[simias]

I've been considering buying a 3D printer lately. I don't have a lot of experience in the domain and I'm not sure where to start, so clearly I'm actively looking about information regarding 3D printers.

What I'm definitely not looking for is ads. Actually I try to avoid anything that might remotely look like one, from official websites (obviously) to comparisons of 3D printers that look like they could be biased one way or an other. Because obviously every company selling 3D printers is going to tell you that theirs is the best you could ever find. Even if they don't outright lie they'll put the emphasis on their strong points while conveniently forgetting to mention the drawbacks.

I really think ads are useless from a consumer perspective. I can believe that there was a time where the best way to reach potential buyers was buying an ad in the newspaper but with the ultra-connected society we're in it's just a waste. Make a great product, send it to a bunch of influential bloggers in the market share you target to review and if it's good the word of mouth will do the rest.

In a society where you can find reviews and recommendations for basically anything online, why on earth would I ever want to see ads? If you need to convince your potential customers that they need your product by spamming them, maybe your product is not that useful in the first place.

Of course the dark side of this is that of course marketing has caught on, now we have "native advertising" and people getting paid to pretend that they like something.

[yorwba]

I think ads are useless when you want to decide within a product category ("Which 3D printer should I buy?") but they can help you become aware of it in the first place ("There are affordable 3D printers now? Maybe I should get one.")

Unfortunately the majority of the consumer market revolves around a few common products and so most ads are about shifting revenue between functionally identical brands.

But I do occasionally see ads for relatively obscure stuff that might cause such an "I didn't know that existed." experience for other people. (I'm apparently hard to target.) For example https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=viva64.com are essentially ads, but they are still interesting to read, and afterwards you might be in the market for a code analysis tool.

[kromem]

You always see high conversion rates for new ad mediums, and those rates reduce over time as marketers abuse consumer's attention.

One of my favorite examples is Amazon reviews. Once you a time, those were legit and you'd see consumers referencing online reviews for products even if buying the product in a store physically, because it was valuable content.

Now, the reviews are so untrustworthy there are multiple sites that automate going through them to flag BS.

The unfortunate thing is that even after an ad medium becomes ignored by the majority of an audience, there's still an audience that's one to two standard deviations below the norm in suggestability that get preyed upon by advertisers. So it's those people that are the 0.1% clicking on general banner ads and purchasing a product. These are the same people that "call now" for those late night TV marketing commercials.

So the cycle for any ad medium is to get the attention of an audience, abuse it until most people stop paying attention, and then prey on the suggestably handicapped. It's a shitty industry, and quite unfortunate as if everyone could agree to not be awful, the fundamental feedback loop is one intrinsically motivated (find out about crap I'm highly likely to enjoy). But we're talking about a class of organizations (corporations) that can't even self regulate when lives and health are on the line, so that's certainly not going to happen for ads.

[falcor84]

>...people getting paid to pretend that they like something

If I remember my history correctly, this is how the very first radio sponsorships started as.