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this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Technology
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Why the fuck are ads even profitable? Seriously? Who actually sees an ad and thinks "I'm going to buy this product"? When I see an ad I think "fuck you" and I'm less likely to buy their product.
They’re paying for a portion of your attention. They’re slowly building an association with their product such that when you finally get around to buying say a VPN subscription your first thought is “Nord.”
It’s not going to affect everyone the same, for instance my thoughts on VPNs are “anything but Nord”; but they only need a fraction of users to develop a positive association with their brand.
Nord's cheap and keeps my ISP off my ass for torrenting. That's all I need.
so do 100 other options, though.
but nord is a huge advertising spender so it's what most people associate with 'vpn'
I looked through a bunch of options and Nord was the cheapest though, so it was the actual service that sold me on it not the ads. Unless something cheaper has come along since, that was ~2 years ago.
You'd be surprised. Advertisers wouldn't be running the ads if they didn't have positive ROI (that is, the value they get from the ads is larger than what they paid for them). A good ROI is usually at least 5x (that is, for every dollar the advertiser spends on ads, they make five dollars). Google's estimates are even higher at 8x:
(source: https://economicimpact.google/methodology/)
Retargeting ads - the ones where you view a product somewhere then see ads for it on Google, Facebook, etc - are especially successful. They have a very good clickthrough rate since the product is already something the user expressed interest in.
They’re everywhere to the point where I wish I had an adblocker built into my eyeballs. Watching NHL there’s ads on the ice, the jerseys, the helmets, popping in from the sides, overlaying the score etc. it’s so out of control and that’s just one thing.
Either it’s a giant pyramid scheme that keeps getting money funnelled into it or if this shit really just works. The sheer amount of money spent on it is absurd, sometimes as much as the budget of some movies to promote said movies.