I've been working in the difital advertising space for >14 years, and I'll second Nextgrid's comment. >Is it a ruse to oversell ads to gullible business owners

I've been working in the difital advertising space for >14 years, and I'll second Nextgrid's comment. >Is it a ruse to oversell ads to gullible business owners, maybe with some help of complicit marketing departments? Absolutely. That's the dirty secret at the heart of online advertising. The advertisers are unsophisticated, so there is a staggering amount of fraud taking place. Advertisers have no way / have no interest in checking which sites end up serving their ads, so you get situations where large firms are bankrolling extremist sites [1] (Nandini Jammi does a lot of work to expose how this works) Because advertising networks are either sketchy or cartelized (search for "project Jedi Blue"), middlemen also skim ~50% of ad spend before it reaches publishers.[2] But, ads do work. They just work on the portion of the population that is not savvy enough to use adblockers, or wealthy enough to pay for ad-free "Premium". And it is a dwindling group. [1] https://www.propublica.org/article/how-steve-bannon-has-exploited-google-ads-to-monetize-extremism https://www.propublica.org/article/how-steve-bannon-has-expl... [2] (esp ISBA study showing how 15% of every dollar is unattributable) [2] https://adalytics.io/blog/adtech-supply-fees https://adalytics.io/blog/adtech-supply-fees