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Advertisers are suckers. Facebook and YouTube are selling ads to people who have already bought their product.

• ravenstine 9y ago
  In a sense, they are suckers. Plus, as another story on HN suggested, their abandonment of advertising you things you don't need right now(but you may find you want later in life) proves counterproductive. A heck of a lot of things advertised to me on Facebook are things I already searched for and either purchased or already decided wasn't worth buying. I don't believe that modern internet ads are as valuable as the industry seems to think, which may be a sign of an impending bubble burst.
  • londons_explore 9y ago
    Internet ads are far more measurable than most other forms of advertising. The advertiser certainly has all the data necessary to see if it's profitable or not to do those seemingly counterintuitive ad campaigns.
    • sharkmerry 9y ago
      except the data is controlled by the entity selling you the ad, so they have reasons to make the profitablity difficult to discern
      • sobani 9y ago
        But still, when you advertise X to people who searched for X' (or even X itself), you can see the conversion rates of those ads, right? And you should be able to measure if that setup is profitable or not.
• sharkmerry 9y ago
  im bombarded with ads for Ecwid. a product i purchased and have used for 5 years. I feel bad, they must have spent more on ads than I actually pay them.