[drdaeman]

If ads would have actually worked as preached by the industry, ad blockers wouldn't exist. ;)

But it's Google's and Facebook's best interest to make people believe that they do, no matter the reality.

What they actually do is increase sales by some measurable margin (not always great, but not zero either), while causing all sorts of negative effects (spam, scam, misinformation, all those "influencers" and "engagement" farming causing mental fatigue) that are just waived away and/or swiped under the rug of ignorance by the industry adepts.

Scroll back ten years - even back then Google and Facebook made people believe in a literal myth that they're so Big Data they know people better than they do themselves (I kid you not, I heard this cliche way too many times), when in fact their best systems had extremely limited knowledge of both the audience (like very basic demographics that are not even always accurate) and advertised products (a few pieces of metadata at best). Heck, even modern LLMs have limited awareness so they struggle to make sensible recommendations a lot of time (and are extremely expensive for use in advertising at scale) and I'm talking about orders of magnitude simpler "targeting" systems back then.

Advertisement industry literally preaches advertisement, because their very well-being (aka market valuation) depends on it. I'm (a nobody internet weirdo) hold an opinion that it harms society more than it does it good by boosting the economy.

[nj5rq]

> I (a nobody internet weirdo) hold an opinion that it harms society more than it does it good by boosting the economy.

I agree with that, but precisely because of how effective they are on manipulating people into consuming and wasting their time.

[satvikpendem]

Have you actually ran any Google or Facebook ads? I have, for my target market, and I made more money in return than I spent on ads, so obviously it works, by definition of these companies existing, independent of whatever the companies say themselves.

[drdaeman]

Of course it does. Advertisements, as a general concept, have an effect of driving customers to sales (simply because it creates awareness about the product, when there was none) - I'm not arguing it doesn't.

But Google's approach is questionable. Yes, they make money, but that's not the only effect the have. They pushed this story about targeted ads, it literally became a heroic myth blown (stories of what's really some cost-shaving statistic optimizations got blown out of proportions and became preached like all this crazy Big Data hoarding is the only way to go), and that had quite severe negative effects on the whole world - so I'm not sure those revenue increases were worth it.

I think, I need to think it more through.