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Comment by gkya | Hacker News Reader

Is there a study on the (in)effectiveness of online ad campaigns? Is it or is it not a bubble that drives all this ad publisher to the ad platforms instead of buying ads more directly? I don't know the prices but I can bet buying an ad directly from a vlogger is cheaper and more effective than any ad platform out there. Is it really the dumbness of ad publishers that keep this system alive or is it me that I'm really ignorant when it comes to the economy of internet?

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It's scale. Finding individual vloggers, making deals and tracking results would be to time consuming to scale up to $1M/day per company. An ad platform is a centralized management and spend system for large groups of individual sites, bloggers, vloggers and apps.

Some medium sized companies will test with an ad platform, find the best performing sites and make deals with them directly.

Just watch what the big advertisers do. Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Procter & Gable, etc...

When your company spends millions on advertising, you have teams of people to figure out if your strategy is effective.

Follow the leaders.

I haven't seen one of them advertise online. Online adverts are way different than TV adverts. For one the latter costs way more, if I'm not mistaken. And even if that's not the case, still, those companies have so much money that running ads is like a hobby for them. So I'd rather not follow them. Just like Google can get away with killing Reader, they can get away with many things which if a smaller company did would be suicide.

Remember that if you're not in an advertiser's target demographic online, you won't see their ads.

I've seen plenty of McDonald's ads online. Coca-Cola, usually around Christmas and the Super Bowl. P&G? Occasionally, but probably more often than I realize because it has so many brands.

> Remember that if you're not in an advertiser's target demographic online, you won't see their ads.

That's one statement I can not believe. But it might be the case that I have not indeed seen the ads from those companies, maybe because of where I am.

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