Hacker News Reader

Comment by markholmes | Hacker News Reader

Is there any research on the effectiveness of ads? I can’t ever remember intentionally clicking an ad on a webpage. I would imagine ads are more relevant or effective on an image feed like Instagram, but does anyone interact with ads on actual webpages? Or, worse, mobile games?

View on HN

I review some of the statistical/experimental papers in https://www.gwern.net/Ads . For example, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2367103 observes that given plausible effect sizes / variances, you can't run an advertising experiment which will pay for itself; https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/gordon_b/files/... demonstrates that even using absurd amounts of detailed tracking data from FB, you still can't recover actual causal effects.

I started shopping at American Apparel because I liked their banner ads back in the day. Same with this other apparel brand that used to be around in Richmond (Need Supply I think.) I’ve also bought things from Instagram and things advertised on podcasts, so maybe I’m the kind of person willing to buy things from ads?

In any case, the ads that appealed to me sold an aesthetic.

Older people and children feed the industry

Citation needed. The prime demographic for ads is 18-34. And people in those age groups are most definitely responding to ads even if they aren’t clicking them.

° And people in those age groups are most definitely responding to ads even if they aren’t clicking them.

Could you provide a source for me to read more?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com