this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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I'm the one with the big comment above, the middleman between Google and the advertisers.
I definitely defend the advertisers. I work with small local businesses who just want to sell their products. I have a guy who just wants to sell quality handles with his daughter. A lady who wants to sell her luxury decorations, and a family who produce extremely secure residential doors.
I'm really happy working with all of them, they're all lovely genuine people with a good product that will absolutely sell to the right person at the right time.
But how do they get to the right person at the right time? How do they fight the giant corporations for your attention so you don't just order from Amazon or TEMU or AliExpress? They advertise.
And what's the best, most cost effective way to advertise right now? Digitally.
Of course they can't compete with the huge marketing budgets of those corporations, but at least they get a small price of the pie, and I help them maximise that effect so they're not showing useless ads to people who never wanted to see their product, and they're not wasting money they could be using to compete with the big guys.
Unfortunately if you block tracking, you're left with the cesspool of untargeted ads that aren't relevant to you, and unfortunately sometimes the ads you see are just related to criteria like "you are over 20 and using a phone" which is useless to everyone and usually the result of companies with more money than sense.
As usual I feel the people to be angry at here are the rich corporations, not every advertiser, of which many are innocent small businesses trying to stay relevant and competitive.
I’ll take the most irrelevant ads in the world, please. I don’t want to be manipulated.
The worst quality, most ugly, annoying ones that constantly talk about things you don't want or care about 👍
I'd personally like ads to actually be related to things I care about if there are any at all.
I in zero way care. Waste your time and money. You don't deserve access to personal information in any fucking way, and trying to pretend it's for the benefit of "small businesses" or, even more laughably, the people you're forcing your ads in front off, is disgusting. Not that you actually care what anyone else thinks. As long as you get your money, you're happy.
Harsh but true. I also need to sell stuff to people, and I hate ads, I realize that other people hate ads too and that in fact ads generally suck. The solution is word of mouth advertising, not ever-more-intricate tools. The real truth is that what the ad companies are selling is the idea that ads are actually cost efficient and worthwhile, and the gullible customers are actually the advertisers, not the people who they're trying to flog stuff to.
Unfortunately, bad ads suck. Many advertisers with a lot of money don't care, they just target everyone, so you see ads about things you have no interest in. Or a site uses an ad platform that doesn't allow such accurate targeting (but they pay the website more for showing them) and you get horrible spammy ads.
As fucking annoying as Google ads can be, they're still better than the competition because they actually have strict rules and regulations about what you're allowed to show.
For most of my customers, they make at least double their money back on ads, because we make sure it's super narrow focus and only people who are already interested should be seeing the ads.
This highly depends on the site of course, if their site looks untrustworthy or bad in some way, nobody will buy their product or service, so we're super clear about that up front. This also ensures we're always working with legitimate businesses too.
I don't think you understand how it even works. What personal information do you think I get?
I just tick a box that says "I think people who like dogs will be interested in this product" and then, if you search "buy high quality dog bed" my clients business appears, because they sell high quality dog beds.
I see nothing about you personally, and there's too much traffic on the internet to even care about being that granular even if I could.
I'm not pretending anything 🤣 I literally only work with small businesses
"I'm not stomping all over your rights. I just use it for profit!" Seriously? Get out of here with your self-serving bs. You're as culpable as the rest of 'em, regardless of what you tell others or yourself to justify it.
Stomping on your rights lol. Again, I'm not sure you actually know how any of it works, just looking for the next thing to be outraged about.
Fuck aallllllll the way off with that. This has been a long standing problem and it's only getting worse, no thanks to attempts like yours to belittle and delegitimize anyone that criticizes it. But whatever it takes to make another buck, right?