The 2025 US GDP was $30 trillion. The US economy is 70% consumer driven. Advertising allows organizations to shave a miniscule slice of that off for themselves, which is still a sizable amount of money.

I think people have lost the disconnect.

Yet, it makes BILLIONS and companies spend billions on it,

The question is where does THAT money come from? And then ask yourself why everything is so expensive… because ad money isn’t plucked out of thin air. It’s added to pretty much EVERY product you buy.

So until people boycott ad products more than buying then nothing will change and everything will just keep getting more expensive as they all outbid each other for ad space because they don’t care how much it costs them because it’ll always get taken out of your wallet!

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.

I started my own bussiness 3 years ago and 99% of my customers discovered me via an ad. Clearly not all people hate all ads. I don’t know how you imagine anyone to find out about a new product or service otherwise.

it succeseful because people will buy thier products, thats why the military aslo pushes out propaganda ads now and then on places like “business insider” so people would join, fund defense contractors and universities.

You run a Webshop without ads. You make 10 sales per day from organic traffic. That’s $100 profit for you.

You pay $100 to an influencer to tell his followers about your shop. You get 500 sales and make $5000 profit.

Same with Google ads, it multiplies your sales and shows your products to new customers.

Despite the hatred, advertising works most of the time.

If nobody knows about your product or service, you can’t make any money. Word of mouth doesn’t cut it beyond a local store.

because people are morons and ads work.

You can take a small box of cat shit and in the right ad campaign, people will buy it. Catshit has electrolytes.

any brand that works with them by extension is hated and reviled by that.

That just isn’t true.

The advertising industry makes billions because ads make companies trillions. The advertising industry elects politicians and shapes public narratives and also rehabilitates public images.

I know this may shock you but people love ads. The Superbowl ads are almost as popular as the game. Some of the most successful comics troops working today are the troops that do insurance ads.

Hell there are company spokesmen who are international celebrities, The Most Interesting Man in the world, Lilly from AT&T.

Your view of people’s feelings towards advertising is skewed. Likely by being around people who have the same feelings.

Most people don’t hate companies because they advertise.

Ads work. People browse or walk by something, there’s a logo, video, or picture or some company or a product, it stays in their head, and they just keep buying shit they don’t need. That’s why. So the more people browse or happen upon ads, the more they sell (sometimes).

I don’t get it.

EDIT:

YOU can evade them, but most people can’t.

It’s some weird % math. Sending BS spam, like the good old nigerian prince, costs nearly nothing, but it only needs to work in like 1 in 10 million cases for it to be profitable. Returns on random spam advertisement is abysmal, and google gets like 10-100x that because it’s more targeted. That is why people use google ads. But also not because they’re good. They’re just less useless, while still having a very very minimal effect.

The rest is scale.

If ads were truly that reviled, adblockers would be more popular. Most people either don’t care at all, or don’t care enough to change anything about how they use media. You can literally set up a way to consume their media without ads for them and most people will refuse to use it over the slightest inconvenience, such as “I don’t like Firefox”.

I feel like im a special snowflake virtually immune to ads. The large part of it is im just unwilling to pay for anything that is unnecessary now. Mostly out of necessity but the longer I have to be like this the more all of it seems silly and I feel that even if I had discretionary income I don’t see wanting to use it. Still would like to renovate where I live but that is mostly around disability and reducing energy use. eating out nope. movies nope. any other paid entertainment nope. internet and computer yep. smartphone nope. linux yep. windows nope. mac nope.