You might return them and get another brand. Even that little positive signal is often worth the wasted impressions because most of the other signals are either so weak or so competitive.

Advertisers getting hosed is pretty much standard with digital ads. Platforms and agencies tell you how amazing their adtech is, but various forms of fraud and dodgy practises seem to be rampant.

If "can be nice" is the bar of quality we hold ads to, then all advertisement passes the bar. A lot of newspaper ads were for luxury tchotchkes, cigarettes, booze or gambling. Back then, advertisements had some pretty substantial downsides, normalizing entire swathes of behavior that is today considered unhealthy and exploitative.

At most, I would call advertisement a Tragedy of the Commons. But the way publicity works, it feels like the tragedy is unavoidable; all smart advertisers will eventually transgress against normalcy.

Before Google, before Reddit, before Facebook, people all over the world, rich and poor, run their own sites and their own forums, allowing them to chat with people throughout the world.

Here in Serbia, even in the worst of times (sanctions, NATO bombing in 1999), people with internet access could participate in local and global fora, newsgroups etc. It was expensive to get a computer and internet access, but people were willing to pay to host a small community. Late in 90s and early in 2000s, there was a huge number of cheap "virtual hosting" providers, and even cheaper LAMP stack providers, where people would run their own phpBB or similar forum software. IRC I probably need not mention.

This "great equalising" has been nothing but a negative in the long run.

> No one likes to acknowledge this, but there is an alternate timeline where only the rich kid in school has a Google account, reddit account, meta account.

It is not at all obvious that this would be a worse timeline to live in.

Ads didn't give us Wikipedia. The vast majority of blogs and forums were not for profit. Specialised media outlets were always subscription-based. Large amounts of valuable information like research papers, technical documentation and curated databases were paywalled.

The content that ad-based websites brought was mostly clickbait designed around serving these ads.

True :-).

Probably more that from an ROI perspective that’s probably the “least worst” vs the best.

I suspect your hypothesis is not falsifiable. Maybe randomly advertising golf balls to random people is just as effective, but we don't have the tracking infrastructure in place for non-targeted ads in order to test that theory.

I agree, before the age of enshittification, when I went to actual blogs, sometimes I did see ads worth my time. But these days most blogs I would visit are hosted on sites that just use ad farms, and the targeting is awful (which, hey, I am on my apple devices most of the time and I disable all tracking) but mostly I would never feel confident that clicking the ad wouldn't bring me to some spyware infested hole. I am far more leery of where I would go when I click it than I am concerned that I'm not the target demographic.

I have bid in Google Adwords on my own product name. If you don't, then a competitor else might, and then they will appear above you in search. It isn't nice, but that is the way it is.

The cost of clicks tends to rise over time with advertising platforms (Google 'the law of shitty clickthrus'). This effect is very noticeable with Google Adwords, for example. So it makes sense to get in early with a new platform and try and get some traffic, before the big corporates push the prices up.

Now let's be honest: short men clothing is basically modern, "slim fit" clothing; you get that fashionable bare-ankles look with short pants.

And again, who does not want to drive a tractor in their city when they hit the pothole? Or at least to re-plow half of the city just because of the stupid buildings they put in there?

Not sure why, but my ads used to be insanely spot on, now they're meh.

My wife will get ads on Instagram targeting me though.

One day I looked at some retro console, she texted me asking if I was looking at a console, she got like 8 ads for it.

Ads, in general, have one main purpose: to make the public, and especially your prospective customers, aware of your product and how it fits and solves problems for them.

By their nature, they should be a positive.

However, media in general (from classical like newspapers, magazines, radio and TV to more modern like news sites and streaming platforms) has been leveraging sound psychological research to influence people to start holding views the editorial policy wants them to. And translated to ads, to them wanting and paying for things they do not need and have not originally even wanted. Back when Windows 95 came out, there was an urban legend how people waited in lines in front of stores to buy it even if they did not have a computer — I never cared enough to check if this was true, but even back then it was acknowledged how you could influence people to simply spend money where it does not bring them any value.

Tech industry had a large problem to enter the market and sustain itself on what was largely volunteer, non-profit environment of the early Internet and web days. The dot-com boom was over (and crashed), people were starting to build real products, but sustaining them was hard. And enter ad-tech, with profiling and targeting enriching the already existing psychological research about how you get people to spend when they don't really have a need or problem to address.

So I believe you are complaining more about the state of media today — I was actually hoping guerilla journalism through personal blogs gets us the real thing back, but oh boy was I wrong :) — than ads or ad-tech directly.

> Why is real journalism dying? Ads

This is not really true. Ads, especially the classifieds, were often the only way that newspapers and news organizations stayed afloat aside from public funding. What happened was the major ad-tech companies captured the revenue and the subscriber data that came from ads and viewers that would normally go to those organizations. "Real journalism" often didn't make much if not any money. "Real journalism" at least for most of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st has always existed alongside advertising. Magazines literally survived on advertising, their entire product to readers was long form content, while, to brands, a higher quality product and more targeted subscriber base. It's pure romanticism to say that ads themselves were the problem. Ad-tech, it's monopoly control in the hands of 2-3 behemoths, is the real issue.

I occasionally enjoy well executed ads, like something that’s creative enough to make me curious, but nowadays, I’m seeing a lot of ads on YouTube that’s obviously low-effort AI slop, they are boring, fake, and depressing.

Do they though? It is often very hard to know with ads. My experience is that most people spending money on ads have no idea if they are getting any sort of return. Are there any studies that show billboard ads work?

BTW That why money off vouchers are so common with ads. Because this is an actual way you can check if the ad is working. Although there are confounding factors - maybe they were going to buy from you before they saw the voucher?

If you asked me to name the companies on the billboards that line the highway I commute on, I couldn't do it.

I don't think any single form of advertising is effective on the whole population.