At first internet advertising was a no-brainer. Agree to host ads, get revenue to keep your site afloat, make a profit, expand. Fine. But now we’re inundated with ads to the point people are turning off. Hell, there are ads I’d be happy to see, but I never will because I’ve blocked them with a Pihole and Ublock. The vast majority of people aren’t doing that, but are they actually buying the advertised products and services?
Guess I can’t get my head around the logistics. Seems like all the money in the world is available for advertising, but are these companies actually seeing a return on that investment? Reddit’s basically bots advertising to bots, and the stock market rewards them handsomely. Nobody involved is stupid, they know this is happening, yet companies are still throwing money around. (Someone will relate this to the AI bubble, but it’s not really the same thing.)
There was a great article posted here about how 40% (?) of ad views are bots. (If someone can find it, that would be great!) The issue came up to the author because he was tasked with finding out why the advertising spend wasn’t getting expected sales. The number of clicks didn’t jive with sales results. The advertiser was seeing some ludicrous clicks vs. sales that was 1/10th of what it should be.
And companies are paying for these dismal results?! Think of a time where you were responsible for results at a company. If your spent $X on a thing, and didn’t get at least $X dollars back, you would back off that spend or your boss would pull the plug. (Sure, marketing often takes time to get a foothold, I get that.) That’s how capitalism fucking works. And for all the bitching about capitalism, the players don’t seem to be doing that thing. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
Is internet advertising a sort of bubble? Doesn’t seem to be as it just keeps going.
Advertising creates a presence. They don’t think any one ad is going to convince you to buy it, and they know that after watching the ad enough times, it’s not going to get any more convincing, but when you are in need of their services, you’ll be looking at their brand and a competitor, and odds are, if price and everything else are the same, you’ll buy the brand you recognize.
And a new ad for the thing you’ve already bought can reassure you that you’ve made the right choice. Going forward, you’re more likely to stick to that brand and for adjacent products.
IIRC that’s the whole point of luxury car commercials during half-time breaks. 99% of watchers can’t afford one, but the ad is there to remind the owners of that very fact.
Psychological safety in play ^^ humans are animals, we trust what we know, fear what we don’t. All of marketing is geared to that simple fact
Well, there’s reasonable animal fear in terms of dangers and potential dangers, but when you’re talking about products? I’d think that curiosity is more common in such scenarios. Then again, maybe I’m once again overestimating sapiens.
Fear may be better said as “the unfamiliar”, but unfortunately I’m confident in this point haha. Did a psych degree, and basically our reptilian brain (fight/flight/flee centre) makes those snap decisions based on previous experience (familiar: friend or unfamiliar: foe/unknown). We can relatively easily override it (e.g. curiosity about the newest swiffer), but if we don’t know to do that, our brains default to “oh I’ve heard of that one before, is friend”
Well, I don’t know what you’re doing with that spinach over there, but yeah, makes sense to me. We have a natural bias towards the familiar & repulsion towards the unfamiliar, even in trivially-important matters, no doubt much like other advanced life on the planet. #2 on Maslow’s Hierarchy, I guess.
Spinach needs love too! 🤔 Absolutely. It’s shocking how much clarity you get on human behaviour when you assume much of it is based on unconscious/animalistic tendencies haha. And yes, #2 is a good shorthand for this - I take a lot of heart from knowing we’re like other advanced life, makes complex existence a little less… existentially isolating, I think?
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AFAIK Google owns the vast majority of advertising online and is the one making all the money.
I generally post variations on this when similar questions come up:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=2025+marketing+technology+landscape&iar=images
The companies on the edges are all about marketing adtech firms to companies with money to convince them to spend it on digital marketing.
You guys have ads on internet ?
Never seen one in 13 years .
Google cooks the books on ad sales and after being found out it makes a lot more sense on the actions they are doing now with their other products that ads we’re propping up.
Ads are actually pretty incredible. If no one knows your brand, all it takes is money to tell em. It’s like a short cut compared to having a good product and word of mouth.
Its essentially like a cold call, but you know the audience is at least generally interested in your topic because of targeting. All that data that is being taken and sold from you, is being sold to avertizers.
Pay Google for getting on search on Google and youtube.
Pay meta to get ads on Insta and Facebook.
If you spend $500 to sell a $3000 product, it’s a no brainer. Ita basically printing money when it works. So yeah, companies are paying when the results match. But also when they are testing the waters to see if its worth it to them.
If you think the number of people that use ad blockers is not a fraction of a percent of internet users, you’re in a bubble.
Go outside, talk to people, friends, family, especially of different generations. Even people I know that I consider much more “tech savvy” than average have no clue about ad blockers or how to begin using them.
If you think the number of people that use ad blockers is not a fraction of a percent of internet users, you’re in a bubble.
Nowhere near the majority, but also not a “fraction of a percent.”
I was about to say, even without actual data to back it up, big companies are going out of their way to try and evade and block ad-blockers, and that costs man-hours to design, so obviously it’s not a negligible number if they have decided its worth trying to pursue.
It is a fraction of a percent. ⁶⁰/₂ is a fraction.
I’m pretty sure they meant it as a colloquial, not a strict mathematical expression.
My friend’s partner works in online advertising from matching, ugh, “influencers” to brands to more “traditional” targeted online advertising.
I asked her something along these lines and she told me about a campaign she’d just worked on which dropped my jaw and changed my perspective.
Essentially, she was working with some product being sold with or inside some luxury brand of cars. Her firm was able to target people who seemed to work in dealerships for that brand in Canada. The product being expensive as hell meant that even a handful of sales would justify the campaign.
The campaign cost her firm almost no time, the data were available fairly easily and once established could essentially be run automatically.
Hers is an extreme example but combine relatively low costs with unnervingly accurate micro targetting like that… It’s a stupidly efficient means of communicating to prospective clients compared to every other type of advertising.
Reddit is an interesting example. They’re milking the advertising for all they can but I’d be surprised if the bulk of their revenue/stock valuation was from ads versus holding all sorts of AI trainable data.
There was a great article posted here about how 40% (?) of ad views are bots.
Could it be this one: https://joindatacops.com/resources/how-73-of-your-e-commerce-visitors-could-be-fake ?
Both your question and the answers are a sign of a healthy (oblivious) detachment from advertised society, IMO. Advertising works. Not to you, because you have the mental infrastructure to not want it to work. The right kind of advertising would work on you too, it’s probably just not profitable.
This. It’s amazing to watch normal people operate. It’s like they think the universe must be showing them the ads for some profound reason
Oh people know they’re being sold and watched, it is just that many can’t resist in a very literal sense, because they have stressors that outweigh lost (seemingly theoretical) freedom by manyfold.
Also stressed ppl are better consumers. Less critical thought, more impulsive behaviour to alleviate anxiety
Advertising works. Not to you,
everyone thinks they are unique. but advertising really works on anyone. it is not like you are seeing an ad for nike and you are just “oh my god, i just realized i need some nike shoes RIGHT now”. but when you are in need for shoes in some future and you have to choose between nike and unknown_brand_27, it is more likely you will choose nike.
Assuming price is the same, would you pick a brand known for using child labor, or a company you know nothing about? I’d avoid the Nikes unless they’re the cheapest option.
brand known for using child labor (…) I’d avoid the Nikes unless they’re the cheapest option.
so, you are okey with child labor as long as it produces cheapest option? man of a principle, i see 😂
it is a complex topic, but the fact is, that most people will choose the brand they know (meaning it was advertised to them long enough) over the other one, which is why advertising works and why companies dump money into it.
Read again.
To answer your second question. Companies are expected to spend $1 trillion on advertising in 2025.
For the first question, it is pretty complex. You can break it down into some topics though and it is more manageable.
Types
Ecosystem
SEO
Criticism (good stuff starts at 10:00)
I just saw something about this the other day. Internet advertising has apparently begun the process of swallowing its own tail. Cory Doctorow was talking to someone about it. I can’t remember who it was though.
Yeah, it’s untenable. It’s a bubble
It doesn’t matter because they don’t work on me since I can’t see them anymore.
There are uhhh, many people who are not you.
If you didn’t set up ad blockers that’s your own fault.
Okay?
The question was “why does internet advertising work”, how does what does what you’re saying have anything to do with that?
