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.
Ad companies often mark their own homework. Sales directors are more often gobshites than scientists. Competition doesn’t really drive out inefficiency very well, or very quickly.
A few things to consider in the world of marketing and advertising…
When reviewing the number of views that an ad gets, there’s no simple way to separate bot traffic from genuine impressions. This is due to privacy restrictions.
Generally, the marketing team will post an ad… A few weeks go by and they report the number of impressions (views) the ad got to upper management… upper management is impressed and continues to approve budgets to make more ads.
Sometimes ads are about driving awareness and not necessarily making sales. If you’re familiar with the new soda in the convenience store you’re more likely to buy it because of the ad you saw about it last week.
A good (even great) return on investment in sales is between 2-3%, meaning if you show your ad to 100 people and get two clicks on it, those are considered good statistics to continue to market your product.
Sauce: 13 years in marketing for both small and large companies
You guys have ads on internet ?
Never seen one in 13 years .
I think what’s happening is that each individual company has a positive ROI on ads in the sense that they would lose more than a dollar in sales if they spent a dollar less on ads, but collectively the ROI is probably smaller than one: if all companies would cut their advertising budgets in half they would all be better off, as they would keep their sales roughly the same.
So adverting is less about sales volume (people don’t necessarily buy more things when they see more ads) but about market share (you get a bigger piece of the cake). Classic prisoner’s dilemma.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
Read again.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, it’s untenable. It’s a bubble
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.
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.
AFAIK Google owns the vast majority of advertising online and is the one making all the money.
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.
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