I, too, am curious if there’s an advertising bubble. I hope so.

I’ve noticed something about my wife, though. She’s not a “mindless capitalist zombie with the sole goal of owning more stuff”, but she does pay attention to advertising a lot. We need more diapers? Well, it just so happens there’s some new startup app that’s advertising a free first month, so if she signs up for that up, we could get free diapers, and we’d only have to keep the membership for another two months, and they have deals on peanut butter, and we’d get access to their free streaming service and they have Disney, so it’s probably worth it overall.

And so it goes, with a million of these deals. The thing is, each “deal” is so complicated that it’s extremely difficult to know which ones we’re actually saving money on. The cynical would say “you’re never saving money: everything’s rigged”, but that’s clearly not true. Some of these deals clearly do work out for us (and some of them cause the startup to immediately go bankrupt). But most of them aren’t clearly better or worse for us: we’d have to spend several hours going through hypothetical scenarios to do the full CBA, which we don’t do.

I do wonder, on balance, how much it’s costing us. I also wonder how many of these deals are specifically (personally) targeted at my wife because they know what she needs and what her habits are.