SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube

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

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.

This is the same myths that everyone in advertising propagates.

Such a belief purports that the effect of all advertising is measurable. It clearly is not. For example, someone sees your ad and decides your company is reprehensible. They were not a customer and they decide to never interact with your company. It's not possible to measure this. Anyone claiming it is holds what amounts to a religious belief.

The "generates negative returns" is the next myth in this. Whether or not advertising generates positive returns is not relevant. You can't measure the return of advertising in the first place. Even if you could measure it, you should be comparing it to the opportunity cost of not doing something more productive with that money. Which you also can't measure. No one rationally proposes that someone spends a hundred dollars on advertising to generate $100.10 in revenue is somehow a good use of money.

> Such a belief purports that the effect of all advertising is measurable. It clearly is not. For example, someone sees your ad and decides your company is reprehensible. They were not a customer and they decide to never interact with your company. It's not possible to measure this. Anyone claiming it is holds what amounts to a religious belief.

What on earth? You obviously haven't worked on anything related to sales. It's clearly measurable: An advertisement is shown one day on TV, for example, the sales the next day are higher. That's the case 99% of the time. You can say it's not, and you can call that "religious belief", if you want to.

Companies use ads because they work, obviously. Everybody thinks they are somehow "immune" to advertisements because they are "smarter than the rest", but the sale statistics are plain and simple.

It's as simple as "if ads didn't work, YouTube, Facebook, Google, et al wouldn't exist"

If ads would have actually worked as preached by the industry, ad blockers wouldn't exist. ;)

But it's Google's and Facebook's best interest to make people believe that they do, no matter the reality.

What they actually do is increase sales by some measurable margin (not always great, but not zero either), while causing all sorts of negative effects (spam, scam, misinformation, all those "influencers" and "engagement" farming causing mental fatigue) that are just waived away and/or swiped under the rug of ignorance by the industry adepts.

Scroll back ten years - even back then Google and Facebook made people believe in a literal myth that they're so Big Data they know people better than they do themselves (I kid you not, I heard this cliche way too many times), when in fact their best systems had extremely limited knowledge of both the audience (like very basic demographics that are not even always accurate) and advertised products (a few pieces of metadata at best). Heck, even modern LLMs have limited awareness so they struggle to make sensible recommendations a lot of time (and are extremely expensive for use in advertising at scale) and I'm talking about orders of magnitude simpler "targeting" systems back then.

Advertisement industry literally preaches advertisement, because their very well-being (aka market valuation) depends on it. I'm (a nobody internet weirdo) hold an opinion that it harms society more than it does it good by boosting the economy.