There is a reason that Google, at least, is worth so much on the stock market.

My mother is definitely not a tech savvy computer user, but she's learning. I've finally showed her how to do a few things 'online', including email and basic searching. She wanted to order flowers for a relative due to a family death recently. As I imagine that vast majority of the population is also trained to do, she went to Google, typed in "order flowers" and went to the very first site that Google showed her. And that flower site, of course, was an ad - though it has gotten harder and harder to notice these over the years.

She ended up spending $30 with free shipping (down from $50 after I showed her how to find 'online coupon'). Google probably made a nice percentage of this sale.

Think of how many times that situation is repeated every day, all over the world.

There's a reason Google can afford so many pointless 'diversity' managers, expensive research, projects that are canned after a few years, and tens of thousands of highly paid and pampered employees. They've practically got a printing press...

"Flowers" is one of the most ad-heavy queries out there. When I worked at Yahoo it was commonly used as the example to show or test some ad displays. Even on Google now you see only ad content above the fold.

I've wondered this, too. There have been maybe a handful of things I've found out about, gotten excited about, and went and purchased. At least since the days when I had to bug a parent to buy it for me (I'm in my 50s). In each case, I proactively went out and bought it on my own. I never clicked on the ad. I don't know if I ever have clicked on an ad, let alone bought something that way.

I've been assuming I'm somewhere close to normal (definitely debatable) and that most people when they want to buy something just go and do it. How many people actually see an ad, get excited about it, click through, buy the product, and then come out of a kind of trance or something and wonder what caused them to do that? I'm probably more susceptible to candy displays at grocery check out counters than I am to online advertising. I'll occasionally buy one of those and tell the clerk it's an "impulse buy".

I assume there's a reason this is a billion dollar industry, but if I'm the poor schlub they are targeting then I wonder how they even stay afloat.

Google has backup strategies and could pivot fast, not without shedding a lot of people.

You're right, though - ad money is definitely providing bad incentives, but it also provides support for cooky projects. Marketing people also get to show their managers these nice graphs on ad spend "returns", that are complete lies.

Twitter and Facebook are much more tied into ad money, though.

Facebook might be more tied to ad money and I dislike them even more than I dislike Google but they actually sometimes manages to show me relevant ads - and unlike their "bigger brother" most of the time without insulting me and my family badly in the process ;-)

I'm surprised how dodgy the Facebook and Twitter ads are. Maybe this is an Australian-localised thing influenced by all my various blockers and noscript extensions, but Twitter shows me 50% outright scams ('Twiggy Forrest says this is the deal of a lifetime!'), Facebook shows me 50% anime clothes which are clearly not officially made by Studio Ghibli. Amazing that this industry works.