[throwaway342526]

Most people do not behave as you claim to. Advertising really does work. It's rational and has well-demonstrated ROI.

You're either an outlier in terms of behavior, or you're not offering an honest representation of how you react to ads.

[TeMPOraL]

It's not rational, it's silly. It's a tragedy of commons problem coupled with a feedback loop - companies waste ever increasing amount of money, fuel, and man power, supporting a whole bullshit job industry in oder to compete with each other over a limited pool of attention and wallets AND at the same time they turn whole Internet into a cesspool. If you look at it globally, it's insanity.

[manigandham]

It seems like you're just saying that because you don't like them.

The ad industry is not full of idiots, it's got an impressive amount of technology and data behind it proving the ROI on every side.

You have not uncovered some kind of mass conspiracy. I'd strongly recommend you either talk to people in the industry or read up on the technology and results available.

[TeMPOraL]

I'm not postulating a conspiracy. I'm only pointing out the resource-wasting zero-sum game which drives most of the advertising. I'm not denying that ads have effect. Of course they have. But what matters is marginal effect, which generally stays constant, because there is only so many things one can buy, and so many attention one can spare.

Also, I worked alongside people in ad industry and I'm very happy I escaped it. I've seen how things are done and I'm not pleased. I don't think ad industry is full of idiots - it's not the smarts I am disputing, it's the morals.

[Nursie]

For a good illustration of some of the points you make - when tobacco advertising was banned in the UK, profits went up markedly because demand remained the same and there was no longer the massive outlay.

[Nursie]

I'm sure it does work across populations, but I'm also pretty sure I'm part of a growing demographic who are finding every way they can to opt out of it because they're sick of it.

As I say, I do find this and patreon interesting, and may sign up. I already get most of my tv and movies through subscriptions to streaming services where I don't have to see any ads.

[smtddr]

>>I'm also pretty sure I'm part of a growing demographic who are finding every way they can to opt out of it because they're sick of it.

I think you're very wrong here. I suspect only a small part of the echo-chamber techies might think this way. The general public only hates ads when they're shown as those crazy multiple pop-up windows + auto-playing flash ads with audio.

Otherwise, people do click... or tune them out(but subconsciously, the ad is in their head)

[Nursie]

I'm pretty sure it's growing, at least on the web, if it were not we wouldn't see stories about adblockers hurting revenues.

The general public in the USA may be more inured to constant ads, I'm not sure that holds everywhere, and as ad-free services like netflix grow I think we'll see more people start to become more conscious of advertising.

[crdoconnor]

Advertising only has to work on a fraction of the population for it to have a positive ROI.

Penis pill emails have a well demonstrated ROI as well.

[greenleafjacob]

> has well demonstrated ROI

Actually, that is not as clear cut as one might expect [1].

[1]: http://justinmrao.com/lewis_rao_nearimpossibility.pdf

[asuffield]

Having worked at and with small companies that rely on advertising to overcome obscurity and get business to their products - modern analytics tools have pretty much got this problem solved, the marketing people knew and actively tracked their ROI on a daily basis and were shuffling limited funding around between various forms of advertising to optimise sales.

Every time I see somebody claiming that advertising doesn't work, I just think that there's another person who has never tried to run a small online business.

[bduerst]

That paper talks about how advertising experiments require larger-than-expected sample sizes to calculate ROI, because the signals are more diluted.

It also doesn't specify mediums of advertising, because of confidentiality agreements, but hints that it included mediums such as television and billboards which are traditionally harder to track. I don't think it's shocking that out of home media is hard to statistically track ROI on.