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Comment by malvosenior | Hacker News Reader

An even dirtier secret is that you can have great data like Facebook but still serve incredibly irrelevant ads that everyone ignores. Google and FB presumably know massive amounts about me but I've never been shown an ad on either service that's worth clicking (on the off chance I even bother to look at them).

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They can only sell the ads they've got in inventory. I've been on FB since 2006 and the last ads I remember seeing were for godawful Farmville-style games and shady dating sites. My profile would tell them I'm college-educated and living in a developed country with a network of similarly educated friends. And yet, I have never seen a single ad that didn't look like it would have fit right in at a late night infomercial.

The Twitter PWA Chrome app sadly doesn't block Promoted Tweets, and it's the same thing there; low-quality ads from garbage companies I'd never consider buying from.

People always say nothing works because they never see relevant advertisements.

But the disconnect here is the at the ad VIEWER is not the customer, the purchaser of the ad is the customer. It might be whoever has a relevant ad for you won't bid enough for you to see it.

That's a really interesting point. A lot of people seem to see FB & Goog as adtech or something, when in fact they simply sell one of the main requirements for advertising - ad space.

Whether the ad is well targeted or not, the host still makes a profit (both monetarily and in terms of their own tracking data)

That's solid economics. If a war breaks out, be the one that sells guns. I seem to recall a quote along these lines but it escapes me...

Absolutely. They suck, they just suck less. With FB, you can _at least_ try to advertise to "small business owners in CA" and get a few leads for your SaaS.

Good luck doing it with independent ad-tech and their "data".

It really only plays as a branding message- like a superbowl ad. I've never bought anything immediately after seeing a superbowl ad, but the brand (Doritos, whatever) is in my brain now (as I eat my Tostitos of course).

This is also not true.

I have a great deal of experience, and I've seen that you can generate final sale for some non-brand obscure SaaS platform (so no branding effect here at all) for like $30 per sale in Facebook, $90 in a good independent ad-tech platform, and $600 in a bad platform.

Facebook still totally kicks ass and absolutely can make money for you if your SaaS brings you $100 in a first year. (100-30=70 in incremental profit for you). Hell, even really good ad-tech platform (yes, they exist) can make you money, though less so (100-90=10 in a first year). Shitty platforms are money sink, though

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