The market is contracting because when rates are high and capital is expensive, ad spending is one of the first you cut.
Now people (and most importantly regulators) are starting to pay closer attention, so the tide might be turning, up until the point where advertising becomes such a minefield that its costs will make alternative monetization models more profitable.
I can't believe I'm the only one who considers advertising as an active negative signal. That is, if you're pushing ads, you are loudly telegraphing that your offering is not good enough to be discovered organically, and is therefore shit.
Paying for so-called influencers is even worse: if you do that, you are - and there's no kind way of putting this - paying for others to whore their opinions on your behalf.
If you want to make your wares visible in my sphere, find ways to make these appearances interesting, original, inventive and sufficiently unobtrusive. If you can't, tough. Take your toxic waste where it belongs.
I just assume there is some other lower cost competitor that spends less money on advertising and returns the margin to me.
"If you want to make your wares visible in my sphere, find ways to make these appearances interesting, original, inventive and sufficiently unobtrusive"
Yeah, that's also called advertising. Sorry.
On the other hand, I do appreciate the snark here:
So basically all products are shit. Gotcha. Seems like a sound model.
You're not too far off. The rule of thumb I apply to this world is that 90% of everything is crap.[ß] And that rule is recursive. Acceptably decent things are rare exceptions and outliers.
ß: Including me.