[pbiggar]

Not only are there definitely people who click ads, but there are people _like us_ who click ads.

All the dev tool companies run ads! CircleCI runs them, but the dozen or so other dev tool companies where I know the founders or early hires also run ads. You would think given comments like this on HN that they would be useless, but we all run the numbers. The numbers say that not only are they effective, but that usually we should run more of them.

It's like when people here say "oh I hate talking to salespeople". Yet, salespeople make the world go around.

[Terretta]

Buyers make the world go round. Salespeople make commissions.

[tjoff]

Or, they just don't have the slightest clue...

"Everyone is doing it, must be good."

I believe this summarizes the ad industry quite well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TysKyHXXtYQ

[pbiggar]

Did you not read my comment? If you did read my comment, why would you write this one?

[tjoff]

Thought it was pretty clear that I didn't buy into yours.

I guess you could rephrase your comment as this: People who run ads believe ads works.

As an outsider that is not very convincing.

[nkurz]

People who run ads believe ads works.

Even then, I think you are being too generous. The stricter criterion is something like: "People who run more ads believe they will personally benefit from running more ads."

Ideally (and occasionally) this means that ad buyer believes the company as a whole will benefit from the advertising. But even if this belief is real, if the influence or income of the decision maker correlates positively with increasing spending on ads (and decreases with cutbacks) it can be difficult to distinguish belief from reality.

[sundvor]

All this talk about "belief" like it's religion or something. It's reasonably feasible to get hard, scientific numbers that prove the effectiveness of advertising spend. Ie tracing click throughs vs conversion rate.