I think I read your reply too quickly and got your point wrong. My bad.

Absolutely perfect example of what I mean. You want to talk about gamers like they are this specific sub-niche of humans who are all the same.

Would you do this with movies? “People who watch movies are like XYZ and they only have a couple of skills.” What about music? “There’s a music listener in this thread and he said ABC.”

This is why I led with “do you know how many people play video games?” The gaming industry earns more annually than movies and music combined.

You have some stereotype of gamers in your brain, fine. That’s your deal. But “gamers” is just “people” these days. Including me. I’m a gamer. And I say: what bogus hysteria.

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.

As long as we’re all clear that that’s the only thing OP can expect, sure. If OP is wondering how much they can knock off their energy bill with this project, the answer is jack shit.

What bogus hysteria. Do you have any idea how many people play video games? Would you expect them not to advertise a recruitment drive on television because we don’t want our air traffic controllers to just kick up their feet and watch the screens? Let’s not be idiots.

It’s far more interesting to ask why they need to advertise a recruitment drive. The profession has been losing skilled people because its high skill, high stress, high stakes, and their paycheck gets jerked around every time there’s a government shutdown. Let’s focus on that instead of clutching our pearls over them hiring people who have played video games before.