an outsider POV. In Europe* mainstream media must obviously be neutral about each candidate but also give the same amount of airing time to each candidate. So like if candidate 1 is invited for a 10 min interview, candidate 2 must be invited too and offered the same airing time. Meanwhile here Fox can just call Harris "stupid" (and CNN reciprocally call Trump whatever they want), lie to make them look good/bad and support their candidate all day long while spitting on the other one, and it's fine.
Edit: my bad for generalizing all countries of Europe
pawelmurias
Not in Poland. Before the last election we had 100% partisan media with the public media campaigning for the ruling party and the opposition controling the private media. Both had the Fox News/CNN/Pravda levels of objectivity showing a strange propaganda version of reality.
ztetranz
How much do they have to be "neutral" when there are multiple candidates with significantly different popularity?
If there are three candidates polling about equal then okay, it's easy to be neutral. But what if they're |40, 35, 25| or |60, 20, 20| or |55, 40, 5|?
When does a minor candidate drop out of their neutrality? I'm not saying the general idea is bad but just pointing out that neutrality is kind of a vague concept. It's a bit like giving climate change deniers equal airtime with serious scientists.
amadeuspagel
This is certainly not true for the mainstream media in all of europe. It might be true for public television stations in some countries.
pessimizer
> But main reason mainly is that it would give those with enough money to afford these "expensive tv ads" a leg up.
I think the main reason for rules like this is because it's literally politicians and political parties shoveling huge amounts of cash to the media, and 1) one of the purposes of the media is to inform people about politicians and politics, and 2) the politicians who are elected will oversee the media and their mergers. An intimate relationship is created where democracy demands an adversarial one.
It's rotten. It's the same reason no media can criticize any drug in the US, since they were allowed to advertise to the public. I'm sure there's some value in having people ask for specific drugs from their doctors, but that's minimal; the main value is being immune to any criticism unless an e.g. television station wants to lose 20% of their income.
sneak
The population of all of Norway is substantially less than that of the New York, LA, Chicago, or Houston metro areas.
The scale of these markets or the spending related thereto is not comparable at all.
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