They absolutely inundated YouTube with ads for Stadia for a couple of months, to the point that it felt like half the ads I saw were Stadia ads. So that’s something, at least?

I wonder what the overlap is between Stadia's target market and people who watch YouTube without blocking ads.

It's not zero, because Chromecast doesn't block ads and that's the natural fit for Stadia. But it's definitely not 100% either.

I don't see ads at all, period. I either Ublock origin or pay for a subscription. I pay for youtube premium.

How would an ad reach me? Youtubers? Can Google use its "contractors" to promote its own product? That just feels weird.

I remember a talk given by chief of czech google at our highschool, she told us that we are one of the few countries where they had to use marketing to compete with for search market (I remember seeing ads for Google chrome in metro when it was new. ).. I think as a monopoly they just usually dont feel the need for marketing when there is no else running ads...

I've been seeing ads for Chrome around northern Seattle (Shoreline) area

At first I was baffled why they would possibly need to advertise Chrome in the US. But in retrospect it might just be feather ruffling in Edge (Microsofts) backyard?

There's also the big one right here: https://www.google.com/maps/place/47%C2%B036'07.6%22N+122%C2... when you get to downtown from the ID (where the 3d view shows a verizon ad, it's now a "no place like chrome" ad.

Are these new? Reddit had a particularly Firefox-meme laden week last week after all of the MV3 chrome discussions.

Chrome is core to Google's business so it's worth it advertising, they also advertise the Pixel phone a lot in high-end places in global cities because they need to gain market share for mobile browsing and phones against Apple.

Anything else, not that important, even GCP which is their major bet doesn't really get any ads because it's a business product so not much sense in doing so.

They seem to believe word of mouth/viral marketing works because it worked for gmail and chrome, so they didn't double down on Stadia before product market fit, and that caused Stadia to fail(along with Google's short attention span reputation).

>Google never adversises its producta.

Not really true (e.g. Chrome) but it's probably true they advertise relatively little given their size.

They just know first hand that online advertising is not worth the money!

I have seen plenty of (annoying) stadia adverts