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by coder-3 1525 days ago
It's case-by-case. You can calculate whether ads are worth it for what you're selling by using cost per click, conversion rate and customer lifetime value.

My general sense is that paid ads is still valuable for niche markets as the ad will be cheaper and ad platforms allow quite specific targeting (they do gather huge amounts of data after all). It's probs too expensive for big competitive markets.

As an aside, it's quite risky to rely too much of paid ads as your business becomes subordinate to the whims of Google, Facebook etc.