[ben_w]

> achieved great success with ad-based business models because of the ability to target ads better

There's an old saying in advertising, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the trouble is I don’t know which half." - https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/04/11/advertising/

The supposed benefit of the current model is to find and eliminate that wasted half.

Facebook has shown me ads for dick pills and boob surgery, ads I can't read because I don't know the Cyrillic alphabet, and ads for services that only apply to citizens of nations I've never been a citizen of who moved to a country I had in fact moved out of.

The reports I hear from people who buy ad slots are mostly unimpressed with the results; the word on the grapevine is that the "success" cases are not even average customers, but those who are vulnerable to getting scammed.

[xp84]

There are lots of ads that don't work, but I can tell you from experience that there are a lot that do. A company I worked for a couple jobs ago basically just added a new pretty color of a clothing item, then ran ads with models wearing it on Instagram (targeted to female, right age range and income level) and the resulting cost per conversion was way below our margin. It was incredibly easy. What made it work though was how the Meta algorithm understood which of the users in that broad filter was into stuff like we were selling, based on all their on-platform activity.

I suspect hackers are far tougher to target - it's kind of a special case.

[inigyou]

Megagiantcorp Proctor & Gamble cancelled all internet advertising, with no loss in sales.

[xp84]

That proves little though. Their ads would be brand advertising anyway, notoriously hard to measure. Just "Don't forget Coca-Cola exists!" and you can accomplish the same with billboards or in-store advertising.

The ads that perform online are the direct response type.