Does Internet Advertising Work? (opens in new tab)

My wife and I have a small life style business, selling a physical product. We make a nice daily profit using Meta ads. X dollars go in, X*A dollars come out, A > 1.0. When not running ads, it's just tumbleweeds.

I also have a digital daily browser puzzle. I've grown the user base quite a bit by running one simple ad on Reddit with amazingly good metrics.

In the past I worked for F2P mobile game companies. Their business is based on running successful internet ad campaigns.

I started listening to the podcast, but first they made me listen to several ads.

One was for a company that survives by selling ads - basically this was an ad selling ads! Given the title of the podcast, I assumed this was some sort of meta-joke, but evidently not.

So the sponsors of this podcast apparently believe that internet advertising works.

internet ads are largely a story of parasitic exchanges using information asymmetry to suck as much surplus out of the middle as possible.

https://june.kim/advertising-journey/

It works very well for the HUGE players who sell it, Google, Meta, Amazon and not many more.

It can help a small advertiser get a small number of customers to try out their offering.

It does not and will not create brands. If you disagree, please tell me about brands created by “Internet advertising” in the current century.

If you know what you're doing and have lots of money to spend, you can get great returns on online advertising, especially because the platforms know how to target very specific niches of customers. But, most people don't know what they're doing and end up wasting their limited budget then conclude it doesn't work for them.

Many consumer brands as I mentioned elsewhere were built off online advertising to billions of dollars in revenues and valuations.