Advertising has been proven to work, over and over. Any good ad campaign includes metrics to see how effective they are, and they are in fact effective. You t

Advertising has been proven to work, over and over. Any good ad campaign includes metrics to see how effective they are, and they are in fact effective. You too probably have been influenced by ads far more than you think. They're in all kinds of things you consume like videos and podcasts, blogs... even many frontpage HN posts are blatantly advertising a service or platform. You might think you're not falling prey because you don't see an ad for Wendys and go immediately there for dinner that night. But tons of companies are slowly exposing you to their preferred platform, building goodwill towards their brands, or otherwise subtly influencing your behavior. Marketers are using a combination of paid ads along with HN posts and other social media posts to drive a variety of traffic to their page, and they have the data to show where everyone is coming from, what they're looking at, and how often they're converting to paid customers. I know this first hand from working with enterprise level marketing experts. HN itself is basically a y combinator ad. You are for sure aware of y combinator by now, and if you needed startup funding you might consider applying there.