Do they? The difference may not be so clear cut always. A policy which got rid of scammy ads might get rid of a lot of "real companies" ads too.

We can debate what is a scam on the margins, but some things are clear scams.

Real companies don't give a damn about what they are actually doing. Facebook tells them that their ad which nobody clicked on got them 40 000 new customers. The worker who put the ad on Facebook gets a pat on the back from his boss. The boss gets a raise and maybe a promotion. Leadership gets shown numbers of how great advertising on Meta is and doesn't take 5 minutes to check them. If sales are low it is those god damned customers, better hike prices and reduce product quality to show the bastards!

Yet in the days of newspapers companies collected data to see how well their ads worked. There are a lot of statisticians working in this area - or there were 20 years ago.

And you can use the exact same methods today on digital channels to see exactly how efficient your ads are, without tracking or invading the privacy of anybody. But companies trust Meta and their sales department instead...

The scam in online advertising is far more sinister;

Google uses their panopticon to show your ad to a user who is just about to buy your product and then claim a conversion. So the stats look like Google is getting you thousands of conversions, when they only actually got a hundred people to look at your product who weren't already interested.

This kind of bullshit was not possible in legacy advertisement. A billboard cannot change itself to always be showing an ad that can be claimed as a conversion to every single user.

The newspaper ads could not change to ensure that you saw an ad that matched what you were about to purchase.

>There are a lot of statisticians working in this area - or there were 20 years ago

Weren't those people the exact ones who came up with "Half of ad spend is wasted but we don't know which half"?

Targeted and online tracking based advertising has fundamental information asymmetry problems that fuck over everyone but Google and Meta.

Statisticians can figure out if the ad google shows was to someone who would buy anyway.

yes a lot of ad spend is wasted but they can prove what was still useful enough to be worth spending despite the waste and which was not.

If this theory were true companies would see no revenue impact from ad buys on Meta. Then they would stop buying, and Meta would go out of business. You need to face the facts here that no matter how much you hate Meta, it isn't a scam.

Why do you think there is no revenue impact? I would assume there is. Companies should have a good idea how much. That is also why companies should care about scams - if ads on meta lose value they lose.

The comment I was replying to implied that targeted advertising is a scam that finds people who were going to buy anyway and then advertises to them. If that were true, there would be no revenue increase because all the customers would have bought anyway.

oh. That makes sense. so long as other people see the ads that shows up in the stastics. Though companies should be pushing back on google doing that. (Though it may be they were going to buy but the ad influenced where which is worth the price)

What the adds really do is target people who are going to buy a certain category of product anyway, and then advertise the specific product made by the company that buys adds. It's hard to convince someone to buy something out of the blue. Much easier to convince them to buy a particular brand of something they were going to buy anyway, which is why targeted ads are so valuable.

Companies will falsely attribute positive revenue impact to whatever sales channels they are using, including Meta. The option would be for dozens of people having to admit that they made a mistake and wasted money on ads which didn't work. It's 2025, people would rather let their company bankrupt than admit they made a mistake.

I understand that impact calculation for ads is, at best, an inexact science. But I refuse to believe that businesses spend hundreds of billions of dollars on ads every year for absolutely no gain. That's chips in the vaccine level conspiratorial thinking.

Go talk to any small business owner of your choosing. When they have a slow day and nothing to do they like to chip in a few hundred dollars into the Meta casino. Since you can tweak endless parameters on which people will see the ads, you can always spend more until you find your winning number, like on the horse race track or in the lottery.

I was talking about large business which should track this. Small do gamble on hope like that.