They don't necessarily have to work on you, they just have to work in general. HN itself is a bit of a bubble, for anyone on here it is likely they want to intentionally avoid internet ads more than the average person.

I work in ads for the airline space, I'm on the engineering side so I can't give great financial numbers offhand, but we usually do trial runs on just subsets of routes an airline offers, and for every customer so far the increased revenue on those routes heavily outweighed the new ad spend. Of course you can make bad ads, just like you're saying. We have departments dedicated to that though, I myself couldn't tell you too much about making a good ad that a few SEO blog posts wouldn't cover better.

But it can be formulaic to a degree. If you're an airline, give us some of your metrics and we can get a pretty good estimate of your ad performance at different levels. Got a SaaS product, video game, new snack? We're useless, but there's likely some company of analysts out there who have you covered.

I'm sure it's extremely variable by market though. Air travel has huuuge volume and lots of customers from every tech-proficiency level. I often get YouTube ads for B2B SaaS services and other extremely targeted business things, and I wonder who is signing a 20mm contract that started from a YouTube ad?? Maybe some other commenter will tell me it works though.

Edit: Actually, I signed up for Robert C Martin's (Uncle Bob) new software training video site recently because his youtube ads were so silly. It helps that I knew his name long before though, and I've yet to pay for one of the non-free ones.

"I wonder who is signing a 20mm contract that started from a YouTube ad??"

This is just a super common misconception among engineers that advertising is a very linear thing. Most ads are not direct response. Most of the time they're just trying to keep at the top of mind for specific groups of folks. So yeah you aren't going to just run out and buy a 20 million dollar piece of software because of a Youtube ad, but when it comes time to buy a solution in that space I bet you'll consider that product. When you think about the scale that this works at (It costs maybe a penny a view or $10 per thousand people reached) you really only need to hit 1 person at the right time across many millions upon millions of impressions to make it worth while. That's all. Many people just don't appreciate the scale of advertising and think it's more sniper rifle rather than carpet bombing especially for large B2B purchases.

Does a sniper rifle ever work? It sounds like ads aren't a good choice for an upstart with a new product (which is what I hope to be). Are there advertising channels better suited to people like myself?

Reddit advertising is pretty close to a "sniper rifle" (you target based on subreddits). It's cheap to get going and very respectful of the privacy and tracking of users.

I think it's not used more by big-co's because it's relatively a small audience.

I actually have one of the top of all time posts on r/redditads (their advertiser support subreddit) and have done a number of how to guides for Reddit ads. I'm a big fan, but honestly most larger companies don't use it yet because 1. They don't have a very sophisticated platform. It's a ton of work to do simple tasks and the analytics etc aren't particularly insightful.Media buyers and PPC specialists time is at a premium already so it's hard to justify adding in yet another platform that doesn't scale super well. 2. Reddit users are pretty hostile to ads still. 3. The traffic quality is a bit all over. Very high bounce, very high instance of ublock etc. so tracking is hard. That said the CPC is super cheap so it works out overall but some people get freaked out about the traffic.

Like I said I really like it but they have a ways to go to attract more mainstream users.

It can work it's just harder. If you're looking to advertise and you have a limited budget I would suggest Google search ads. Honestly though with limited budget you're likely better suited to doing some combination of PR + SEO + Content marketing and using the cash you would have spent on ads to enhance those efforts. Once you've got your funnel figured out then you can expand into paid advertising.

Im planning on advertising for a network security gadget I invented. You said you're "useless" in other domains. That's not good news for little old me who is going to try and make the ads himself.

I've heard about testing ads for your various demographics before you go all in on an advertising campaign. But it sounds like there is even more to it.

Why do you feel like you would be useless in another domain? Surely you would do better than some geek off the street.

It does work. Despite the anti advertising rhetoric of Hacker News users advertising can and does grow many brands very quickly and profitably. I think you've hit on some reasons in your post why though many people fail at advertising. They want it to be a linear sort of thing when in reality it mirrors more of a exponential success or failure sort of model (not unlike startups) instead. Your creative and audience have to match and your offer has to be extremely compelling to get someone cold. It's also notable that direct response advertising, which many people conflate with the overall ads ecosystem is a actually a very small piece of the pie as it were. Most larger brands are fine losing money on a first interaction or sale because they have a good handle on CLTV. That said this specific article is about things like mobile app ads and website banners. It's actually much easier to succeed in walled garden environments like Facebook etc.

You don’t have to buy it online, just raising awareness or influencing an offline purchase are also goals for online advertisements.

Across large groups it can approach being more formulaic where FB et al. will show you predicted # of conversions based on your inputs before you start a campaign. Of course you are trusting their estimation process then.

Those ads aren't meant to make you buy something. They work in a more subtle way by shaping culture. It's a little difficult to explain what the purpose of that is and how it benefits the company. I recommend trying to read up on it, as it's pretty interesting, but will easily take you a few hours.

So if they are a macro tool does it make sense for me to use them when hocking my widgets?