[ogre_codes]

> Ads/marketing budgets create employment that would otherwise not be there.

Whether something creates jobs or not doesn't make it a net good. Would you suggest Ransomware is good? Because it also creates jobs. As do Nigerian email scams and Ponzi schemes. "Creating Jobs" doesn't mean something is good for society.

> You are also sort of missing the point. We are trying to make ads relavant for everyone, but even if it's relavant, you don't click on everything you see.

Apparently you are missing the point here. Whether you see it or not, Facebook and google's marketplaces by nature serve advertisers, not me. Advertisers don't give a damn what advertising is "most relevant" to me. What they care about is which demographics are most profitable to their brands.

> We are trying to make ads relavant for everyone

So long as Google and Facebook put the advertisers in control of who sees their advertising, any assertion that the system is designed to serve us is bullshit. People don't see advertising that is relevant, they see advertisements from the people who pay google/ Facebook to see their message. Those two things are not equivalent and never will be.

[tehlike]

Advertisers don't give a damn what advertising is "most relevant" to me. -> They certainly do, indirectly - that'd mean they get better ROI on their investment.

But think of it this way. You are getting a service, you are paying either directly or indirectly through ads.

Facebook wouldn't be a thing if it were a paid product from get go. It'd probably even lose a major part of its user base if it became a paid product overnight.

Like i said, i would love if i can pay for a product i am benefiting from, but it's not always possible.

[disgruntledphd2]

> So long as Google and Facebook put the advertisers in control of who sees their advertising, any assertion that the system is designed to serve us is bullshit

But they don't put advertisers in control of who sees their ads.

If you look at audience sizes on FB, and then run some direct response ads on that audience, you'll notice that you only ever reach maybe 10% of that audience.

This is because what FB/Goog are good at is figuring out which ads are likely to get someone to click and/or convert, and show only those ads.

The dirty secret is that those people might have converted anyway.

One can measure this with an attribution model, but the trouble is that the two biggest players Google and Facebook have very little incentive to co-operate, so all attribution models are extremely biased.

tl;dr the advertisers set boundaries on who should see the ad, but they don't control who the ads get served to.