Technology

So I can tell you from experience that there's a huge difference in terms of how much of your products you sell by doing advertising versus doing nothing. It's very rare that advertising is designed to take the person who's observing it from "IDK what this is" to "Holy crap I gotta go buy that" -- but building brand recognition, making people aware that your stuff exists, and yes sometimes having them see an ad for something and click on it and buy something, is 100% worth it when it's done right.

I actually do agree with you as to as lot of advertising on the modern internet, though. I think like a lot of areas of human endeavor, online advertising has been overrun by people who genuinely just have no clue what they're doing. Someone works at a company that has a river of money coming in, their job is to buy online ads, so they direct some of the river of money at buying obnoxious ads that do very little except piss people off (and, enable the site where they run to keep operating and paying their people, which is nice). It doesn't accomplish anything for the company they work for and no one notices, and that persists for years, and the internet as a whole is crapped up for everyone in general. :-/

I think about 95% of ad campaigns are no more effective than just listing the product and the price. Maybe 5% are creative or well targeted enough to actually influence some purchases.

Problem is the people in a position to evaluate effective advertising are mostly the same group that gets paid by to create advertising. There's no one running around to businesses trying to sell them on the idea that advertisements aren't all that effective and they could just save their money on much simpler communications. Plus we indoctrinate hoards of 'marketing' graduates into the cult of advertising every year. There's a critical mass of people that just uncritically embrace the idea that modern advertising is the only way to sell a product, and many of their careers depend on that remaining a widely accepted idea.

In fact if I see a product being heavily advertised I am less likely to buy it. Not only because it is annoying, but also because I know a significant percentage of the purchase price is just paying for more advertisement instead of actually relating to the quality of the product.

ads doesn’t actually do much other than annoy the people who are exposed to the ad

I used to watch a lot of twitch in the mid 10's. There's products I still boycott because of their excessive ads on twitch almost a decade ago.

Every time I opened a new stream. Even if I just wanted to check out a stream for 20 seconds? 30 seconds ads. Every. Damn. Time. More than a hundred times a day?

I have never, and will never spend any money on Noisy softdrinks. I will always tell this story when ever I have a reasonable chance, and how out of touch with their audience Sunniva was. It ended up as a drink for geriatrics in the end. Noisy drinks are watered down juice. Their winning argument was that it was juice. But with water!

I would, thanks to their disgusting ads, not drink Noisy softdrink if they were free and I was thirsty. This situation have already arisen.

Every time I see a product from Tine/Sunniva I think about this. Whenever I have a choice I pick products from the competing Q company since I've never seen an ad from them, even if it's on average between 1.5-2% more expensive. Tine/Sunniva tried to brainwash me to spend money on their products, I hate them for that just like I hate any other ad-pushing company. But the amount of ads regarding the Noisy watered down juice I was unwillingly exposed to was exceptional. Extraordinary.

If any readers ever get the chance to boycott Tine or their sub brand Sunniva, you should. You should also tell everybody you know about this story, even if you live in Bogota. I hope my disdain for Tine/Sunniva due to their awful advertising practice a decade ago is globally known.

I kind of hate that the greatest minds on earth are working on creating products on monetizing around the current advertising model.(Ex: Google/Facebook/Amazon etc).

If the advertising model useless or less useful why do we keep doing it ? I think we hate it and that's why we are on Lemmy but most people suck up to ads do buy useless shit. Check out the rise of Temu and Shein.

Honestly the best "ads" I've received have been YouTubers reviews on products. I follow people and they tell me about products related to the subjects I specifically follow them for.

And I don't mean influencers. I follow retro gamers and they occasionally get a product in the mail to review. I follow Amateur Radio operators and they occasionally get radios and antenna products in the mail to review. Foodies and cooks get stuff for the kitchen. Etc. I honestly can't remember the last time I saw an ad and bought it.

A lot of Mastodon servers are run like that. It generally works if you run a instance as a community and not a catch-all general purpose one as then you will have a smaller dedicated group of members willing to subsidize the un-avoidable lurkers and free-loaders. This is like those "Free2Play" games that are massively profitable despite having no ads and are free to download if you want think about it in capitalist terms.

In the end it isn't terribly expensive to run a Lemmy instance or any online service. Facebook and the other ad companies spend most of their revenue on user tracking and advertisement infrastructure which is super wasteful as it is just done to attract more advertisers... basically a snake eating its own tail.

I think Reddit gold was a brilliant way to support the platform and get something in return. I’ve been thinking of supporting various FOSS projects, but getting nothing but a a warm and fuzzy feeling in return just feels inadequate. Getting a Debian/Inkscape/Firefox hoodie sounds much more appealing to me, so recently I’ve been lookin for those sorts of donation options.