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> Is there a measurable effect? What kind of businesses see uptick in sales, and how real / scammy they are?

There are plenty of mismatched incentives in the advertising supply chain making it so that very few of the parties involved actually care about an uptick in sales.

You have the marketing department in the company, who gets allocated a certain budget. Their objective is to spend the budget (otherwise they'd get less next time) and find a way to convince their boss that it led to good results so they can justify their own salary/promotion/etc. Sales is a difficult thing to obtain (let alone attribute), but there's this magical thing called "engagement". You can pull it out of thin air.

The marketing/ad agency they hired needs to justify their fee. Again, sales are a difficult thing to obtain (for a start, the product needs to be good and useful to the purchaser) let alone attribute. But again, your objective isn't really sales when you can just show "engagement" and let someone else find an excuse as to how this relates to sales, if any.

The advertising platform is happy to take their money and send (or outright make up) "engagement" their way. They don't care how real or intentional this engagement is. Someone trying to dismiss an obnoxious cookie banner and clicking the ad by mistake? Great! Obnoxious lockscreen ad and person thinks they have to tap the ad to unlock the phone (this is real - I've seen it)? Sure thing!

The websites in turn are paid per click they refer to the advertising platform and don't care about how real/intentional those clicks are either, so placing the ads in inconvenient places where they're likely to attract unintentional clicks is in their interest.

At every layer someone skims some money off the top so everyone is happy to look the other way, and nobody is interested in exploring other approaches (such as a marketplace model where users who intend to buy something can search through ads) because such a model, even if it turns out more efficient in connecting sellers & customers, will eliminate the need for these middlemen which is an obvious problem for them.

> The websites in turn are paid per click they refer to the advertising platform and don't care about how real/intentional those clicks are either, so placing the ads in inconvenient places where they're likely to attract unintentional clicks is in their interest.

Of my maybe 20 ad clicks in the last 10 years, about 19 have been accidental clicks on moving banners on the phone. (Made up guesstimate numbers).

But I had this other revelation. I have a 4yo son, that every now and then sneak up on my wife's Windows computer and clicks every obnoxious embedded Windows' ad he sees until he get to some game he likes. He can end up with like 60 tabs.

Like. How much of ad engagements are really from kids that can't even read? I've seen toddlers click ads on parents phones a lot. The moving ads with pretty colors, might not really be a good ad for the advertiser but just kids pressing the obvious thing to press.

(I've since taken measures to protect him from Windows. Don't worry.)

The "kids clicking ads" sector drives a lot of money + content production on YouTube. Check out "Elsa-gate".

I've been working in the difital advertising space for >14 years, and I'll second Nextgrid's comment.

>Is it a ruse to oversell ads to gullible business owners, maybe with some help of complicit marketing departments?

Absolutely. That's the dirty secret at the heart of online advertising.

The advertisers are unsophisticated, so there is a staggering amount of fraud taking place. Advertisers have no way / have no interest in checking which sites end up serving their ads, so you get situations where large firms are bankrolling extremist sites [1] (Nandini Jammi does a lot of work to expose how this works)

Because advertising networks are either sketchy or cartelized (search for "project Jedi Blue"), middlemen also skim ~50% of ad spend before it reaches publishers.[2]

But, ads do work. They just work on the portion of the population that is not savvy enough to use adblockers, or wealthy enough to pay for ad-free "Premium". And it is a dwindling group.

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/how-steve-bannon-has-expl... [2] (esp ISBA study showing how 15% of every dollar is unattributable)

[2] https://adalytics.io/blog/adtech-supply-fees

It works. I have a friend who works for a small but stable independent company selling a consumer goods ( imagine 10 people selling hats online). 90+% of their revenue depends on marketing. Almost nobody goes to "coolhats.com" to see if there is a sale, and nobody stops by to casually browse hats and see if there is something interesting.

Instead, you have to put a cool hat in front of someone on facebook or reddit and show them. Ideally someone who recently conducted a related keyword search or has otherwise been profiled as a likely buyer.

100%. HN users will sit here and tell you all day long ads don’t work, having worked ad’s adjacent, I can assure you, they do. I do contract work for a bunch of ecommerce customers and for everyone one of them AdWords is 95+ percent of their traffic and sales.

Do they “work” because they’re actually effective, or do they “work” due to being in so many places, that it’s basically inevitable that you end up in some conversion pipeline.

If someone searches for “your_site.com” and the top 3 results are: an ad for “your_site”, “a competitor” and then the link to your site, and someone clicks the ad, and purchases something, that conversion will 100% look like the ad worked, but realistically the user was going to your site anyways.

In my friends experience, they have done advertising in waves. Turn off the adds and traffic and sales disappear. This is a pretty strong signal.

The thing is that without ads, nobody is searching for your site, they don't know your product exists, and they don't want it.

They work because they work.

You stop the advertisising and the sales stop, instantly.

Since you mentioned Facebook, I find their ads most precisely targeted (seeing as a target audience member regularly presented with relevant ads). They are also not obnoxious, even though not very modest either.

Sadly, many websites and ad networks do a much worse job, which, to my mind, should produce infuriation and make a negative brand image, rather than awareness and sales.

In a similar vein, Instagram was the first platform where I actually took a pause and realized someone had actually figured out how to give me appealing advertising over the internet. I don't use Facebook to know how they differ, it may be practically identical.

My experience is that I use my Instagram account not to interact with my social group but to engage with content I like (primarily art content like sculpture, painting, light/projection, music, etc). It's actually a really pleasant experience and I'm doing my best to protect my groove in the recommendation algorithm. I basically get an effortless feed of art events in my area without me needing to subscribe to a newsletter. And it also engages me with a lot of independent artists selling unique items that I like.

FB’s ad relevance is somewhat helped by the detailed psychometric profiles they build up over years of surveillance.

I'd like a company to test out offering a separate tab of 'sponsored links' related to a list of search results. That would provide an advantage to advertisers as they are only charged for views when a person chooses to look at the ads (presumably because they are a more likely customer.) It would benefit users by giving them more actual search results and the choice to see ads, which should benefit the company taking this approach.