I believe that ads are just yet another tragedy of the commons type of thing, where bad actors not only ruin it for everyone, but also convert good actors to being bad actors.
I’d say there’s three tiers:
Ads showing you things you actually want or need, and providing you with new information.
These are going to have high CPMs, so you don’t need many per page, and having more per page will decrease their value, but kind of require tracking to ensure their relevance.
Ads showing you things you might not want or need, but might cobsider buying, or information that isn’t immediately relevant.
This is the baseline for reasonable quality, untargeted ads, and CPMs for these are going to be fairly low, but much higher if you click on them
Ads promoting scams, malware, and things you neither want nor need.
In this case, the CPMs will be virtually zero, so the site is forced to cram as many on the page as they can. They’re also encouraged to get you to click by mistake.
This makes people block ads or trackers, reducing the number of ads in the first category and forcing more sites to adopt these patterns.
It’s kind of sad that it’s going this way (and has been for a while) but I guess it’s going to end up with just a return to paying for media with money rather than ads.
There hasn’t been an insignificant number of times I’ve found out about a new product or event I’m interested in, a sale for something I already want, or something like that through advertising.
It’s rare as a proportion, but it definitely does happen.
The more ads you show people, the less each ad is worth. Because people have a fixed amount of money and only so much time and attention, so each ad is competing with all the other ads they’re being shown. People are skipping your ad because all the previous ads have them sitting with a finger already on the skip button.
If people spend more time watching ads, they don’t have any more money than they did before, so each ad has a smaller chance of leading to a sale. We’re racing towards a world where there’s flashing, moving ads on every surface around you and you don’t buy any of it or even see the advertising, it’s just visual noise to ignore. And advertisers will inevitably respond by looking for more things to put more intrusive ads on.
And none of the advertisers want to be the first one to advertise less, they’re all fighting for advertising market share, trying their hardest to get a larger cut of the profits and making things worse for everyone including themselves in the process.
I believe that ads are just yet another tragedy of the commons type of thing, where bad actors not only ruin it for everyone, but also convert good actors to being bad actors.
I’d say there’s three tiers:
It’s kind of sad that it’s going this way (and has been for a while) but I guess it’s going to end up with just a return to paying for media with money rather than ads.
I see all ads as scams in my eyes, and most major companies are the scammers.
ads from (name a company)…you’re being scammed… products are cheaply made, fail, low quality and riddled with lies/fake words and misleading text.
There hasn’t been an insignificant number of times I’ve found out about a new product or event I’m interested in, a sale for something I already want, or something like that through advertising.
It’s rare as a proportion, but it definitely does happen.
The more ads you show people, the less each ad is worth. Because people have a fixed amount of money and only so much time and attention, so each ad is competing with all the other ads they’re being shown. People are skipping your ad because all the previous ads have them sitting with a finger already on the skip button.
If people spend more time watching ads, they don’t have any more money than they did before, so each ad has a smaller chance of leading to a sale. We’re racing towards a world where there’s flashing, moving ads on every surface around you and you don’t buy any of it or even see the advertising, it’s just visual noise to ignore. And advertisers will inevitably respond by looking for more things to put more intrusive ads on.
And none of the advertisers want to be the first one to advertise less, they’re all fighting for advertising market share, trying their hardest to get a larger cut of the profits and making things worse for everyone including themselves in the process.