Comment on How does internet advertising work? Where is all the money coming from? More...
MyBrainHurts@piefed.ca 1 day ago
My friend’s partner works in online advertising from matching, ugh, “influencers” to brands to more “traditional” targeted online advertising.
I asked her something along these lines and she told me about a campaign she’d just worked on which dropped my jaw and changed my perspective.
Essentially, she was working with some product being sold with or inside some luxury brand of cars. Her firm was able to target people who seemed to work in dealerships for that brand in Canada. The product being expensive as hell meant that even a handful of sales would justify the campaign.
The campaign cost her firm almost no time, the data were available fairly easily and once established could essentially be run automatically.
Hers is an extreme example but combine relatively low costs with unnervingly accurate micro targetting like that… It’s a stupidly efficient means of communicating to prospective clients compared to every other type of advertising.
Reddit is an interesting example. They’re milking the advertising for all they can but I’d be surprised if the bulk of their revenue/stock valuation was from ads versus holding all sorts of AI trainable data.
rumschlumpel@feddit.org 1 day ago
As far as I can tell, most online ads don’t have that kind of microtargeting, though, and for most products the consumers don’t believe that they will actually earn money for choosing that product.
MyBrainHurts@piefed.ca 1 day ago
Oh no, that was an extreme example and it would be impractical to always have that granular level. For other, more mass ads, consider say, the water bottle trend or almost any other tik tok food fad. Maybe it started organically, maybe not, but advertisers absolutely jumped into those, connected with “influencers” to make sure their brands were represented. And for those campaigns, age and location or general demographic of each influencer’s audience would be more than sufficient (and still fairly microtargeted, they’re hitting folks with under 100k subscribers! Almost no other traditional media campaign can slice so finely.)
rumschlumpel@feddit.org 1 day ago
Influencer sponsorships are still not the same thing as random online ads, though. I totally get how sponsorships work, what I have trouble believing is that showing random ads before YouTube videos or in the middle of some news article works.
MyBrainHurts@piefed.ca 1 day ago
I mean, showing random ads before or during things is pretty much what sustained most television and radio for a number of decades.
And now they aren’t random.
If you’ve been watching influencers on youtube or tiktok, they know a lot more about what to show you. And whatever they’ve been talking about, they can shoehorn an appropriate ad in.
Then you consider the cost which is a fraction of a penny per eyeball, so even nudging only one in 20,000 targeted views, of an audience who are interested in your type of product is probably going to be profitable.
Think of email phishing scams. It seems insane that anyone has ever fallen for thr Nigerian prince thing but all they need is one success every so often and it’s profitable.