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You're tricked if you think so yourself, all the small businesses measure it and that is why FB and Google are so rich. Its like saying you're been tricked to t

You're tricked if you think so yourself, all the small businesses measure it and that is why FB and Google are so rich. Its like saying you're been tricked to think computers are useful for your productivity, it's insanity. You can argue if big corps spending just to keep coca cola on in front of your eyes is useful or not. To what extent but that's entirely different conversation. When was the last time you died? Death still exists.

kbos87 5y ago
Agree completely. The sentiment that this is all a shell game and advertisers are being completely manipulated always seems to come from people who don’t have much domain expertise. I’d be quick to throw digital advertising to the wolves but the reality is that it’s extremely effective. Is there a level of opacity? Yes. Are there tranches of junk traffic and ineffective tools put forth by the ad networks? Absolutely. But these are problems at the margins, and don’t invalidate the fact that advertising on Google and Facebook in particular are very effective, and measurable to enough of an extent that it makes sense to keep doing it and growing your level of investment. The majority of advertisers both large and small get that they can’t let the quest for perfection in advertising attribution be the enemy of progress.
- mdoms 5y ago
  No one is saying "advertising doesn't work". We're saying that massively targeted invasive advertising is not significantly more effective than content based advertising. There's plenty of evidence for this assertion.
  - amirhirsch 5y ago
    Provide some evidence then. Half of the people on this forum can contradict your comment from experience.
    - mdoms 5y ago
      https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/targeted-ads-offer-little-extra-value-for-online-publishers-study-suggests/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/targeted-ads-offer-little-...
- merrywhether 5y ago
  > You are being manipulated and abused just like the consumers you are targeting Their first sentence was more correct: consumers are also getting value and the question is more whether the true cost is worth the benefit. For some people it definitely is, especially those who are skeptical and thus learn/measure/etc themselves. For others they give away far more than they get. For society/humanity as a whole it’s an open question, even more so once you start to include the second-order effects (in both directions, good and bad).

kbos87 5y ago

Agree completely. The sentiment that this is all a shell game and advertisers are being completely manipulated always seems to come from people who don’t have much domain expertise. I’d be quick to throw digital advertising to the wolves but the reality is that it’s extremely effective. Is there a level of opacity? Yes. Are there tranches of junk traffic and ineffective tools put forth by the ad networks? Absolutely. But these are problems at the margins, and don’t invalidate the fact that advertising on Google and Facebook in particular are very effective, and measurable to enough of an extent that it makes sense to keep doing it and growing your level of investment. The majority of advertisers both large and small get that they can’t let the quest for perfection in advertising attribution be the enemy of progress.

mdoms 5y ago
No one is saying "advertising doesn't work". We're saying that massively targeted invasive advertising is not significantly more effective than content based advertising. There's plenty of evidence for this assertion.
- amirhirsch 5y ago
  Provide some evidence then. Half of the people on this forum can contradict your comment from experience.
  - mdoms 5y ago
    https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/targeted-ads-offer-little-extra-value-for-online-publishers-study-suggests/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/targeted-ads-offer-little-...
merrywhether 5y ago
> You are being manipulated and abused just like the consumers you are targeting Their first sentence was more correct: consumers are also getting value and the question is more whether the true cost is worth the benefit. For some people it definitely is, especially those who are skeptical and thus learn/measure/etc themselves. For others they give away far more than they get. For society/humanity as a whole it’s an open question, even more so once you start to include the second-order effects (in both directions, good and bad).