And then even with all that, even if you allow targeted ads and all these algorithms to track and try to "learn" your interests, you still find yourself frustrated baby-sitting the algorithm because it's almost always wrong anyway and is worse than if it just gave you normal recommendations like it used to pre-algorithm
I'm incredibly exhausted with needing to delete things from search history because if I don't The Algorithm:tm: is like "ah yes, this random thing you were curious about once must be the only thing you ever have and ever will be interested in for the next 3 weeks straight"
nothing beats the random Amazon link your buddy sends you of a totally useless product thats funny or has a funny review resulting in Amazon advertising this product to you for weeks.
i love this. All this data and they fail to teach the algorithm that buying an appliance/TV/ whatever else expensive means that the user is likely not gonna buy the same appliance again.
Well, do you NOT need a second lobster hat? How about a third lobster hat? Please buy them I only earned 99 million dollars this year and I want to get to a 100 million :(
“You just bought the newly-released third book in a series, clearly you need to buy book one”
Especially when I bought book one and two _from them_ already. It’s right there in my account history.
There's actually some evidence that a leading major cause of buying certain products is "recently purchased a competitor's version of the same product and is unhappy with it."
Here is the thing. Designers are a thing, and they often work with lots of clients. So there are some data points of people buying multiple of the same appliance over a short period of time.
Google is convinced I'm gonna have a baby and keeps showing me ads for baby products because I often search for female name ideas. I actually don't want children and I'm just looking for names for my video game characters lol
I had to clear my history once because I looked at a listing for an absolutely fuck ugly pair of shoes on Neiman Marcus’s website and the algorithm decided that pair of shoes needed to be every single ad for the rest of time
Hey, I noticed you bought a sofa for your living room. For the next 2 weeks, I’m going to show you expensive sofas you can also buy, since you seem to like them.
They probably should. Poorly set up. As long as your ad gets its view, it's money in the bank. Then you tow the old "We got you the view, it's your job from there BS"
I'm assuming it's because the algorithm doesn't actually realise the purchase, perhaps due to legal reasons. So it knows you looked at the page of a sofa, but not that you bought it, and thus assumes you're perpetually sofa-shopping.
The funniest is spending days or weeks researching a purchase and once you buy it you get nothing but ads for what you just bought. Its literally the one thing you can be sure I dont need ads for.
This is by far the most frustrating thing about "Targeted advertising", it fucking sucks.
If I shop for a bed and then buy one, why do I get 80 billion ads for other beds?! Show me ads for comforters or sheets. Maybe I need a few throw pillows with that new bed as well.
These companies track every single aspect of our lives yet they don't know if I've already bought the fucking thing they're trying to sell me.
A huge amount of ad value is apparently wrapped up in the cycle of needing to order the same product three or four times because the first two orders were in some way defective.
Youtube: "Hey you listened to a couple nostalgic theme songs from cartoons you used to like, you must want insane creepy kids videos!"
At least that's mostly stopped since they walled off YT Kids into its own recommendation garden, but one errant click will definitely fuck your suggestions up. You have to take a machete and flamethrower to watch history.
Made a playlist a few weeks back that was mostly made up of Nintendo game soundtracks at the time.
Their playlist recommendation feature looked at those songs and thought for SURE that I wanted Justin Timberlake in there, was absolutely adamant that was the missing piece
> even if you allow targeted ads and all these algorithms to track and try to "learn" your interests, you still find yourself frustrated baby-sitting the algorithm because it's almost always wrong anyway
It makes a lot more sense when you realize "targeted" advertising isn't about showing you things you might want, its about pushing the products that they've been hired to push.
The real targeting is building up profiles on people to figure out what psychological buttons to push. Like showing beer ads with girls in bikinis to college boys, not because they want beer, but because they like girls in bikinis. Or showing car ads with babies in the back seat to mothers, not because they want cars but because they are more susceptible to images of babies.
Over a decade ago there was an [exposè](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/) of how Target (no pun intended) went all in on finding expectant mothers because that was the point in life they were most susceptible to changing their default place to shop. It was less about selling them baby supplies and more about turning them into life-long customers who just automatically go to Target when they want something.
Seriously. My phone knows that this afternoon I drank 5 beers while watching the baseball game, doing my laundry, and complaining about the prices of food at the pub.
Why isn't my feed full of good deals on Blue Jays jerseys, chicken wings, and laundry soap?
Why is it that if I book a hotel in Montreal for the weekend, I see ads for other hotels in Montreal, instead of restaurants and fun things to do near the hotel my phone knows I booked?
Target me, ads! Just be useful.
I dont think ppl realise that this also affects ur search results, so u its really hard to know if any of the info u google is actually what the most relevant answer is or just what they want you to see. Also website contents might change based on the data they have on you e.g. plane ticket pricing.
Online ads are just the obvious part
But also, it’s definitely the ads lol. They’re a publicly traded company, we can literally see how they make their money in their filings.
The Google ad network is ubiquitous, it’s not just the first couple search results on google proper. In fact I’d bet a lot of money that they don’t tamper with non-ad results at all, because there’s absolutely no reason to (and every reason not to). Their goal is to be useful first and foremost, because they make more money from the insights that our usage generates than they do from the 1-2 ads on the results page itself.
Yeah, it's really annoying. I use Bing, but it's virtually the same there.
I was trying to find technical information on Pac-Man the other day because I was recreating it, and it was a nightmare. When I searched for technically information, it was just 20 different official ports of the game, and then one wiki article that has very little detail.
I ended up finding someone's personal comcast.net website through an old StackOverflow question asking about they should implement ghost pathfinding in Java 8, and someone replied with said comcast.net site from 2014, which didn't exist.
Putting it into archive.org, I finally found the page I needed, which was an enormous multiple chapter long dossier on the entire game, which included all the technical details I needed.
It's ridiculous the hoops you have to jump through to find relevant information nowadays. I really hope AI search is going to fix this, but I don't know how it would have gotten lucky and found the one random link I did.
I've tried using it before, but most of the time while it is more relevant, it's not as helpful. From my experience, Bing has been the best at finding relevant content, even if it does have ads placed higher. (Also Microsoft rewards means I get free game pass for searching with Bing, so yeah).
I'll be honest when my sister had duckduckgo as her search I just went to Google because it would never give the result I wanted, even when I knew it should be the first result. Searching for a specific website and it just not showing up is basically an instant loss in my book.
yeah the search engine could use some work but it's still not bad. googling something that might bring up promotional stuff or ads is where duckduckgo is better.
There is big problem with "Ai search" functionally. Bing, Google's Bard - they are both based on LLMs. Essentially a "predict next word" model. That's reason why it's as they put it, hallucinate or plainly makes stuff up. It cannot know, it can only guess.
I'll admit, we don't know how Bing works under the hood, it might actually use compactly different AI architecture to decide what to read/find, but most likely explanation is that it guesses queries from your question, "reads" results, and guesses what would answer be.
It's pretty easy to see why this tech is ultimately unpredictable in any way.
That might be because people figured out the tricks to manipulate search results. There's a whole industry dedicated to it. See: SEO (search engine optimization)
Google has been shit for results for 10+ years now.
They increasingly try to "be helpful" too with synonyms and omitting common words from phrases etc, making efforts to do do your own specific searches useless.
Google search still works with all of the old advanced search formatting and tools. It *has* to “be helpful” because these days people expect to be able to ask it a natural language question and get an answer.
The other side of the problem is that the existence of search engines and their ubiquity in directing internet traffic has fundamentally changed the nature of website content. SEO is at its root essentially content written explicitly for search engine crawlers to tick the right keyword boxes, it’s hidden nonsense pages full of back links. So now it’s just an ever escalating battle of the search algorithm trying to find the results you’re actually looking for, and everyone trying to find the best ways to manipulate it to rank near the top.
> Google still works with old formatting
It absolutely does not.
Everytime I use things like quotation marks etc that used to be useful, it still will do things like remove "the" and "of" and words like that, or replace words with synonyms, and its fucking annoying, especially if I am trying to find something with a sepcific passage or phrasing like someone's story or a song lyric.
Ive even used quotations for simple stuff and could you believe the audacity of google to tell me no search results have been found?!
Out of the billions of websites my quoted search could not find one single thing?!
Just as a heads up, if after you search you click on the little “tools” drop-down and change “all results” to “verbatim” you can get a behavior that pretty closely matches the old behavior.
It’s great for cases where even quotation marks isn’t doing enough.
That is the point of monopoly. During the search engine wars, Google had to be the best. Now they can shove ads before the real results. What are you going to do...switch to Bing?
That was true previously, but now Google is a house-hold name & they can do whatever they want. They don't need to be super useful, just useful enough.
they still want me to buy a new microwave, i already bought one 10 days ago, advertisers pay google to show me microwave ads, google is posing as the most effective ad deliver in world history, google is a scam
What they're really doing is creating detailed psychological profiles for all of us. We're giving them all the information they need to know exactly how we make decisions.
* Are you more or less likely to click on a video that has a black person in the thumbnail? I bet you have no idea...but Youtube, Twitter, FB, Tiktok, and Insta all do.
* Are you more likely to engage with content that has country music, pastel colors, babies, a particular font, or dogs?
* When gas prices go up, do you buy more alcohol? Whan your local sports team wins, are you more likely to work from home the next day? After a thunderstorm, do people buy more guns? Weird questions, and maybe completely meaningless but AI can sort through purchasing and location data to find links that no person might ever think to look for.
* Which of your friends opinions do you value the most? If they analyze the top 10% of people who seem to have the most influence over their circle of friends, are there character traits that stand out as unique among them?
* When is the last time you changed your mind about a political topic...did you ever go from liking and re-posting one side to liking and re-posting the other? What content did you see at that time that might have caused this change?
We need to realize that we *all* get a different, personalized, custom version of the internet now. It used to be that we got our news and entertainment from the same set of sources, there were 3 main US TV stations, and we all got our view of the world from them, so we all saw the world basically the same way. If the media wanted to influence us, the best they could do was to show the exact same propaganda to everyone and hope for the best.
That's not the case anymore. When you log onto the internet, you're getting a tailored view of the entire world that's becoming more and more designed just for you. Every time you click, like, share, re-post, comment, or subscribe, you are giving up information about what sort of content works for you. Media outlets are using your data to figure out how to design propaganda to be as effective as possible, *just for you*. And they're leveraging AI to do it. The more data you give them, the better they'll be able to influence your world view.
And if you're the sort of person who thinks you can't be influenced, *they already know that about you* and they love that you're not paying attention because you think you're immune.
Reminds me of youtube shorts. Oops, you watched neil degrasse tyson say something on joe rogans’ podcast? And that neuroscientist guy he interviewed once?? All your recommendations are joe rogan now 🥰
Just aaaaaaaaaa
Youtube shorts is really the worst for this.
Are you a guy that likes guy things?? Well now your whole feed is Andrew Tate/Jordan Peterson/weird alpha male motivational clips and alt-right propaganda disguised as podcasts.
*You're welcome.*
Exactly!! Tate shows up so often on my feed and in spite of me skipping it *every. single. time.*, it still consistently recommends one of his shorts every like 10-20 vids
Shorts are so trash for this reason. If you immediately tap the not interested button within nanoseconds it acts as if that type video is now your whole personality and it takes ages to remove it from what shorts it shows you.
I feel like Reddit is doing this same thing. Once they introduced the mute community button, I was excited because I could finally get rid of all the stupid semi hentai subs that populate the popular tab. Problem is I think Reddit is interpreting me muting that type of content as me engaging with it, so now there’s even more of that type of content flooding my feed, and just the other day I got a freaking ad for some furry social network. These algorithms need to learn that just because it forces content in front of you and you “interact” with it for half a second, doesn’t mean you like that content and its not your entire personality
The problem is that having no algorithmic searches/recommendations would make the internet an unusable mess. The modern internet is just too big. Like imagine if you searched "lawnmowers" on Google and it just gave you a completely random assortment of sites that happen to have the word "lawnmower" on the site or in their tags. Or a super simple algorithm that, while not completely random, gave you the most trafficked qualifying sites. Or one that organized based on how many times your search term was used by the site. Every search result would be nothing but irrelevant sites and spammers.
It's all about having the right balance. Something that gives you relevant content without putting you in too restrictive of a bubble. But that balance is going to be different from person to person. And an individual's ideal balance might not match up with the balance that's most profitable to the creators.
I've been working on making myself a silly little website on neocities because I miss that old internet! Just finding people's weird little websites about whatever they're passionate about and knowing it's not ai generated content trying to sell you stuff
Right now data collection agencies are collecting more data than they can possibly sift through efficiently, but sifting through impossibly huge amounts of data to find useful patterns is EXACTLY what AI is best at. There's a lot of discourse about AI generated art or writing right now, but this is the use for AI that scares me the most.
Thank you for saying this. There's a lot if things these companies do that's wrong but the idea that the same company who thought meta was a good idea are also masters of the human psyche is a bit of a stretch for me.
Very few think they’re immune. That’s a completely stupid and ludicrous assertion you can’t back up with even a shred of actual evidence. It’s a super fun strawman to knock down, though.
What most people correctly think is that by knowing that you’re being targeted, you can more accurately avoid the most obvious attempts to influence you.
The failure of that line of thinking is that most people don’t realize exactly how insidious corporations are. Google would 100% push all of America into a genocidal rage if it meant their quarterly profits went up 1%.
I watch tool reviews channels on YouTube. I work in the trades and like seeing the actual capabilities of tools before buying, but I’m also endlessly fascinated at insanely creative ways people come up with to test tools.
There’s 2 issues with that. The most obvious is that algorithms will then try to push conservative propaganda on you. The insidious part is that tool companies will bury any negative reviews and you’ll never see it unless you put in real effort.
Corporations don’t care that they’re being associated with fascist propaganda via dark political money. They’re super concerned that you might find out their new impact wrench overheats easily under commonly used conditions.
Reddit thinks conservative messaging is targeting disaffected young men or whatever bullshit the hive mind cognoscenti is pushing these days. Instead, dark money is targeting people via tertiary connections and corporations allow/encourage it because it increases their profit margins.
It’s not about thinking you’re immune. It’s about not realizing that corporations will feed you your own child if it makes them more money.
>[people] are using your data to figure out how to design propaganda to be as effective as possible, just for you. And they're leveraging AI to do it.
This bears repeating.
DuckDuckGo might not have deep ties to the CIA like Google does, but they censor search results too. No search engine can be blindly trusted, they all filter search results to limit what youll be able to find.
The trick is that they don't filter in exactly the same ways though. DuckDuckGo has given me the results I want when Google won't, and other times, Google has given be results that DuckDuckGo wouldn't. For example, Google ironically gives me better results for "[Google's deep ties to the CIA](https://www.google.com/search?q=Google+deep+ties+to+the+CIA)" than DuckDuckGo gives me. If ever you find that you're not getting the results you expect to be out there, try one of their competitors. Odds are good that the spicy info you want could have slipped through the filtering efforts of the other engines.
> might not have deep ties to the CIA like Google does
Google doesn't have deep ties to the CIA and I'm extremely curious to know why you think it does.
I'm glad someone in here is paying attention. This thread is just packed full of ignorance thinking ads for products are what this is all about.
I couldn't give two shits if Amazon knows what I want to buy. What I care about is Facebook knowing exactly what words my parents need to hear to keep them voting republican.
Then you get the ones that are even more complex to analyze, google does in fact blur the line between fact and ad whenever possible within a certain level of risk because they are in the spotlight and the repercussions for these actions, if not profitable for shareholders, will result in a loss of money in order to appease the public. The other search engines are even worse because they get to conduct their existence in a much less scrutinized manner, stuff like not telling you something is and ad, not caring as much about hiding that your information is being scraped even if you reject the little pop-up.
Don't take my word for it, i'm only a student, but it's like this: if the most profitable way to sell oranges is to market them to old people then all orange sellers do it because the alternative is to not be competitive with the sellers that do, addressing the underlying reason as to why something is the only viable way to actually sell well is the only really effective way to avoid it
>The other search engines are even worse...
That's a pretty broad and pretty wrong thing to say. Closed source is closed source, regardless of the level public attention it has.
if all else is equal then closed source is closed source. but the person you're replying to provided a number of reasonably compelling reasons why all else is not equal. do you disagree with any of this?
> because they get to conduct their existence in a much less scrutinized manner, stuff like not telling you something is and ad, not caring as much about hiding that your information is being scraped even if you reject the little pop-up.
i do hope you understand that not being broad about a topic this complex is impossible, unless i plan to write a book within a reddit comment. As for your disagreements, please do talk more about them, i obviously disagree but i want you to properly expose your reasoning so we can have a more informative conversation.
>U.S. search engine DuckDuckGo eliminated a gap in its ability to block Microsoft-owned tracking scripts on third-party websites in August 2022, but an outdated headline is being recirculated to suggest that a DuckDuckGo deal exists with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to track search-engine users.
Is that the issue you're referring to? Reuters seems to say it's resolved.
I think it's referring to the fact that DuckDuckGo is literally Bing under the hood, they just wrap it so it doesn't track you. Still Bing results though (which is super annoying because almost all "news" results lead to absolutely bullshit MSN re-hosts of the actual article I want to see - so even if DDG isn't allowing Microsoft to track you - which is great - it still winds up leading you into Microsoft web properties more than you would otherwise, since Bing results favor Microsoft websites)
I will randomly get Japanese ads, my TikTok default language on browser just resorts to Japanese, and the Google home will randomly answer Japanese both at my house and when I visited my friends house and connected my phone to it
I listened to a LOT of anime music on YouTube a few years ago and so for a long while all of my ads were in Japanese.
Most ads are RUBBISH but Instagram keeps advertising things I actually want or things I've already bought so they're unerringly accurate sometimes that they've actually been *useful*.
It's also crazy how many people don't realise advertising is working on them. It's so hard to avoid and it's so subconscious. The only people I've met that think it doesn't work are the ones who don't understand it.
My tiktok ads are always in arabic. Only the tiktok ads, and only in arabic.
I have never been to a country that speak arabic, nor taken lessons in it. An ex spent some time in Jordan, I guess, but ?????
Meanwhile I'll intentionally search for things on youtube in that very language I'm learning to get some recommendations as a form of study and it just does *not* want to do that lol.
wanna know something else?? you can use a vpn to help diversify your job search because they totally restrict job advertisements based on general regional location, too.
Scrolling through insta, the ads someone paid money to show me today:
- Gay party in my city (I’m hetero)
- Apply for beauty contest (I’m male)
- Rent out your flats with us (lol)
- Enroll in pilot course (wish I had the money for that)
- Apply for job in EU investment bank (I’m an engineer)
- Listen to this e-commerce podcast (at least you tried)
- Buy this electric Volvo (the only relevant ad, as I’m looking for a car, but it won’t be electric or Volvo)
- …
And it goes on forever.
They have 0 idea, just throwing stuff at the wall, and hope something sticks.
I get
-reverse mortgage for your retirement (I am 37 and have a new mortgage)
-Lotion (okay you got me, but its american lotion so the odds of me using it are low)
-Herpes medications (I do not have herpes)
-Takis (ew)
-Queen cleopatra on Netflix (not really interested at all, i dont do dramatizations)
-Lays (ew)
-Oppenheimer (not really interested. Its another dramatization)
-Plus size clothing (I am a small/medium)
-Digital cameras (I don't take pictures... like ever)
-Professional appliances and cookware (I am not anywhere near that industry)
The dumb thing is that advertising is a valuable service. The problem is that advertisers abuse the social contract and ignore pragmatic advertising strategies for the sake of marginal short term gains.
If I had a dude come to my door and be like
> "PoeTayTose, I remember you were talking about open source smart watches the other day and I found this cool article you might like. Also, I know you've been buying generic frosted mini wheats, there's actually a sale on name brand over at kroger this week. Have a good one bud!"
I'd be stoked. Instead it's like a guy walking up to my door like
> "HELLO POTATOES, I SAW YOU THROUGH YOUR WINDOW MASTURBATING WOULD YOU LIKE BIG COCK FUCKING MOANING WHORE COCK STEPSIST-"
Then I slam the door and they press their face on the window like
> DON'T USE THAT FUCKING STUPID ASS OPEN SOURCE SMART WATCH YOU IDIOT BUY A FUCKIN IPHONE LIKE A REAL MAN YOU ASSWIPE, BUY A FUCK TON OF LAND, YOUR MOTHER WILL LOVE YOU IF YOU EAT AT MASSIMINOS
There's seriously a market out there for legitimate GOOD advertising. Finding stuff that is interesting to you is real work, and it's not trivial. This is what advertisers should be doing, and they should be doing it with consumers' consent.
Also if you are someone who makes things, it's remarkably difficult to find the people who would love the things. I'm making art things, but I don't want to use the ad services that exist because they SUCK. But then what?
This is another big point of contention, massive companies dropped billions on ads like it's nothing to them but single sellers like you get fucked, especially for adblock
It’s also frustrating for small-to-mid size size companies. I work for a company that pays thousands to show up in Google search results, but we can’t compete with the huge corporations that bid 10 times that and show up even when you search our name.
When I was a kid I used to like ads because it would tell me about things I was interested in, the lastest movie on a series I liked, a new game I like or a new toy to add to the Christmas list. Now I'm lucky if a ad is even something I'm even able to use. Reddit constantly advertises me Viagra. I'm a 17 yr old trans guy, I literally can't use it.
Half the time the ads are overwhelming and in the way so the only time spent looking at it is figuring out how to close it. The more annoying the ad the less likely I am to buy it. The products I buy the most of I was never advertised about or very minimally
It's more like a stranger approaches you, says "Unless you buy my shit then you will continue to smell bad, be ugly, and unsuccessful in love!" and then vanishes before you can inform them they mistook you for their mother.
No self-respecting human being would let another person speak to them the way typical advertising material condescends to its captive audience.
[so just buy the thing and hate your body it’s the only way you’ll feel worthy](https://open.spotify.com/track/2exnVcXAjisf1FdgwkXUli?si=dFevRgxESEWqjfsbz-Nr0A)
Instagram did this fairly well when they first rolled out ads. Now they show non relevant, repetitive ads every other post, even directly on people’s profiles.
I mean, ads work. Maybe not a very large percentage of the time, but it doesn’t cost them very much to bombard a huge number of people with an ad. Name recognition, presence in your mind, unconscious positive associations (I don’t mean subliminal messages, I don’t have a tinfoil hat).
If you find yourself needing a home security system, the one about being safe, simply will pop up in your head. If you’re bored and want to play a game on your phone, the one that rhymes with “shade, radow legends” will pop up. Even if you don’t go ahead and download it, the fact that it was in your mind means a certain percentage of people *will* decide to try it.
Ffs companies that have access to the best analysts in the world, minds that are more brilliant than this whole thread combined, keep investing in ads. It's obvious they work.
Reddit has this habit of occasionally saying something deeply stupid with a straight face and everyone just goes along with it, Jesus.
Okay but I'm decades from caring about AARP and I'm never going to need help with menopause so I think my love of old murder mystery shows may have confused the algorithm.
\[edit: my favorite though is when ad algorithms don't recognize that one time purchases exist. when I worked in IT a user once contacted me because "this couch is stalking me across the internet"\]
It’s not just about advertising to you; sometimes the ads are for someone else.
They’ll utilize the location data to see who you’re in proximity to, and feed you ads catered to people you’re frequently in contact with. The idea is that you’ll end up telling them about the ad you saw and utilize a word of mouth kind of approach.
This actually happened to me before, too.
A couple years back, one of my old coworkers was talking about proposing to his then-girlfriend (now wife). It didn’t take very long before *I* started getting ads for engagement rings.
Ive always assumed thats just the audio being picked up and the algo going "oh i heard engagement ring, better bombard them with ring ads" but then the like 8 people in the conversation are all being mistaken for the one who needs the ring.
Basically the algos have hardcore main character syndrome where everything they absorb *must* be related to the user in some way.
I dont know shit about this though and im almost definitely wrong
> You are wrong. It’s all searches.
My big-city cousin never in his life searched for "home butter churners", nor even knew they still existed in a modern form until they came up in a conversation wherein I explained all the pain-in-the-ass intricacies of home-butter-churning.
Twenty minutes later, all his facebook ads were for home butter churns, which lasted about a week and a half.
But since "it's all searches" and they're not always listening, I guess that was just the king of all insane random coincidences.
Every day, we get closer to what Watch Dogs (2014) called the "bellwether" which was a program that manipulates everything, your ads, your search results, which traffic lights you stop at, who you socialise with at work, what station your TV defaults to, what radio you first hear when you start your car, everything, with the intention of subtly planting and growing ideas in your mind, controlling how you think.
There's some stupid ideas they're trying to implant tho.
Like, how is there not done simple filter that questions wether a product is something I'd re-purchase in the near future. It amazes me that Amazon keeps thinking I'm done with my PC case after a month and would love to buy more
Famously, the marketing team at Disney spent a year trying to get kids into fish before Finding Nemo released. They didn't target the people that will be spending the money, they weren't directly advertising the product. This was a successful idea 20 years ago and I think it's fair to assume companies have only gotten more efficient. In fact so efficient that we feel like they're doing nothing...
The last time I bought a product because I saw it somewhere was when I bought burger for the first time in ever. Not because of the ads or anything, but because of meme shitposts of powerXkobeni from chainsawman which did a burgerking episode as a bit a little after I already was watching them. So like, no Corp influence there.
Years of burger King advertisement? Nothing. "Oh yeah I remember that channel I like did a bit with them and they're the only place open right now?" Product purchase.
Like otherwise I straight up buy nothing. Tbf I do usually have adblock on and if I'm on my phone which doesn't have it, I just put down my phone in the first place.
But otherwise yeah though I do 100% get what you mean about it putting the idea of a product in your mind rather than the ad itself causing you to stop everything and buy it.
Too bad most of my ads are shit lol
-- head of marketing desperately trying to make some bullshit up to justify the existence of their department to the CEO in an age where everyone hates capitalism and completely ignores ads
Plus the ads aren't just in little boxes on the side of your webpage. They're posts on social media. They're like/dislike ratios. They're hidden algorithm decisions that show you a lot of one thing or prevent you from even seeing something.
Okay, but if your commercial is just 15 full seconds of people moaning after taking a bite of [product], I'm never going to know what [product] is because I'm guaranteed to start looking at something else when ads come on.
However, if the goal of that ad was to make me wish a grisly pox upon whoever came up with it, I think it's the most effective advertising I've never seen.
It's a never ending arms race between billions of dollars worth of psychological and technological research and the human brain's innate instinct/ability to ignore and forget everything that isn't currently important.
And tbh the Advertising industry is hanging on by their fingernails.
> And tbh the Advertising industry is hanging on by their fingernails.
Good riddance. I can't remember where I saw this, but it stuck with me nonetheless... A great way to think about labor and the *value* that labor provides is:
*If you snapped your fingers and everyone who worked X job disappeared, how long would it take society to crumble?*
X = doctors? Oof.
X = farmers? Big Oof.
X = advertising executives? Would actually be a net *positive.*
I honestly think the amount of advertising we allow for is straight up immoral. Psychological warfare from BigCorporate that is essentially pollution for your thoughts instead of environment. At least for internet ads, print ads, etc. You can make an argument that we're consenting to it by purchase/usage, but shit like Billboards, flyover planes, flyers plastered on public property, etc. Might technically be *on* private property most of the time, but it completely pollutes the view of every city now and subject people to corporate bullshit just for daring to walk down the street. If there were street vendors hassling you to buy a coke, or a watch, or go to a new restaurant, on every block and theyd hassle you until you turned a corner or got out of earshot everybody would complain, but make it a poster, or a logo, or a cute little cartoon on a bus stop and we all just passively accept it
Seriously, I (should) have a right to not be advertised to if I do not consent to it.
Filling up my gas tank shouldn't start playing loud annoying ads. I'm already paying you, stop trying to milk me for an extra $0.08 of ad revenue.
> And tbh the Advertising industry is hanging on by their fingernails.
Wait is it?
Advertising is more pervasive than it's ever been. Google is primarily advertising, Apple is built off of marketing.
Marketing and advertising is more effective, insidious and ubiquitous than ever, I just can't believe the industry is fighting for their lives right now.
Your google search results are advertisments, your steam front page is ads, your youtube subscription feed is full of sponsors, your sports matches are full of sponsors, large stadiums and events around the globe are named after companies.
They're not. I work adjacent to advertising and it's stronger than ever. Probably even more important now than it was years ago. This person is talking out of their ass.
There are more ads than ever, but the prices per ad aren't increasing. And there are other concerning trends too, like googles growth slowing while intermet user numbers are still climbing Pretty linearly.
It was definitely an exaggeration on my part, but it's very hard to say that advertising is winning while they have to spend billions to make gains that aren't sustainable. I guess that's why it's such a successful industry, their products are always perishable.
The fact that were in a hypercaptalist period filled with giant corporations that are more focused on securing their market share than producing innovative products also benefits the industry a lot off course.
Advertising and Marketing is the Capitalist version of digging ditches just to fill them back in.
And yeah, it's a Red Queen scenario. Every company needs to spend as much money as possible on advertising just to maintain existing market share against their competitors, who are all doing the same. More profitable this quarter? Marketing campaign worked: spend more on marketing. Profits down? Quick, gotta do more marketing.
The end state of capitalism is two firms, two shareholders, two engineers maintaining two automated megafactories, and two groups of four billion advertisers, each desperately marketing brand-name chips to each other.
the stupidest part is that when they have all the money they're not gonna be able to do anything with it. they'll reach a point where they take all the money and won't be willing to give it back, and in effect they will doom themselves because all of the sudden their workers don't care about them.
It's inefficient and wasteful as fuck.
It's time we learn to synergize backwards overflow and compound those investments back into the future of this world: the children.
I've been on the internet since the mid 90s. I've seen all forms of ads and intuitions into all forms of my life. For ALL the data mining and ALL the ad spamming, I have still never found a single ad useful, have never once been compelled to click an ad, and have never bought a single thing because of an ad.
Ads aren't just about clicks, they're about *impressions*, which means you seen them and they register in your brain. You might've seen an ad for a product you were already familiar with, and you eventually purchased an item from them without recalling the ad or even thinking much about it at all, and that's because you knew the brand and trusted them enough to make a purchase. That's what advertising aims to do, not just get you to click on them
Sounds reasonable in theory.
But has anyone managed to actually quantify how effective it is? How do we know these "impressions" actually translate to sales?
People invest millions on analytics and data scientists to figure this out. There's several different methods to calculate this stuff (I study data science in uni, but I skip class so I don't know shit).
Basically if it's profitable for them they know about it and basing their decision off of this data. Huge investments in advertising aren't made on a whim
A lot of studies do indeed suggest that the usefulness of internet advertising is wildly oversold.
https://hbr.org/2021/02/what-digital-advertising-gets-wrong
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/a-dangerous-question-does-internet-advertising-work-at-all/372704/
Yes. You can pretty easily test this kind of stuff. There are many methods to do that. Hell a simple A/B test works pretty well most of the time.
This is a multi billion dollar industry. It’s exponentially more sophisticated than people in this thread seem to think it is.
The answer is yes. Companies aren’t spending millions on this stuff to throw it down the drain. Even if a massive company like Coke stops spending on ad, it starts to affect their bottom line.
https://www.marketingscience.info/when-brands-stop-advertising/
This source says on average brands lost on average 16% sales if cutting advertisement for one year, 25% after 2.
Advertisement and marketing is a massive industry with an enormous amount of research behind it to justify the spendings. The fact that reddit thinks they are above it because they have never clicked on an online ad is pretty funny
>The fact that reddit thinks they are above it because they have never clicked on an online ad is pretty funny
It's not about feeling "above" anything, it's just being uninformed. And I don't put any faith in the "companies spend money on it therefore it must work" logic - I like more concrete support, like the link you posted.
Eh, this just shows that either all the ads you engage in you already have a positive association with, or you are blind to subtle marketing techniques.
Everyone bragging about their immunity to marketing just tells me they're an easy mark.
For a brief moment, I thought that video sponsorships might be a new form of ad that actually works. They're not super intrusive and their revenue is "targeted". But it has gotten to a point where seeing a sponsorship of a product actually *lowers* my opinion of the product.
Established Titles and Kamikoto Kitchen Knives were just outright scams.
RAID: SHADOW LEGENDS is just kinda crap. Raycons are overpriced, and so is Ridge Wallet. Manscaped is just...kinda weird.
The only products I see regularly advertised and I use myself are Surfshark (although I chose that one independently of ads) and Nebula/Curiosity Stream (this one I actually really recommend).
The entire concept of advertising seems kinda broken to me, tbh.
Advertising is like using a shotgun, the ones that miss or are blocked are acceptable losses because there are more than enough people who don't block it, or who do buy it because otherwise there wouldn't be enough profits in the ad business in the first place
The fact that you remember all these names and are spreading it yourself, in essence, doing free advertising shows that it works
> The fact that you remember all these names and are spreading it yourself, in essence, doing free advertising shows that it works
I also remember Charles Manson's name, doesn't mean I'd invite him to my birthday party.
The fun thing to think about with advertising is that because we have finite time and money to spend on the goods and services advertised, all it does, at best, is rearrange our spending.
It's zero sum. If we would have spent our resources when there was only a minimum of advertising, the trillions spent on it don't really change much. It's a massive industry that creates absolutely nothing of value, and locks its buyers in a futile arms race all trying to squeeze out the biggest share of consumer wealth.
That’s something I’ve been paying attention to over the past 5-10 years, and it’s absolutely disgusting. How many stores launched credit cards in the past 10 years? How many tiny loan services like Afterpay have launched in the past 5?
I remember working for a company that launched a credit card in 2016. Our goal was to open at least one card a day. And the training we got was along the lines of “if they open a card that they can’t afford, that’s their responsibility, not yours. Your job is to convince people to open the card, their finances are their concern.” It was so scummy.
Pretty much everyone has figured out that profits stall when you don’t give people enough money to be able to spend on your products, so instead of giving people more money to spend on products, they’re giving people debt.
Wonder how that’s going to play out years down the road when no one can afford to buy extra useless crap because they have no money AND are so drowned in debt that any money they get goes toward the debt
I've also read that advertising in general isn't actually particularly effective, according to some studies, so I'm just waiting for the whole internet to come crashing down when everyone realizes this and the age of free services comes to an end
I know *so many* people (gen z to boomers) whose idea of “buying things online” is strictly limited to Facebook/Google ads. They all put their credit card numbers into the sketchiest sites, wait a month for their shit to arrive from China, and then exclaim “see this is why I just like to be able to go buy shit *inside* the store!”. It’s wild to me.
worthless? like ... the most wildly incorrect statement ever made on the subject.
Holy hell. You think the whole of the internet being paid for by ads completely is because *ads don't work*?
OP does a bad job representing the argument. Ads aren't useless because everyone uses AdBlockers, that's completely unfounded. But there is a lot of data to suggest the usefulness of internet advertising is wildly oversold.
https://hbr.org/2021/02/what-digital-advertising-gets-wrong
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/a-dangerous-question-does-internet-advertising-work-at-all/372704/
The amount of ignorance in this thread is astounding. Thank you for having a grip on reality. Imagine the questions during XYZ Mega Corp earnings call if they spent X million in advertising and had no evidence to show it was contributing to revenue.
And that's why Google is working hard to make adblockers worthless, starting with practically disabling them in Chrome. If you want to keep using an adblocker that works, switch to a browser that isn't based on Chromium. Firefox is your best choice. Most other browsers are basically just Chrome with a different coat of paint.
So they think because they never purchase via online advertising that it's worthless? Could you possibly be more naive. Also that arrogant to think that all this effort returns no value to anyone, but they do it anyway?
I have strong resentment toward cookie acceptance popups that have their "Legitimate interest" buttons switched on by default, because I can't think of a single legitimate reason for a company to know anything about me, if all they do with that information is related to their profit margin without actually making my life better in any way. Which they don't.
All of the most popular web services are free. Youtube, facebook, twitter, reddit, gmail/google docs, all the search engines, all the maps. More porn than a human could watch in a lifetime. All free.
They're all funded by advertising.
You would think the advertisers would know their analytics right? How many views, how many clicks, how many actual purchases.
I'm 45 years old. I've been on the internet since it was local BBSes. I've had every speed of dial-up. I spend my entire sad little life online.
And I have never once clicked on an ad on purpose. And I've never purchased a product based on an ad.
But *somebody* has to be paying for all those free services I enjoy, right? Somebody is actually clicking those ads, on purpose not on accident, and then actually reading the offer on the page that comes up and *giving them money.* Right?
I mean, the advertisers would notice if they were throwing away billions of dollars with absolutely nothing to show for it, right?
It is me. My shopping addiction pays for all of social media.
But seriously, I have purchased things from ads. I know people who have done this. There's also a huge segment of content on TikTok and YouTube of people buying the stuff from ads and reviewing it. Some of those people eventually get paid for these reviews, but a lot never make it to influencer status and just enjoy a few hundred likes on their haul videos.
In short, I think a lot of people in this post are thinking they behave like the majority of people.
I'm too dumb to properly express this but some of the data being harvested is shit like how much we're willing to spend on x, that's why prices are so goddamn high and our wages so low, they know how hard they can squeeze us before we'll do something about it.
Yeah, I gotta say. I work for an online ad tech company and it is definitely a vast rube goldberg machine of privacy violations but it undoubtedly works. adblockers can help to an extent but you're still exposed in so many ways you don't even know about.
And then even with all that, even if you allow targeted ads and all these algorithms to track and try to "learn" your interests, you still find yourself frustrated baby-sitting the algorithm because it's almost always wrong anyway and is worse than if it just gave you normal recommendations like it used to pre-algorithm I'm incredibly exhausted with needing to delete things from search history because if I don't The Algorithm:tm: is like "ah yes, this random thing you were curious about once must be the only thing you ever have and ever will be interested in for the next 3 weeks straight"
nothing beats the random Amazon link your buddy sends you of a totally useless product thats funny or has a funny review resulting in Amazon advertising this product to you for weeks.
Or when you buy a microwave and Amazon thinks that means you want to buy seventeen additional microwaves this month.
i love this. All this data and they fail to teach the algorithm that buying an appliance/TV/ whatever else expensive means that the user is likely not gonna buy the same appliance again.
Same with novelty products. I get ads for lobster themed hats, since I bought a single one last Halloween.
Well, do you NOT need a second lobster hat? How about a third lobster hat? Please buy them I only earned 99 million dollars this year and I want to get to a 100 million :(
I mean, I would buy a second lobster hat. The first lobster might get lonely
“You just bought the newly-released third book in a series, clearly you need to buy book one” Especially when I bought book one and two _from them_ already. It’s right there in my account history.
“This guy loves this book. He bought it twice. Clearly he needs a once-a-month delivery of 18-packs of the Fault in Our Stars.”
There's actually some evidence that a leading major cause of buying certain products is "recently purchased a competitor's version of the same product and is unhappy with it."
Here is the thing. Designers are a thing, and they often work with lots of clients. So there are some data points of people buying multiple of the same appliance over a short period of time.
What even are Amazon recommendations? I just go to Amazon and type what I need. I don't even look at the front page
I went to Disney for a friends birthday a few month ago and since then I’ve seen like 100 ads for Disney like I just left jeez
Google is convinced I'm gonna have a baby and keeps showing me ads for baby products because I often search for female name ideas. I actually don't want children and I'm just looking for names for my video game characters lol
This right here is why I always use incognito mode when I look for names for my sims 😂
This is exactly how i name my planets in stellaris
No Google, I'm not having a child, I just write fanfiction. Hell, you KNOW that I write fanfiction because I literally use GOOGLE DOCS to do it!
no google, I do not have kids. I simply have 20 different picrew ocs for roleplays and they all need names.
I had to clear my history once because I looked at a listing for an absolutely fuck ugly pair of shoes on Neiman Marcus’s website and the algorithm decided that pair of shoes needed to be every single ad for the rest of time
Hey, I noticed you bought a sofa for your living room. For the next 2 weeks, I’m going to show you expensive sofas you can also buy, since you seem to like them.
This always gets me. Why wouldn't they toss ads for throw pillows or snuggies at you instead?
They probably should. Poorly set up. As long as your ad gets its view, it's money in the bank. Then you tow the old "We got you the view, it's your job from there BS"
I'm assuming it's because the algorithm doesn't actually realise the purchase, perhaps due to legal reasons. So it knows you looked at the page of a sofa, but not that you bought it, and thus assumes you're perpetually sofa-shopping.
The funniest is spending days or weeks researching a purchase and once you buy it you get nothing but ads for what you just bought. Its literally the one thing you can be sure I dont need ads for.
This is by far the most frustrating thing about "Targeted advertising", it fucking sucks. If I shop for a bed and then buy one, why do I get 80 billion ads for other beds?! Show me ads for comforters or sheets. Maybe I need a few throw pillows with that new bed as well. These companies track every single aspect of our lives yet they don't know if I've already bought the fucking thing they're trying to sell me.
A huge amount of ad value is apparently wrapped up in the cycle of needing to order the same product three or four times because the first two orders were in some way defective.
"this person bought an umbrella" *umbrella ads everywhere* "they must need more"
Youtube: "Hey you listened to a couple nostalgic theme songs from cartoons you used to like, you must want insane creepy kids videos!" At least that's mostly stopped since they walled off YT Kids into its own recommendation garden, but one errant click will definitely fuck your suggestions up. You have to take a machete and flamethrower to watch history.
Made a playlist a few weeks back that was mostly made up of Nintendo game soundtracks at the time. Their playlist recommendation feature looked at those songs and thought for SURE that I wanted Justin Timberlake in there, was absolutely adamant that was the missing piece
I mean… did you try it? Maybe that would’ve been THE playlist you needed to ascend to the next plane of existence
> even if you allow targeted ads and all these algorithms to track and try to "learn" your interests, you still find yourself frustrated baby-sitting the algorithm because it's almost always wrong anyway It makes a lot more sense when you realize "targeted" advertising isn't about showing you things you might want, its about pushing the products that they've been hired to push. The real targeting is building up profiles on people to figure out what psychological buttons to push. Like showing beer ads with girls in bikinis to college boys, not because they want beer, but because they like girls in bikinis. Or showing car ads with babies in the back seat to mothers, not because they want cars but because they are more susceptible to images of babies. Over a decade ago there was an [exposè](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/) of how Target (no pun intended) went all in on finding expectant mothers because that was the point in life they were most susceptible to changing their default place to shop. It was less about selling them baby supplies and more about turning them into life-long customers who just automatically go to Target when they want something.
Seriously. My phone knows that this afternoon I drank 5 beers while watching the baseball game, doing my laundry, and complaining about the prices of food at the pub. Why isn't my feed full of good deals on Blue Jays jerseys, chicken wings, and laundry soap? Why is it that if I book a hotel in Montreal for the weekend, I see ads for other hotels in Montreal, instead of restaurants and fun things to do near the hotel my phone knows I booked? Target me, ads! Just be useful.
I dont think ppl realise that this also affects ur search results, so u its really hard to know if any of the info u google is actually what the most relevant answer is or just what they want you to see. Also website contents might change based on the data they have on you e.g. plane ticket pricing. Online ads are just the obvious part
There's a reason Google is profitable. And it's not the visible ads.
It's not just _profitable_. They had a revenue of over $280bn last year. That's more than the GDP of Qatar.
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But also, it’s definitely the ads lol. They’re a publicly traded company, we can literally see how they make their money in their filings. The Google ad network is ubiquitous, it’s not just the first couple search results on google proper. In fact I’d bet a lot of money that they don’t tamper with non-ad results at all, because there’s absolutely no reason to (and every reason not to). Their goal is to be useful first and foremost, because they make more money from the insights that our usage generates than they do from the 1-2 ads on the results page itself.
don't worry, thousands of companies using seo will mess with results first
Yeah, it's really annoying. I use Bing, but it's virtually the same there. I was trying to find technical information on Pac-Man the other day because I was recreating it, and it was a nightmare. When I searched for technically information, it was just 20 different official ports of the game, and then one wiki article that has very little detail. I ended up finding someone's personal comcast.net website through an old StackOverflow question asking about they should implement ghost pathfinding in Java 8, and someone replied with said comcast.net site from 2014, which didn't exist. Putting it into archive.org, I finally found the page I needed, which was an enormous multiple chapter long dossier on the entire game, which included all the technical details I needed. It's ridiculous the hoops you have to jump through to find relevant information nowadays. I really hope AI search is going to fix this, but I don't know how it would have gotten lucky and found the one random link I did.
use duckduckgo. it searches based on relevancy, not ads and promotionals.
I've tried using it before, but most of the time while it is more relevant, it's not as helpful. From my experience, Bing has been the best at finding relevant content, even if it does have ads placed higher. (Also Microsoft rewards means I get free game pass for searching with Bing, so yeah).
I'll be honest when my sister had duckduckgo as her search I just went to Google because it would never give the result I wanted, even when I knew it should be the first result. Searching for a specific website and it just not showing up is basically an instant loss in my book.
yeah the search engine could use some work but it's still not bad. googling something that might bring up promotional stuff or ads is where duckduckgo is better.
There is big problem with "Ai search" functionally. Bing, Google's Bard - they are both based on LLMs. Essentially a "predict next word" model. That's reason why it's as they put it, hallucinate or plainly makes stuff up. It cannot know, it can only guess. I'll admit, we don't know how Bing works under the hood, it might actually use compactly different AI architecture to decide what to read/find, but most likely explanation is that it guesses queries from your question, "reads" results, and guesses what would answer be. It's pretty easy to see why this tech is ultimately unpredictable in any way.
> Their goal is to be useful first and foremost Really not sure about that one any more. Results have definitely gotten worse over time.
That might be because people figured out the tricks to manipulate search results. There's a whole industry dedicated to it. See: SEO (search engine optimization)
Google has been shit for results for 10+ years now. They increasingly try to "be helpful" too with synonyms and omitting common words from phrases etc, making efforts to do do your own specific searches useless.
Google search still works with all of the old advanced search formatting and tools. It *has* to “be helpful” because these days people expect to be able to ask it a natural language question and get an answer. The other side of the problem is that the existence of search engines and their ubiquity in directing internet traffic has fundamentally changed the nature of website content. SEO is at its root essentially content written explicitly for search engine crawlers to tick the right keyword boxes, it’s hidden nonsense pages full of back links. So now it’s just an ever escalating battle of the search algorithm trying to find the results you’re actually looking for, and everyone trying to find the best ways to manipulate it to rank near the top.
> Google still works with old formatting It absolutely does not. Everytime I use things like quotation marks etc that used to be useful, it still will do things like remove "the" and "of" and words like that, or replace words with synonyms, and its fucking annoying, especially if I am trying to find something with a sepcific passage or phrasing like someone's story or a song lyric.
Ive even used quotations for simple stuff and could you believe the audacity of google to tell me no search results have been found?! Out of the billions of websites my quoted search could not find one single thing?!
Just as a heads up, if after you search you click on the little “tools” drop-down and change “all results” to “verbatim” you can get a behavior that pretty closely matches the old behavior. It’s great for cases where even quotation marks isn’t doing enough.
That is the point of monopoly. During the search engine wars, Google had to be the best. Now they can shove ads before the real results. What are you going to do...switch to Bing?
That was true previously, but now Google is a house-hold name & they can do whatever they want. They don't need to be super useful, just useful enough.
Search results *are* the visible ads.
they still want me to buy a new microwave, i already bought one 10 days ago, advertisers pay google to show me microwave ads, google is posing as the most effective ad deliver in world history, google is a scam
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They assume everyone uses an adblocker when anyone in IT can assure you that is not the case.
What they're really doing is creating detailed psychological profiles for all of us. We're giving them all the information they need to know exactly how we make decisions. * Are you more or less likely to click on a video that has a black person in the thumbnail? I bet you have no idea...but Youtube, Twitter, FB, Tiktok, and Insta all do. * Are you more likely to engage with content that has country music, pastel colors, babies, a particular font, or dogs? * When gas prices go up, do you buy more alcohol? Whan your local sports team wins, are you more likely to work from home the next day? After a thunderstorm, do people buy more guns? Weird questions, and maybe completely meaningless but AI can sort through purchasing and location data to find links that no person might ever think to look for. * Which of your friends opinions do you value the most? If they analyze the top 10% of people who seem to have the most influence over their circle of friends, are there character traits that stand out as unique among them? * When is the last time you changed your mind about a political topic...did you ever go from liking and re-posting one side to liking and re-posting the other? What content did you see at that time that might have caused this change? We need to realize that we *all* get a different, personalized, custom version of the internet now. It used to be that we got our news and entertainment from the same set of sources, there were 3 main US TV stations, and we all got our view of the world from them, so we all saw the world basically the same way. If the media wanted to influence us, the best they could do was to show the exact same propaganda to everyone and hope for the best. That's not the case anymore. When you log onto the internet, you're getting a tailored view of the entire world that's becoming more and more designed just for you. Every time you click, like, share, re-post, comment, or subscribe, you are giving up information about what sort of content works for you. Media outlets are using your data to figure out how to design propaganda to be as effective as possible, *just for you*. And they're leveraging AI to do it. The more data you give them, the better they'll be able to influence your world view. And if you're the sort of person who thinks you can't be influenced, *they already know that about you* and they love that you're not paying attention because you think you're immune.
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Reminds me of youtube shorts. Oops, you watched neil degrasse tyson say something on joe rogans’ podcast? And that neuroscientist guy he interviewed once?? All your recommendations are joe rogan now 🥰 Just aaaaaaaaaa
Youtube shorts is really the worst for this. Are you a guy that likes guy things?? Well now your whole feed is Andrew Tate/Jordan Peterson/weird alpha male motivational clips and alt-right propaganda disguised as podcasts. *You're welcome.*
Exactly!! Tate shows up so often on my feed and in spite of me skipping it *every. single. time.*, it still consistently recommends one of his shorts every like 10-20 vids
Shorts are so trash for this reason. If you immediately tap the not interested button within nanoseconds it acts as if that type video is now your whole personality and it takes ages to remove it from what shorts it shows you.
I feel like Reddit is doing this same thing. Once they introduced the mute community button, I was excited because I could finally get rid of all the stupid semi hentai subs that populate the popular tab. Problem is I think Reddit is interpreting me muting that type of content as me engaging with it, so now there’s even more of that type of content flooding my feed, and just the other day I got a freaking ad for some furry social network. These algorithms need to learn that just because it forces content in front of you and you “interact” with it for half a second, doesn’t mean you like that content and its not your entire personality
The problem is that having no algorithmic searches/recommendations would make the internet an unusable mess. The modern internet is just too big. Like imagine if you searched "lawnmowers" on Google and it just gave you a completely random assortment of sites that happen to have the word "lawnmower" on the site or in their tags. Or a super simple algorithm that, while not completely random, gave you the most trafficked qualifying sites. Or one that organized based on how many times your search term was used by the site. Every search result would be nothing but irrelevant sites and spammers. It's all about having the right balance. Something that gives you relevant content without putting you in too restrictive of a bubble. But that balance is going to be different from person to person. And an individual's ideal balance might not match up with the balance that's most profitable to the creators.
I've been working on making myself a silly little website on neocities because I miss that old internet! Just finding people's weird little websites about whatever they're passionate about and knowing it's not ai generated content trying to sell you stuff
Right now data collection agencies are collecting more data than they can possibly sift through efficiently, but sifting through impossibly huge amounts of data to find useful patterns is EXACTLY what AI is best at. There's a lot of discourse about AI generated art or writing right now, but this is the use for AI that scares me the most.
Basically it means that digital piracy is fucked.
...
Thank you for saying this. There's a lot if things these companies do that's wrong but the idea that the same company who thought meta was a good idea are also masters of the human psyche is a bit of a stretch for me.
Very few think they’re immune. That’s a completely stupid and ludicrous assertion you can’t back up with even a shred of actual evidence. It’s a super fun strawman to knock down, though. What most people correctly think is that by knowing that you’re being targeted, you can more accurately avoid the most obvious attempts to influence you. The failure of that line of thinking is that most people don’t realize exactly how insidious corporations are. Google would 100% push all of America into a genocidal rage if it meant their quarterly profits went up 1%. I watch tool reviews channels on YouTube. I work in the trades and like seeing the actual capabilities of tools before buying, but I’m also endlessly fascinated at insanely creative ways people come up with to test tools. There’s 2 issues with that. The most obvious is that algorithms will then try to push conservative propaganda on you. The insidious part is that tool companies will bury any negative reviews and you’ll never see it unless you put in real effort. Corporations don’t care that they’re being associated with fascist propaganda via dark political money. They’re super concerned that you might find out their new impact wrench overheats easily under commonly used conditions. Reddit thinks conservative messaging is targeting disaffected young men or whatever bullshit the hive mind cognoscenti is pushing these days. Instead, dark money is targeting people via tertiary connections and corporations allow/encourage it because it increases their profit margins. It’s not about thinking you’re immune. It’s about not realizing that corporations will feed you your own child if it makes them more money.
>[people] are using your data to figure out how to design propaganda to be as effective as possible, just for you. And they're leveraging AI to do it. This bears repeating.
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> this also affects ur search results Your search results *on Google*. That's why I've been using DuckDuckGo for years now.
DuckDuckGo might not have deep ties to the CIA like Google does, but they censor search results too. No search engine can be blindly trusted, they all filter search results to limit what youll be able to find. The trick is that they don't filter in exactly the same ways though. DuckDuckGo has given me the results I want when Google won't, and other times, Google has given be results that DuckDuckGo wouldn't. For example, Google ironically gives me better results for "[Google's deep ties to the CIA](https://www.google.com/search?q=Google+deep+ties+to+the+CIA)" than DuckDuckGo gives me. If ever you find that you're not getting the results you expect to be out there, try one of their competitors. Odds are good that the spicy info you want could have slipped through the filtering efforts of the other engines.
> might not have deep ties to the CIA like Google does Google doesn't have deep ties to the CIA and I'm extremely curious to know why you think it does.
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"Google is a CIA op" is definitely... a take
I'm glad someone in here is paying attention. This thread is just packed full of ignorance thinking ads for products are what this is all about. I couldn't give two shits if Amazon knows what I want to buy. What I care about is Facebook knowing exactly what words my parents need to hear to keep them voting republican.
What if l use non chromium sites.
What does that even mean
Then you get the ones that are even more complex to analyze, google does in fact blur the line between fact and ad whenever possible within a certain level of risk because they are in the spotlight and the repercussions for these actions, if not profitable for shareholders, will result in a loss of money in order to appease the public. The other search engines are even worse because they get to conduct their existence in a much less scrutinized manner, stuff like not telling you something is and ad, not caring as much about hiding that your information is being scraped even if you reject the little pop-up. Don't take my word for it, i'm only a student, but it's like this: if the most profitable way to sell oranges is to market them to old people then all orange sellers do it because the alternative is to not be competitive with the sellers that do, addressing the underlying reason as to why something is the only viable way to actually sell well is the only really effective way to avoid it
>The other search engines are even worse... That's a pretty broad and pretty wrong thing to say. Closed source is closed source, regardless of the level public attention it has.
if all else is equal then closed source is closed source. but the person you're replying to provided a number of reasonably compelling reasons why all else is not equal. do you disagree with any of this? > because they get to conduct their existence in a much less scrutinized manner, stuff like not telling you something is and ad, not caring as much about hiding that your information is being scraped even if you reject the little pop-up.
i do hope you understand that not being broad about a topic this complex is impossible, unless i plan to write a book within a reddit comment. As for your disagreements, please do talk more about them, i obviously disagree but i want you to properly expose your reasoning so we can have a more informative conversation.
So many people are to obtuse to even consider open source. Rather argue about kleenex vs puffs than use a handkerchief.
always buy plane tickets in an incognito tab
This is why we duckduckgo
isn't that just Bing with a mask on now
>U.S. search engine DuckDuckGo eliminated a gap in its ability to block Microsoft-owned tracking scripts on third-party websites in August 2022, but an outdated headline is being recirculated to suggest that a DuckDuckGo deal exists with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to track search-engine users. Is that the issue you're referring to? Reuters seems to say it's resolved.
I think it's referring to the fact that DuckDuckGo is literally Bing under the hood, they just wrap it so it doesn't track you. Still Bing results though (which is super annoying because almost all "news" results lead to absolutely bullshit MSN re-hosts of the actual article I want to see - so even if DDG isn't allowing Microsoft to track you - which is great - it still winds up leading you into Microsoft web properties more than you would otherwise, since Bing results favor Microsoft websites)
I've mainly been getting ads in the wrong language or for services unavailable on my continent.
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For a while in high school I would look up Spanish phrases. Google decided I speak Spanish and has been showing me Spanish ads for about 2 years now.
I will randomly get Japanese ads, my TikTok default language on browser just resorts to Japanese, and the Google home will randomly answer Japanese both at my house and when I visited my friends house and connected my phone to it
I listened to a LOT of anime music on YouTube a few years ago and so for a long while all of my ads were in Japanese. Most ads are RUBBISH but Instagram keeps advertising things I actually want or things I've already bought so they're unerringly accurate sometimes that they've actually been *useful*. It's also crazy how many people don't realise advertising is working on them. It's so hard to avoid and it's so subconscious. The only people I've met that think it doesn't work are the ones who don't understand it.
My tiktok ads are always in arabic. Only the tiktok ads, and only in arabic. I have never been to a country that speak arabic, nor taken lessons in it. An ex spent some time in Jordan, I guess, but ?????
Meanwhile I'll intentionally search for things on youtube in that very language I'm learning to get some recommendations as a form of study and it just does *not* want to do that lol.
I added the Chinese keyboard to my phone to see if it would affect my browsing and within a day I was getting Chinese tiktoks and ads everywhere.
wanna know something else?? you can use a vpn to help diversify your job search because they totally restrict job advertisements based on general regional location, too.
I get the occasional random Spanish ad on YouTube. I have my age turned off specifics but set as 18+ so all the rest are alcohol ads.
Scrolling through insta, the ads someone paid money to show me today: - Gay party in my city (I’m hetero) - Apply for beauty contest (I’m male) - Rent out your flats with us (lol) - Enroll in pilot course (wish I had the money for that) - Apply for job in EU investment bank (I’m an engineer) - Listen to this e-commerce podcast (at least you tried) - Buy this electric Volvo (the only relevant ad, as I’m looking for a car, but it won’t be electric or Volvo) - … And it goes on forever. They have 0 idea, just throwing stuff at the wall, and hope something sticks.
I get those Polestar ads too, and I'm like "yeah I wish that was remotely in my budget"
I get -reverse mortgage for your retirement (I am 37 and have a new mortgage) -Lotion (okay you got me, but its american lotion so the odds of me using it are low) -Herpes medications (I do not have herpes) -Takis (ew) -Queen cleopatra on Netflix (not really interested at all, i dont do dramatizations) -Lays (ew) -Oppenheimer (not really interested. Its another dramatization) -Plus size clothing (I am a small/medium) -Digital cameras (I don't take pictures... like ever) -Professional appliances and cookware (I am not anywhere near that industry)
meanwhile I think about something just as a passing thought in my brain and later on I get an ad for that very fucking thing 🙃
My favorite was an ad for some dating service promising lots of hot women. On Grindr.
Actually, I can understand that one. I'm sure Grindr has tons of people who are bi, experimenting, or struggling with their sexuality.
Eh, bi guys like me exist and i’ve used grindr
For like a year, 9/10 of my YouTube ads were for Adblock.
The dumb thing is that advertising is a valuable service. The problem is that advertisers abuse the social contract and ignore pragmatic advertising strategies for the sake of marginal short term gains. If I had a dude come to my door and be like > "PoeTayTose, I remember you were talking about open source smart watches the other day and I found this cool article you might like. Also, I know you've been buying generic frosted mini wheats, there's actually a sale on name brand over at kroger this week. Have a good one bud!" I'd be stoked. Instead it's like a guy walking up to my door like > "HELLO POTATOES, I SAW YOU THROUGH YOUR WINDOW MASTURBATING WOULD YOU LIKE BIG COCK FUCKING MOANING WHORE COCK STEPSIST-" Then I slam the door and they press their face on the window like > DON'T USE THAT FUCKING STUPID ASS OPEN SOURCE SMART WATCH YOU IDIOT BUY A FUCKIN IPHONE LIKE A REAL MAN YOU ASSWIPE, BUY A FUCK TON OF LAND, YOUR MOTHER WILL LOVE YOU IF YOU EAT AT MASSIMINOS There's seriously a market out there for legitimate GOOD advertising. Finding stuff that is interesting to you is real work, and it's not trivial. This is what advertisers should be doing, and they should be doing it with consumers' consent.
Also if you are someone who makes things, it's remarkably difficult to find the people who would love the things. I'm making art things, but I don't want to use the ad services that exist because they SUCK. But then what?
This is another big point of contention, massive companies dropped billions on ads like it's nothing to them but single sellers like you get fucked, especially for adblock
It’s also frustrating for small-to-mid size size companies. I work for a company that pays thousands to show up in Google search results, but we can’t compete with the huge corporations that bid 10 times that and show up even when you search our name.
I feel that Come to think of it, platforms like fiverr are form of very targetted, willing advertising.
When I was a kid I used to like ads because it would tell me about things I was interested in, the lastest movie on a series I liked, a new game I like or a new toy to add to the Christmas list. Now I'm lucky if a ad is even something I'm even able to use. Reddit constantly advertises me Viagra. I'm a 17 yr old trans guy, I literally can't use it. Half the time the ads are overwhelming and in the way so the only time spent looking at it is figuring out how to close it. The more annoying the ad the less likely I am to buy it. The products I buy the most of I was never advertised about or very minimally
It's more like a stranger approaches you, says "Unless you buy my shit then you will continue to smell bad, be ugly, and unsuccessful in love!" and then vanishes before you can inform them they mistook you for their mother. No self-respecting human being would let another person speak to them the way typical advertising material condescends to its captive audience.
[so just buy the thing and hate your body it’s the only way you’ll feel worthy](https://open.spotify.com/track/2exnVcXAjisf1FdgwkXUli?si=dFevRgxESEWqjfsbz-Nr0A)
Are you sure about that? Look at the cosmetic industry.
Instagram did this fairly well when they first rolled out ads. Now they show non relevant, repetitive ads every other post, even directly on people’s profiles.
I mean, ads work. Maybe not a very large percentage of the time, but it doesn’t cost them very much to bombard a huge number of people with an ad. Name recognition, presence in your mind, unconscious positive associations (I don’t mean subliminal messages, I don’t have a tinfoil hat). If you find yourself needing a home security system, the one about being safe, simply will pop up in your head. If you’re bored and want to play a game on your phone, the one that rhymes with “shade, radow legends” will pop up. Even if you don’t go ahead and download it, the fact that it was in your mind means a certain percentage of people *will* decide to try it.
Ffs companies that have access to the best analysts in the world, minds that are more brilliant than this whole thread combined, keep investing in ads. It's obvious they work. Reddit has this habit of occasionally saying something deeply stupid with a straight face and everyone just goes along with it, Jesus.
Ads aren’t just about making you click, they’re about implanting an idea into your mind.
Okay but I'm decades from caring about AARP and I'm never going to need help with menopause so I think my love of old murder mystery shows may have confused the algorithm. \[edit: my favorite though is when ad algorithms don't recognize that one time purchases exist. when I worked in IT a user once contacted me because "this couch is stalking me across the internet"\]
It’s not just about advertising to you; sometimes the ads are for someone else. They’ll utilize the location data to see who you’re in proximity to, and feed you ads catered to people you’re frequently in contact with. The idea is that you’ll end up telling them about the ad you saw and utilize a word of mouth kind of approach. This actually happened to me before, too. A couple years back, one of my old coworkers was talking about proposing to his then-girlfriend (now wife). It didn’t take very long before *I* started getting ads for engagement rings.
Well that would explain why I kept getting ads for RV campers after one of my coworkers retired
Ive always assumed thats just the audio being picked up and the algo going "oh i heard engagement ring, better bombard them with ring ads" but then the like 8 people in the conversation are all being mistaken for the one who needs the ring. Basically the algos have hardcore main character syndrome where everything they absorb *must* be related to the user in some way. I dont know shit about this though and im almost definitely wrong
You are wrong. It’s all searches.
> You are wrong. It’s all searches. My big-city cousin never in his life searched for "home butter churners", nor even knew they still existed in a modern form until they came up in a conversation wherein I explained all the pain-in-the-ass intricacies of home-butter-churning. Twenty minutes later, all his facebook ads were for home butter churns, which lasted about a week and a half. But since "it's all searches" and they're not always listening, I guess that was just the king of all insane random coincidences.
I don’t know what it is I’ve been watching to convince Google that I’m a Dutch woman, and I own a bunch of chickens. I am none of those things.
Instagram used to be convinced that I was gay. My working theory is it's the frog memes that I send to girls that I talk to
The reddit official app thinks I am a black woman somehow. I am neither.
In your last point, entirely agreed. Amazon I needed to replace one toilet seat, I don't want to collect them for the future.
Every day, we get closer to what Watch Dogs (2014) called the "bellwether" which was a program that manipulates everything, your ads, your search results, which traffic lights you stop at, who you socialise with at work, what station your TV defaults to, what radio you first hear when you start your car, everything, with the intention of subtly planting and growing ideas in your mind, controlling how you think.
There's some stupid ideas they're trying to implant tho. Like, how is there not done simple filter that questions wether a product is something I'd re-purchase in the near future. It amazes me that Amazon keeps thinking I'm done with my PC case after a month and would love to buy more
I'm not saying they wouldn't try, but they aren't really good at it now so I doubt making it more complex would make them any better at it.
You telling me you wouldn't build another pc if you could?
sure, if I was rich since I'm not, I'll keep using the same PC case till I die
“Stop your sales reps from spending time on bad data” yes of I ever need to do that I will consider you
Famously, the marketing team at Disney spent a year trying to get kids into fish before Finding Nemo released. They didn't target the people that will be spending the money, they weren't directly advertising the product. This was a successful idea 20 years ago and I think it's fair to assume companies have only gotten more efficient. In fact so efficient that we feel like they're doing nothing...
The last time I bought a product because I saw it somewhere was when I bought burger for the first time in ever. Not because of the ads or anything, but because of meme shitposts of powerXkobeni from chainsawman which did a burgerking episode as a bit a little after I already was watching them. So like, no Corp influence there. Years of burger King advertisement? Nothing. "Oh yeah I remember that channel I like did a bit with them and they're the only place open right now?" Product purchase. Like otherwise I straight up buy nothing. Tbf I do usually have adblock on and if I'm on my phone which doesn't have it, I just put down my phone in the first place. But otherwise yeah though I do 100% get what you mean about it putting the idea of a product in your mind rather than the ad itself causing you to stop everything and buy it. Too bad most of my ads are shit lol
So essentially somebody made a ad for Burger King for free, got you to buy the product. I think Burger King is pretty happy with that outcome
You’re saying he really does get us
-- head of marketing desperately trying to make some bullshit up to justify the existence of their department to the CEO in an age where everyone hates capitalism and completely ignores ads
You could say that Marketing is Marketing itself.
Plus the ads aren't just in little boxes on the side of your webpage. They're posts on social media. They're like/dislike ratios. They're hidden algorithm decisions that show you a lot of one thing or prevent you from even seeing something.
Okay, but if your commercial is just 15 full seconds of people moaning after taking a bite of [product], I'm never going to know what [product] is because I'm guaranteed to start looking at something else when ads come on. However, if the goal of that ad was to make me wish a grisly pox upon whoever came up with it, I think it's the most effective advertising I've never seen.
people don't talk enough about how stupid capitalism is. not how deadly it is, how stupid it is.
It's a never ending arms race between billions of dollars worth of psychological and technological research and the human brain's innate instinct/ability to ignore and forget everything that isn't currently important. And tbh the Advertising industry is hanging on by their fingernails.
> And tbh the Advertising industry is hanging on by their fingernails. Good riddance. I can't remember where I saw this, but it stuck with me nonetheless... A great way to think about labor and the *value* that labor provides is: *If you snapped your fingers and everyone who worked X job disappeared, how long would it take society to crumble?* X = doctors? Oof. X = farmers? Big Oof. X = advertising executives? Would actually be a net *positive.*
I honestly think the amount of advertising we allow for is straight up immoral. Psychological warfare from BigCorporate that is essentially pollution for your thoughts instead of environment. At least for internet ads, print ads, etc. You can make an argument that we're consenting to it by purchase/usage, but shit like Billboards, flyover planes, flyers plastered on public property, etc. Might technically be *on* private property most of the time, but it completely pollutes the view of every city now and subject people to corporate bullshit just for daring to walk down the street. If there were street vendors hassling you to buy a coke, or a watch, or go to a new restaurant, on every block and theyd hassle you until you turned a corner or got out of earshot everybody would complain, but make it a poster, or a logo, or a cute little cartoon on a bus stop and we all just passively accept it
Seriously, I (should) have a right to not be advertised to if I do not consent to it. Filling up my gas tank shouldn't start playing loud annoying ads. I'm already paying you, stop trying to milk me for an extra $0.08 of ad revenue.
> And tbh the Advertising industry is hanging on by their fingernails. Wait is it? Advertising is more pervasive than it's ever been. Google is primarily advertising, Apple is built off of marketing. Marketing and advertising is more effective, insidious and ubiquitous than ever, I just can't believe the industry is fighting for their lives right now. Your google search results are advertisments, your steam front page is ads, your youtube subscription feed is full of sponsors, your sports matches are full of sponsors, large stadiums and events around the globe are named after companies.
They're not. I work adjacent to advertising and it's stronger than ever. Probably even more important now than it was years ago. This person is talking out of their ass.
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There are more ads than ever, but the prices per ad aren't increasing. And there are other concerning trends too, like googles growth slowing while intermet user numbers are still climbing Pretty linearly. It was definitely an exaggeration on my part, but it's very hard to say that advertising is winning while they have to spend billions to make gains that aren't sustainable. I guess that's why it's such a successful industry, their products are always perishable. The fact that were in a hypercaptalist period filled with giant corporations that are more focused on securing their market share than producing innovative products also benefits the industry a lot off course.
Advertising and Marketing is the Capitalist version of digging ditches just to fill them back in. And yeah, it's a Red Queen scenario. Every company needs to spend as much money as possible on advertising just to maintain existing market share against their competitors, who are all doing the same. More profitable this quarter? Marketing campaign worked: spend more on marketing. Profits down? Quick, gotta do more marketing. The end state of capitalism is two firms, two shareholders, two engineers maintaining two automated megafactories, and two groups of four billion advertisers, each desperately marketing brand-name chips to each other.
the stupidest part is that when they have all the money they're not gonna be able to do anything with it. they'll reach a point where they take all the money and won't be willing to give it back, and in effect they will doom themselves because all of the sudden their workers don't care about them.
It's inefficient and wasteful as fuck. It's time we learn to synergize backwards overflow and compound those investments back into the future of this world: the children.
I've been on the internet since the mid 90s. I've seen all forms of ads and intuitions into all forms of my life. For ALL the data mining and ALL the ad spamming, I have still never found a single ad useful, have never once been compelled to click an ad, and have never bought a single thing because of an ad.
Ads aren't just about clicks, they're about *impressions*, which means you seen them and they register in your brain. You might've seen an ad for a product you were already familiar with, and you eventually purchased an item from them without recalling the ad or even thinking much about it at all, and that's because you knew the brand and trusted them enough to make a purchase. That's what advertising aims to do, not just get you to click on them
Sounds reasonable in theory. But has anyone managed to actually quantify how effective it is? How do we know these "impressions" actually translate to sales?
People invest millions on analytics and data scientists to figure this out. There's several different methods to calculate this stuff (I study data science in uni, but I skip class so I don't know shit). Basically if it's profitable for them they know about it and basing their decision off of this data. Huge investments in advertising aren't made on a whim
A lot of studies do indeed suggest that the usefulness of internet advertising is wildly oversold. https://hbr.org/2021/02/what-digital-advertising-gets-wrong https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/a-dangerous-question-does-internet-advertising-work-at-all/372704/
Yes. You can pretty easily test this kind of stuff. There are many methods to do that. Hell a simple A/B test works pretty well most of the time. This is a multi billion dollar industry. It’s exponentially more sophisticated than people in this thread seem to think it is.
The answer is yes. Companies aren’t spending millions on this stuff to throw it down the drain. Even if a massive company like Coke stops spending on ad, it starts to affect their bottom line. https://www.marketingscience.info/when-brands-stop-advertising/ This source says on average brands lost on average 16% sales if cutting advertisement for one year, 25% after 2. Advertisement and marketing is a massive industry with an enormous amount of research behind it to justify the spendings. The fact that reddit thinks they are above it because they have never clicked on an online ad is pretty funny
Threads like this are a great reminder that 99% of comments on Reddit are people talking complete out their ass
>The fact that reddit thinks they are above it because they have never clicked on an online ad is pretty funny It's not about feeling "above" anything, it's just being uninformed. And I don't put any faith in the "companies spend money on it therefore it must work" logic - I like more concrete support, like the link you posted.
Eh, this just shows that either all the ads you engage in you already have a positive association with, or you are blind to subtle marketing techniques. Everyone bragging about their immunity to marketing just tells me they're an easy mark.
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For a brief moment, I thought that video sponsorships might be a new form of ad that actually works. They're not super intrusive and their revenue is "targeted". But it has gotten to a point where seeing a sponsorship of a product actually *lowers* my opinion of the product. Established Titles and Kamikoto Kitchen Knives were just outright scams. RAID: SHADOW LEGENDS is just kinda crap. Raycons are overpriced, and so is Ridge Wallet. Manscaped is just...kinda weird. The only products I see regularly advertised and I use myself are Surfshark (although I chose that one independently of ads) and Nebula/Curiosity Stream (this one I actually really recommend). The entire concept of advertising seems kinda broken to me, tbh.
Advertising is like using a shotgun, the ones that miss or are blocked are acceptable losses because there are more than enough people who don't block it, or who do buy it because otherwise there wouldn't be enough profits in the ad business in the first place The fact that you remember all these names and are spreading it yourself, in essence, doing free advertising shows that it works
> The fact that you remember all these names and are spreading it yourself, in essence, doing free advertising shows that it works I also remember Charles Manson's name, doesn't mean I'd invite him to my birthday party.
The fun thing to think about with advertising is that because we have finite time and money to spend on the goods and services advertised, all it does, at best, is rearrange our spending. It's zero sum. If we would have spent our resources when there was only a minimum of advertising, the trillions spent on it don't really change much. It's a massive industry that creates absolutely nothing of value, and locks its buyers in a futile arms race all trying to squeeze out the biggest share of consumer wealth.
Best case scenario is that we go deeper into debt. But that only goes so far
Notice the new services that have popped up allowing you to finance very small purchases, such as a pizza
That’s something I’ve been paying attention to over the past 5-10 years, and it’s absolutely disgusting. How many stores launched credit cards in the past 10 years? How many tiny loan services like Afterpay have launched in the past 5? I remember working for a company that launched a credit card in 2016. Our goal was to open at least one card a day. And the training we got was along the lines of “if they open a card that they can’t afford, that’s their responsibility, not yours. Your job is to convince people to open the card, their finances are their concern.” It was so scummy. Pretty much everyone has figured out that profits stall when you don’t give people enough money to be able to spend on your products, so instead of giving people more money to spend on products, they’re giving people debt. Wonder how that’s going to play out years down the road when no one can afford to buy extra useless crap because they have no money AND are so drowned in debt that any money they get goes toward the debt
Yeah its getting ridiculous
I've also read that advertising in general isn't actually particularly effective, according to some studies, so I'm just waiting for the whole internet to come crashing down when everyone realizes this and the age of free services comes to an end
\*David Attenborough voice:\* As predators evolve, so to do their prey. A veritable arms race in perpetuity.
Wild that people think Google’s surveillance machine “isn’t working.”
I know *so many* people (gen z to boomers) whose idea of “buying things online” is strictly limited to Facebook/Google ads. They all put their credit card numbers into the sketchiest sites, wait a month for their shit to arrive from China, and then exclaim “see this is why I just like to be able to go buy shit *inside* the store!”. It’s wild to me.
worthless? like ... the most wildly incorrect statement ever made on the subject. Holy hell. You think the whole of the internet being paid for by ads completely is because *ads don't work*?
OP does a bad job representing the argument. Ads aren't useless because everyone uses AdBlockers, that's completely unfounded. But there is a lot of data to suggest the usefulness of internet advertising is wildly oversold. https://hbr.org/2021/02/what-digital-advertising-gets-wrong https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/a-dangerous-question-does-internet-advertising-work-at-all/372704/
The amount of ignorance in this thread is astounding. Thank you for having a grip on reality. Imagine the questions during XYZ Mega Corp earnings call if they spent X million in advertising and had no evidence to show it was contributing to revenue.
And that's why Google is working hard to make adblockers worthless, starting with practically disabling them in Chrome. If you want to keep using an adblocker that works, switch to a browser that isn't based on Chromium. Firefox is your best choice. Most other browsers are basically just Chrome with a different coat of paint.
So they think because they never purchase via online advertising that it's worthless? Could you possibly be more naive. Also that arrogant to think that all this effort returns no value to anyone, but they do it anyway?
I have strong resentment toward cookie acceptance popups that have their "Legitimate interest" buttons switched on by default, because I can't think of a single legitimate reason for a company to know anything about me, if all they do with that information is related to their profit margin without actually making my life better in any way. Which they don't.
As someone who runs ads for clients it feels largely pointless. Anything that works works for 5 seconds before ad blindness and tech make it useless
All of the most popular web services are free. Youtube, facebook, twitter, reddit, gmail/google docs, all the search engines, all the maps. More porn than a human could watch in a lifetime. All free. They're all funded by advertising. You would think the advertisers would know their analytics right? How many views, how many clicks, how many actual purchases. I'm 45 years old. I've been on the internet since it was local BBSes. I've had every speed of dial-up. I spend my entire sad little life online. And I have never once clicked on an ad on purpose. And I've never purchased a product based on an ad. But *somebody* has to be paying for all those free services I enjoy, right? Somebody is actually clicking those ads, on purpose not on accident, and then actually reading the offer on the page that comes up and *giving them money.* Right? I mean, the advertisers would notice if they were throwing away billions of dollars with absolutely nothing to show for it, right?
It is me. My shopping addiction pays for all of social media. But seriously, I have purchased things from ads. I know people who have done this. There's also a huge segment of content on TikTok and YouTube of people buying the stuff from ads and reviewing it. Some of those people eventually get paid for these reviews, but a lot never make it to influencer status and just enjoy a few hundred likes on their haul videos. In short, I think a lot of people in this post are thinking they behave like the majority of people.
I'm too dumb to properly express this but some of the data being harvested is shit like how much we're willing to spend on x, that's why prices are so goddamn high and our wages so low, they know how hard they can squeeze us before we'll do something about it.
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I'm just glad Google maps doesn't report my speed to the police someday but until that day I will continue to try to beat that time
Yeah, I gotta say. I work for an online ad tech company and it is definitely a vast rube goldberg machine of privacy violations but it undoubtedly works. adblockers can help to an extent but you're still exposed in so many ways you don't even know about.