I cannot wrap my head around the economics of the ad industry. They work to make your life worse in the most obnoxious and disgusting ways possible, and they - and any brand that works with then by association - are hated and reviled by that. Yet, it makes BILLIONS and companies spend billions on it, even if you seriously piss off your potential clients doing that (BMW’s Spiderman ads, for example).

I don’t get it.

EDIT: just to clarify, I don’t think I’m a special snowflake immune to ads ffs. I’m talking about the ads in the enshittification spectrum, like the ones that blare inside the media center of your brand new car, the ones that makes sites unreadable, the ones shoved every minute in your 10 minute videos, things like that. But I understand that I may be inside my own ad hate bubble, I really dislike ads in general and I try to avoid them them best I can.

  • scarabic@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    7 hours ago

    I think what you’re missing is the picture of a business that is doing pretty well and has extra cash but needs to grow even if it means losing some cash.

    In the old world of brand advertising, the idea was to plant an image in people’s minds that would last a long time, earning back the price of the ads by raising customer awareness and loyalty.

    In the new world of online ads, it’s more transactional. I can only sell t-shirts on my t-shirt site if I get visitors to it. How do I do that? Oh I can buy ads. And the ad network can target people interested in t-shirts. How does it know they’re interested? They clicked on other t-shirt ads. I spend $5.50 on hundreds of ads just to get one person to the site who buys. But I make $9 profit on each shirt.

    If you had a machine that could pump out $9 every time you put $5.50 in, your only question would be how many times you can turn that crank per hour. That’s where all the ads come from. And did you notice the ad company gets $5.50 while the t-shirt maker who actually makes and sells the product only gets $4.50? It’s still a profitable deal for them. But the ad companies make bank.

    All of this is going on all the time. Your post seems to be saying “but I hate ads.” I can’t disagree with you there. But unfortunately they actually work as long as you have some profit margin to spare on them.