I think what you’re missing is the picture of a business that is doing pretty well and has extra cash but needs to grow even if it means losing some cash.

In the old world of brand advertising, the idea was to plant an image in people’s minds that would last a long time, earning back the price of the ads by raising customer awareness and loyalty.

In the new world of online ads, it’s more transactional. I can only sell t-shirts on my t-shirt site if I get visitors to it. How do I do that? Oh I can buy ads. And the ad network can target people interested in t-shirts. How does it know they’re interested? They clicked on other t-shirt ads. I spend $5.50 on hundreds of ads just to get one person to the site who buys. But I make $9 profit on each shirt.

If you had a machine that could pump out $9 every time you put $5.50 in, your only question would be how many times you can turn that crank per hour. That’s where all the ads come from. And did you notice the ad company gets $5.50 while the t-shirt maker who actually makes and sells the product only gets $4.50? It’s still a profitable deal for them. But the ad companies make bank.

All of this is going on all the time. Your post seems to be saying “but I hate ads.” I can’t disagree with you there. But unfortunately they actually work as long as you have some profit margin to spare on them.

If everyone is so concerned about smartphones and social media ruining our attention span than where is the moral panic around advertisements slicing up everything into smaller and smaller chunks seperated by unrelated maximally superficial content?

hmmmm

I don’t get it.

EDIT:

YOU can evade them, but most people can’t.

It’s some weird % math. Sending BS spam, like the good old nigerian prince, costs nearly nothing, but it only needs to work in like 1 in 10 million cases for it to be profitable. Returns on random spam advertisement is abysmal, and google gets like 10-100x that because it’s more targeted. That is why people use google ads. But also not because they’re good. They’re just less useless, while still having a very very minimal effect.

The rest is scale.

The advertising you are seeing doesn’t work that well on you. I’m in the same boat. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. There’s a ton of advertising where I’m a net negative. That doesn’t mean the overall output is negative.

Because they are funded by literally almost every other industry and business on the planet, small and large. They have established themselves as the critical and inescapable middleman between consumers and providers, not necessarily directly or exclusively but in every practical way possible and in such subtle ways that it’s not always obvious how much they actually control. They are the gatekeepers of all commerce, they control the information of even knowing what businesses exist and what they do and are the only way of finding them and are often the only way of finding a price too. All commerce flows through them, and so they inevitably take their cut of all that business. Few other industries are as widespread through the rest of the economy as advertising is, and none are able to establish effective monopolies as easily as advertising has.

Oil comes close, but even oil is ultimately a commodity that can be take from or moved around from place to place for the right price. It doesn’t separate businesses from their consumers the way advertising does. A business or consumer can find a different source for oil – but they have to use information to do that. And the advertising industry controls most of the information.

I feel like im a special snowflake virtually immune to ads. The large part of it is im just unwilling to pay for anything that is unnecessary now. Mostly out of necessity but the longer I have to be like this the more all of it seems silly and I feel that even if I had discretionary income I don’t see wanting to use it. Still would like to renovate where I live but that is mostly around disability and reducing energy use. eating out nope. movies nope. any other paid entertainment nope. internet and computer yep. smartphone nope. linux yep. windows nope. mac nope.