Unlike conventional businesses where a good or "binary" service (it works or not) is sold, advertising is a much more nebulous good whose efficiency can't be accurately measured. This means there are tons of inefficiencies where middlemen can skim something off the top:

* a product manager decides to include ads in some digital product. Their analytics show plenty of "engagement". The engagement is actually people accidentally clicking on the ad while hunting for the tiny "close" button, but even if the PM suspects it, they have no reason to volunteer that information. They keep getting their salary paid and even earn a promotion based on the engagement numbers.

* the developers are tasked with implementing the advertising infrastructure - they get paid while padding their resume about how they're building "scalable" systems.

* the "scalable" system runs on a cloud provider and earns them a ton of money. Cloud provider is happy.

* some marketing agency is given a budget to go and spend on ads. The person there maybe even knows that advertising in the aforementioned product is a bad idea because most of their clicks are fake... but if their client is tasking them with burning money, why would they refuse?

* a marketing person at a big company that doesn't actually need any more advertising to succeed is given a budget and spreads it across a few marketing agencies including the aforementioned one. They get paid, why should they refuse?

At every layer (and I haven't even listed them all), people get paid by skimming something off the top. It doesn't matter whether the advertising works, because nobody in the chain has any incentive to admit it while the status quo is so lucrative, so the rational thing to do for everyone is to not rock the boat.

Customers are generally low-information shoppers. They go to a hardware store and ask the salesperson for a fridge that fits their requirements. The rep will show them a few options, and then the customer gets to try them out. This is where the animal brain takes over: Samsung designs for the animal brain. It's sleek. It's futuristic. There's so many doors. It has a beverage drawer. A condiment drawer. You can customize the panels. The animal knows the Samsung fridge is better, and customers likely won't know any better if the salesperson doesn't tell them (and would they? They make a better commission on the more expensive fridge)

I think it's mostly about squeezing consumers for more money, even after they already paid a premium, because they simply can and nobody will do anything about it.

Because simply selling a refrigerator isn’t good enough anymore. How else do you fuel infinite economic growth?

If it was legal to kill for money they would do that too. In some ways that already occurs.

Why do you think there is infinite economic growth in ads???

Ads is just part of strategy.

Ads + subscription ($18 for heated seats in BMW, anyone?) + optional accessories and you can squeeze 20% more revenue.

That's fine, but you can't squeeze infinite growth!

it is legal to kill for money as long as it is indirect enough

Because it's a dual revenue stream. The retail customer pays you, and then the advertising customer pays you. Why make only $1 when you can make $2, $3, $4 over time?

If your next question is "why do they need to keep making more money?", the answer is capitalism.

And a general lack of competition. You only buy fridges from a few brands after all.

When you get downvoted for making the obvious statement that you have to maximize profits as a capitalist entity, well, you know you’re in a venture capital forum.

It's an inexpensive revenue stream; the secondary effects and risk to customers are considered relevant insofar as they can negatively impact the company's future profitability (if then).

There's no way that this was ever /not/ going to happen under current laws (US).

> Why is this the best business model we can collectively execute on?

Attention is the ultimate resource.

The System rewards the business model that also covertly enables the most surveillance.

The line must go up.

By a percentage every year.

Compounding.

This was always an obvious outcome.

What the outcome actually happening is indicative of however is that consumers are very very very bad at their job (consuming the best products) and do not have enough rights.

If a customer was entitled to a working product without this kind of deficiency, and we had courts that actually applied punishments to large corporations (instead of unilaterally and without justification, significantly reducing fines to nothing) we wouldn't have this problem. It wouldn't be possible to profit off of this kind of advertising because you would be too busy signing court documents about how you suck at building stuff.

There's only so many human beings who can buy your fridge. There's only so cheap you can build your fridge. There's only so much you can charge for your fridge. But line must go up.

This is simply what it looks like when the people with money and resources decide that a stable and reliable profit is a Failed business.

because it's essentially free money with no consequences.

Who said anything about the best? It’s the strategy that makes most revenue in the shortest amount of time.

The execs will receive their bonuses in two years and then move to the next company to grift again, and again, until they retire.

Internal incentives not overall profitability drive such behavior.

An executive can point to a profit stream and suggest that’s beneficial to the company while ignoring externalities that cost the company 5x as much. Nobody inside has complete knowledge if someone was a good idea or not so the appearance of benefit often replaces the search for actual benefit.

Why do you address us as if we collectively went down to the town center and three dozen times in a row and decided on the same thing by consensus? For most of us this was shoved down our throats by sheer force of violence. And why always this oh shucks apologia about the “business model” that they are supposedly forced to adapt? No, this fridge already costs a lot of money. The ads don’t have to be recouping losses. They could just be for more profit.