Even if you do not use the ads you see to make your decision, they influence you.

I already knew this but got very conscious of it when I was surprised to go to McDonalds and then discovered that they had new ads on my full commute route.

Even without influencing you, brands may just make you aware of their products, which is already a big 0 to 1.

Yes, minority. Marketing works, and it works on multiple levels as well, serving multiple, synergistic purposes. An ad for a product serves to increase sales of that particular product, which is what most people think ads are for. But in the meantime, the brand also positions itself, by showing that product as their representative, with the experience that comes from its choice of colors, shapes and other presentation material, by showing their logo and other associations like a jingle, and by signaling values that the viewer is supposed to associate with the brand. All of these are happening at the same time, and with every tactic that is not directly illegal - and it works. People's lives, culture is shaped by products, it's impossible to avoid at least thinking a bit about Apple, Coca Cola, or cars for example.

So even if we are in the minority of trying to be as rational with the purchases as possible, we surely don't do this all the time with everything. And surely we can't expect others to follow suit - so, simplifications will be made in the decision process, and that is exactly where advertisers are aiming for, and successfully.

Well, advertisers advertise because money: I put $X into facebook, google, taboola, linkedin, yahoo, and so on and I get X+R% back in revenue from amazon, facebook, google, yahoo, etc.

As a result, it doesn't matter whether you are "in the minority" or not, and to show you why simply assume that your "behavior" is the majority for a moment: If I'm still buying ads, it's not because altairprime is on my marketing list, and I'm determined to show you an ad for something you don't want, but because volume of minority ad buys 'V' is high enough to support my lifestyle at an 'R' I have uncovered.

That is to say, as an online advertiser, I'm looking for my channel (with a big R% and a big enough V), and I don't really care about the absolute size (V) of not-my-channel until I have an idea of how to get that big R from them.

Ads work whether we want them to work or not. It's why they are so bad. They work on our subconscious. Most people do not consciously connect watching an ad to purchasing the thing advertised.

One thing to consider is why do luxury watches advertise in newspapers? It's about building the hype around a brand. The value of a watch is not in telling the time it's about (except some in build value of materials and work) the value that society gives it.

It's why they are even more problematic than it seems on the surface.

> I don’t get why advertisers still advertise.

Because it works, and because as usual, HN users confuse their personal experience for being that of the masses when nothing could be further from the truth.

Today, we see online ads being used as a form of "nag", to borrow the term from the shareware days, to encourage computer users to "sign up" for or "subscribe" to something that is free from ads (but still a means of data collection that may support delivery of ads elsewhere). I have read that YouTube is doing this, as many HN commenters like to try to convince readers to pay.

The utility value of ads to the computer is low. But these users are not the ad buyers so that makes little difference.

The tragedy of online ads is that computers when used for search do provide utility to computer users in locating products and services. But middlemen, so-called "tech" companies, seek to intermediate the use of computers for search in order to profit from ad services. This lowers the utility value of search to the computer user.

HN commenters and other commenters across the web complain about this degradation, namely they complain about results delievered by the largest search middleman, Google, almost daily.

Online ads annoy the majority of computer users in order to be "effective", i.e., profitable for the ad buyers, with respect to only a small minority of computer users. The system is profitable for the ad buyers but extremely inefficient. Waste and fraud are common on an unprecedented scale.

Personally I have nothing against advertising. However, having used computer networks that had restrictions on advertising, I question whether computer networks are the appropriate place for advertising.

The decreasing ability of those who produce software to license it for fees, i.e., no viable business plan, has caused them to use surveillance, data collection and advertising services as a substitute means of generating income. Software is given away "for free" and functions as a Trojan Horse for surveillance, data collection and advertising services. The sustainability of such a strategy is questionable.

Half of what they're paying for is the analytics. Look up "cost of customer acquisition." Those numbers can get pretty high depending on the segment and showing you an ad costs fractions of a penny.

You are not even in a 0.00001% group, never mind approaching "prevalent".

Damn. Well, thanks for the confirmation.

I wish I could teach other people how to evict ads from short-term memory before they get written to long-term and how to create mental blind spots the size of billboards and banner ads. Apparently it’s an invaluable pair of skills :(

Because it works. Even on you.