Since targeted ads got so cheap, tiny little businesses could buy super targeted social media ads for less money than they could selling their products wholesale at a store. Net result is that they can flood social media with targeted ads for some geoarbitraged thing that tiny startup found on AliExpress decided to sell DTC, and end run around consumer wholesaling and all rigamarole involved there.

The barrier to entry for that is super low. All you really need to be good at then is matchmaking some real niche product you found on Alibaba to a real niche consumer need.

Net result: lower prices, greater net profit for the company, tons of new entries to the game of social media enabled DTC.

Also, the article links to a study which found DTC to be 10% more expensive than traditional retail.

Umm, I bought a no-name (but Gillette-compatible!) razor last week while travelling due to having left my usual kit at home.

Having used the no-name one for a week, I can no longer see any reason to pay the extra for a razor brand ever again.

Granted, I haven't looked at prices in a long time. I am mostly assuming not insane costs.

I'm not sure what "insane" would mean in this contect, but replacement blades for the no-name Gillette clone I bought are half the price of original Gillette ones.

My week using the former showed that, for me at least, the performance of the latter really doesn't justify its price. YMMV.

It's likely that even small companies are selling enough that these costs amortise to near zero.

I also cannot tell the difference between that and just buying safety razor blades, though there is a huge advantage (for me) in the pivoting head.

This is a gem of a phrase. I'm going to use 'geoarbitrage' from now on.

I live in a place full of this sort of nonsense, such as resold Clevo ODM notebooks, overly-cheap 'desktop projectors', overly-cheap TVs, water purifiers, and even air-conditioners. Oh, and the 'advertisers' are typically skimpily-dressed young women barely in university.

I simply refuse to buy anything that isn't European, Korean, Taiwanese, or Japanese for home appliances and electronics.

Brands like Miele, Bosch, Samsung, LG, Sony, Brother, Nikon, Philips, Smeg, Liebherr... They're usually up to 2-3x as expensive as the equivalent on AliExpress, but the quality and service is unbeatable.

That being said, personally dislike American brands but only because they usually advertise and use USC units, which make them hard to wrangle in a purely SI country.

Jeremy’s volume is probably a Gillette’s rounding error. A better question is what is their CAC and CLV - and Gillette’s are probably much better.

Before jeremy's there were other similar businesses with the same business model that weren't anti woke but advertised heavily online - dollar shave club, harry's, etc. They both have the same business model as Jeremy's. Dollar shave club was acquired by Unilever for $1 Billion and Harry's was acquired by Schick for $1.37 Billion. After being acquired both companies seem to have stopped advertising online anywhere near as heavily as they did before. I think Harry's started as a sort of charity buy one give one sort of company so it also had a social aspect to its promotion.

It's clearly a space where there's room for competition and the possibility of getting acquired by a giant company who doesn't want to compete with you. If you have a built in audience of "anti woke" who will buy whatever dailywire sells them, you short circuit a lot of your risk and can focus on growth. The targeted ads at people more likely to be interested is just that, looking for growth. It doesn't mean its a bad business.

Alphabet, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu, Bytedance, Yandex each have more than 1% of digital ad spend marketshare, and none of them have 50% of total marketshare. They compete in many areas too.

I think there are credible Indian competitors growing too.

These companies have margins >>20% whereas the advertisers barely break even.

How is oil & gas relevant to digital ads?

Social media making $$$ whereas the companies buying Ads barely breaking even is not equal to an “open efficient and free market” as the initial thread suggested.

I'm not really sure why your trying to compare oil & gas with digital ads, it doesn't make any sense. You can't extrapolate conclusions based on the market dynamics of one to the other.

Here is another oil&gas comparison: OPEC countries aren’t distorting the market in their favor, because oil is just a fraction of the total energy market (e.g., nuclear, wind, solar,…)

1/1 is a fraction. What fraction is oil of the total energy market?

Spoiler alert: it's because they are being sold garbage impressions while being shown "analytics" that make the lay person believe it's their content, or ad, or targeting, or whatever... and not the fact that the platform just pooled all the valuable impressions outside the auction and gave them to a preferred customer who never touched the auction system to begin with.

Being a small time app developer and seller of random things. I can't afford these new CPMs, $15 - $50 is a LONG shot compared to 2019 and paying $3-5 CPM.

Mind you I've spent close to $400k between Fb/Snapchat/Tiktok.

What do I do now that these companies have shut me out? Anything I build I can't see a path forward on acquiring customers without say buying email lists or hitting SMS lists. I feel very unfairly screwed.

I've had success with two strategies:

1) Maintaining a semi-popular Open Source project adjacent to my app. The website of the open source project mentions my paid app. It's free advertising that noone can outbid.

2) Word-of-mouth: My app is recommended by users to others. It's also free advertising, you just need to make a nice product...

Could be rewritten as 'U mad bro? Y no buy muh razors & own the libs'.