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.
Oh no, that was an extreme example and it would be impractical to always have that granular level. For other, more mass ads, consider say, the water bottle trend or almost any other tik tok food fad. Maybe it started organically, maybe not, but advertisers absolutely jumped into those, connected with “influencers” to make sure their brands were represented. And for those campaigns, age and location or general demographic of each influencer’s audience would be more than sufficient (and still fairly microtargeted, they’re hitting folks with under 100k subscribers! Almost no other traditional media campaign can slice so finely.)
Influencer sponsorships are still not the same thing as random online ads, though. I totally get how sponsorships work, what I have trouble believing is that showing random ads before YouTube videos or in the middle of some news article works.
I mean, showing random ads before or during things is pretty much what sustained most television and radio for a number of decades.
And now they aren’t random.
Edit: Consider the influencer sponsorships. An ad campaign might be as simple as reminding folks who watched that sponsorship about that product. If we agree that sponsorships can work, reminding someone about that product seems a very simple, easy to target kind of campaign!
Okay, non edit og stuff:
If you’ve been watching influencers on youtube or tiktok, they know a lot more about what to show you. And whatever they’ve been talking about, they can shoehorn an appropriate ad in.
Then you consider the cost which is a fraction of a penny per eyeball, so even nudging only one in 20,000 targeted views, of an audience who are interested in your type of product is probably going to be profitable.
Think of email phishing scams. It seems insane that anyone has ever fallen for thr Nigerian prince thing but all they need is one success every so often and it’s profitable.