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661 points anotherhue | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.236s | source
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voidUpdate ◴[] No.41243350[source]
I still don't understand a lot of youtube advertising. Like for me, if I'm being advertised something, I instinctively don't trust it, because they're having to pay people to say good things about it rather than people who have used it telling me it's a good thing. And there are still so many sponsorships from places like BetterHelp, which has been known to be a scam for a while now, and Raid Shadow Legends, which is just a crappy mobile game that is about as "mobile game" as you can get. The only reason I use onshape is because a friend recommended it to me, and I was very skeptical about it initially
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dkarras ◴[] No.41243454[source]
you're not the target. advertisements work. the people managing ads are very meticulous about their spend vs. return. if you are seeing an ad of something for any noticeable duration of time, that means it works. by that I mean they get positive return from showing the world their ad. if it generates negative returns, it will be pulled pretty quickly. they are humans just like you and me, we don't like losing money.

also one should always be skeptical about the extent they believe they are not influenced by ads. that runs pretty deep. you say you instinctively don't trust it. but when the time comes to buy something, you won't automatically steer yourself towards a product that you have never heard before just because you have not seen an ad for it. having some names in your mind, even them showing up when you do research creates influence.

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lupusreal ◴[] No.41244099[source]
I only worked in ad tech briefly and many years ago, but what I saw there was a game being played between the people who make/distribute ads and the companies that buy them. The game is to convince the people buying ads that ads have value, even when they don't.
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1. dragonsky ◴[] No.41252019[source]
I suppose raises the question, is the spending of mega bucks on advertising (regardless of effectiveness) a net benefit for society?

As commenters have already raised, we'd have no Google, Facebook, Twitter (sorry 'X') or many other entities and the products they create without the money spent on advertising. Is this all just happening because people are too scared to look under the curtain and find that it's all just a sham?

We had advertising long before the internet came along, and from my personal memory most of the most aggressive advertising was for things that were either useless (magic snake oil remedies) or actually dangerous (tobacco products), not to mention all the "as seen on TV" junk that was "promoted" on morning television.

Is what we have now is more intrusive? It used to be that you could duck to the toilet during the adds on TV or flip the page in the newspaper or magazine, but now they are taking our cpu cycles, making web pages unreadable and that is not to mention the more intrusive ways of really getting in our heads.

I'd argue that we've always had (even if just the shop keeper recommending a product) and always will have advertising. There have always been products that are not needed or wanted by the majority, and advertising is the way that the producer of that product gets their product sold. I would be nice if there were not so much dodgy practice involved.