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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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I don't have a link to the article offhand, but there was a researcher who worked with eBay and found that most of their ad clicks came from people who were already planning to go to eBay (in other words, they were wasting money on their search ads).

Ad people know that and they place the ads anyway.

Well yeah. What are they going to do, admit that their specialty actually doesn't work?

As somebody who works in digital advertising.

If you don't place the ads there, an external ad agency/contractor will say you're doing an awful job and tout their far better numbers (which they're getting via selling to the already-converted). It's a race to the bottom and digital advertising as a space is a horrific bed of fraud and awfulness.

Yes, but that makes Google an almost ad cartel where you pay not to attract new customers but to try and prevent other people paying Google more money to recommend themselves to your existing customers who just want to find you.

One's the flip side of another. If my Ford dealership is at Exit 8 of the highway, I might well want to buy the billboard leading up to it to avoid the Chevy dealership at Exit 9 buying it to divert people who are looking for Fords away. The Chevy dealership here is "paying to attract new customers", and the Ford dealership is paying to prevent them.

Key thing is these are negative sum games.

As oppose to beneficial marketing where you are making some aware of your product that has a positive consumer surplus to trade with you but didn’t know beforehand they wanted to trade with you.

This is one fair critique of capitalism is a number of areas that just look like negative sum games. HFT being probably another area that’s just negative sum

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