[3rodents]

but that’s not really true. You’re not paying, you’re bidding. You are competing against thousands of other advertisers for eyeballs. If you are the only advertiser targeting a group of people, you will spend almost nothing to advertise. If you are targeting a group of people that everyone targets (e.g: rich people in their 30s) you will pay through the nose.

Facebook, Google etc. are the most “fair” forms of advertising. We can dislike advertising, their influence, product etc. but when you compare them to almost every other type of advertising, they’re the best for advertisers.

The reason they generate so much revenue is because they are so accessible and because they are so easy to account for. The reason LTV and CAC are so widely understood by businesses today is because of what Google, Facebook etc. offer.

[pclmulqdq]

No financial market would be able to run the way Google and Facebook run their ad markets. They are the supplier, the exchange, and the broker all at the same time. This is not a competitive market. It's a captured one where the supplier effectively gets to set their price, and the exchange and the broker incentivize and advise you to trade at that price.

[93po]

Google has famously and repeatedly rigged this bidding system in anti-competitive ways and has had to pay billions in fines because of it (which I am sure were less than the amount they profited from)