I wish someone could quantify how much energy goes into this.
Approximately 15 energy
Which, for those of you who aren’t energy professionals, is actually a fair bit of energy.
To give a comparison, this is the sort of energy you often see in stars, cars, or springs.
stars, cars, or springs.
Sounds like the name of a weird gameshow 😁
Yeah, Match Their Energy! You’ve seen it?
Nope, but it sounds genuinely intriguing 😁
How many joules?
Dozens!
I hate to be so American, but what is that in 3 month-old elephant seal pups?
Not sure, but I can tell you it is exactly 226 SMUs. This is - as you’re already well aware - standard mcunits. 1 SMU is one standard mcdonalds cheeseburger, 300 Cal or 348 Wh.
Any time someone brings up to me what a waste of power crypto is (and it is, I’m not denying that) I bring this up, and it’s so fun to watch them all do this:
Why would they get mad about dissing advertising along with crypto?
(Maybe they think you’re saying it to defend crypto using whataboutism?)
I think most people have genuinely never thought about it once in their life, just like how they never would have thought once about crypto’s energy usage if the media hadn’t told them to be angry about it. So they either get upset at the sudden realization that we’re all being played by the rich or they get defensive because suddenly their world view is under attack. Same expression either way.
I always figured the angry npc wojak meme implied they were mad at you for making a good point that they didn’t like, but if you’re using it to say they just became angry in general, fair enough.
I mean, it is absolutely that on occasion. I may come off as doing a whataboutism, but I mean it more like “Absolutely, we should be angry at people and technologies whose energy use exponentially outweighs the societal benefits. Here’s the world’s biggest offender!” But they don’t actually care about energy usage, they just hate crypto and have never thought critically about targeted advertisement; all they know is it’s a part of capitalism which they love so their brain starts doing flips trying to find a way to make it defensible. It’s like telling a ‘wont somebody please think of the children’ evangelical republican all the ways in which they directly support child abuse and abusers. “I agree with you, but do you?”
I wish someone would quantify how useful advertising really is for established brands and then they can stop it.
Amazon sells power meters.
Maybe >1M man hours per year?
They don’t really need to make or sell products, they just need to create the appearance of selling products to attract investment from billionaires. They’ve got all the money, why would they care about the small pittance of money everyone else has?
#NotHumidiferAdvice
Seriously, though, is this bullshit actually effective enough to justify all the money and effort they put into it?
I really doubt it. I think targeted ads are just window dressing to hide the real reason they want to spy on us everywhere all the time.
I used to wonder this, too, and think that it couldn’t be that effective. Then I went to my last job, and there were MULTIPLE people who said they actually liked the ads because they learned about new products that they would like. What’s worse is that a couple of those multiple people actually clicked the ads and would buy things.
All that to say, yes, it is actually at least somewhat effective, and it erodes my faith in humanity.
Would these people buy those items again, though, right after the initial purchase? Some products are certainly repeat buys, but appliances usually take at least half a year until they break.
So, the scam here is from ad providers like google on anyone running ads. It’s the reason that often you see ads for a product you just looked at forever: if you are shown an ad for a product, and then you buy that product, the ad provider gets a cut. If you click on the ad, that cut is higher. Now, clearly you already looked at the product without the ad, and at best it was a reminder of something you already wanted, but in the eyes of the contract, you bought that product because of the ad. That’s WAY more of a sure thing than actually compiling a meaningful profile on the provider side. Now, on the opposite end, you DO have stories of storefronts sending out coupons, emails, direct to consumer ads, built on your viewing history on their site that ARE based on complex algorithms that know you better than yourself, which is how you get stories of the algorithm knowing people are pregnant before they do
The advertisers are paying for ads to he shown to people who have shown an interest in humidifiers. If they aren’t clear enough that people who have recently purchased the humidifiers shouldn’t be targeted, Google isn’t gonna correct them and show the ads to fewer people.
Yea, google basically profits off of all their data, so it’s either use it or be left out. They don’t really give a shit if advertisers bleed dry, there’s not much of a competition for Google.
You know how most of the ads on YouTube are watched by kids on their parents phones. But on Google’s database they’re some adult individual with this and this interests. Google fucks over both ends.
Use Hanlon’s razor.
Exactly the one that came to mind, love this one
I’ve been recently rewatching all the X-men movies in order on Disney+.
After each one it’s like “why not watch the first one again?” like it doesn’t know full well I watched it a few days ago.
All this data collection, and for what?
So they can charge advertisers/companies money for “relevant” ads. I assume there’s pushback in the market on this but even so, that’s wasted ad space/time (since they seem to think it’s so important to advertise that route. Maybe it’s not even such a bad idea since so many products are shit and you may well be in the market soon anyway.
Selling ads to people wanting to make money is like selling picks and shovels to people heading to the gold rush. Those selling shovels don’t even really care if their buyer finds gold (despite any apparent enthusiasm), they don’t even care if they’ll even need or want the shovel after figuring out most gold in this rush is found panhandling rather than by digging or that the amount of digging you’d have to do to find a decent amount of gold is more than what a shovel can handle (actually they might use that to sell you a shovel subscription).
They only care that your desire for money has brought you to them, where you can make them money whether you do or not.
Almost as good as when I went to Home Depot and the next day I got an email asking me to rate my experience during my recent visit. That creeped me out so much I removed the app from my phone and forced logout on all devices. I have not been back since. And no, I did not pay using a Home Depot card and I am not part of any rewards program with them. Just eeew. If you advertise to me, I will ignore your product and buy something else. If there is not an alternative, then I will either plug my nose and buy it assuming that it is a need, otherwise I go without.
Y’all need to go on the dark web, people are gambling millions on humidifier vs. dehumidifier battles, the videos are disturbing and end dry or moist.
After reading an article about ad metrics I realized this is ad fraud.
What is going on is a business buys ads and pays one rate for ads shown but pays a higher rate if the ads resulted in a conversion (a sale). But the ad contracts are monthly or longer. So a business buys ads for their product and the ad company after noticing you bought it, stuffs your feeds with ads for what you just bought so they can bill those ads at the higher conversion rate.
It’s just lies and deceit all the way down it seems… Every corner of almost every aspect of our lives, these kind of things keep cropping up. Kinda makes me feel like there might be an underlying reason to it all… Hmm…
I remember reading or hearing about this too, but i forget where. Do you know?
I can’t remember. My doom scrolling of Lemmy and YouTube is so fast I can’t find posts from 12 hours ago.
But that doesn’t make sense. The way they know it’s a conversion is the ad url you click on tracks you through the purchase process.
Yes but ads shown that result in a conversion are paid higher than ones that don’t. If you pay for 1000 ads in a month and it results in a conversion you pay more for those all ads in the block because you got that conversion. You don’t pay just for the one ad that resulted in a sale. You say “I only got one sale.” They say, “It was those 999 ads that the consumer saw that generated the sale.”
Right, but to know the ad resulted in a conversation the customer would need to click on the ad before purchasing. Showing you the ad after you bought the product without clicking on an ad wouldn’t count.
A company isn’t going to pay more without the platform providing evidence that the conversion happened on their platform. If a company runs ads on Google, Instagram, and TikTok, Google can’t just claim that every sale was because of ads on their platform.
A company isn’t going to pay more without the platform providing evidence that the conversion happened on their platform.
The proof is the sale. What isn’t shared is exactly which ads ran when because they purchased a block.
How is there proof of a sale due to an ad on a platform if the customer never interacted with the ad?
I can guarantee you that no one is going to sign an advertisement contract if they have to pay more solely because the company sold something within that timeframe.
The platform they advertise on is the one tracking the customer through the purchase, but that can’t happen if the customer buys a product before they’re shown an ad.
You vastly overestimate the nuance in ad spend.
No I don’t. I’m saying that a company isn’t going to pay an advertising platform more money just because.
I can guarantee you that no one is going to sign an advertisement contract if they have to pay more solely because the company sold something within that timeframe.
I used to spend a million a year on TV ads without ever knowing if I got a sale from those ads.
And did you have to pay extra just because you made a sale in the time span the ad was running?
I think you overestimate how much time the companies buying ads spend on analyzing the data, or if they even get that data.
The company selling the ad also doesn’t have much interest in transparent reporting.
The end result is that neither the company selling the ads or the company buying the ads have any interest in the ads. They both only care about their own sales numbers. Fuck the consumers, fuck the product, fuck the ads. Only sales.
Right, but the company buying ad space isn’t going to pay extra because they sold a product during the time period the ad ran.
YouTube fed me a sponsored ad from Scientology today. Like, Google, you know everything about me, you should know this was stupid.
Google probably knew it was stupid but if scientology wanted to pay them to show you the ad they weren’t going to refuse the money.
Yeah I realized that as I finished writing it
My Facebook ads now feature hard-core porn. I don’t know what digital footprint I’ve created to deserve those.
…you know…
I assume everyone on Facebook likes some hard-core.
At least 22 people were reminded of scientology. Money well spent.
How is that not a literal crime?
Why would that be a crime? Advertising your weird-ass failed scifi author founded cult isn’t illegal.
There are plenty of other crimes scientologists have committed that they’re not being protected for (like, where is the head of the church’s wife? Hasn’t been seen in like 15 years). This isn’t one of them.
I’m also amusedly infuriated when “smart” advertising takes the exact wrong pattern ……
“ I see you recently bought a part for a Toyota. You must have a Toyota. Let me sell you the same part for a Volkswagen. “
My partner found the wedding bands they wanted to buy. They’re metal bands in the design of para cord as I was in the military at the time and their father is a retired Lieutenant-colonel. The two of them together was like $150 and we got them off Etsy.
For nearly a month after I bought them for us, my phone was giving me ads for wedding rings. Like… Bro, we got them already. We don’t need more.
The number of penetrable orifices, extremities with clasping capability reduces the number of useful partners to 3 to 5. Some people are more adventurous. This number appears to work for both men and women and LGBTQ-ist equally unless you count the possibility of taking turns or having various groups and clans in the same household. I mean, one could probably afford a house like that. We would be happier. Kids would get more attention and the population would reduce to a sustainable level. All good things!
A very annoying feature of that company. Always trying to sell you what you just bought, sometimes at a lower price its like theyre saying HA HA you got screwed
Similarly:
We’ve been tracking you for decades now. We know your location at all times. We know about the humidifier you bought. We know you do everything in English, but we also know you’re trying to learn Spanish. We know who your family members are based on your interactions with them, and we have vast databases on them too. We know about the plane ticket to Turkey. We know about the new bathing suit you bought. We know about the English language guidebook you bought for Turkey.
We know you’re now in Turkey on your vacation.
Here’s an ad in Turkish for a humidifier sold in a Turkish store.
You go to a different country, and despite the massive privacy invasions, and the terabytes of data they have about every aspect of your lives, they think you speak the local language and show you ads you can’t even understand for products you’d never buy while there on a vacation.
They should push you to buy a dehumidifier. Then you can put them on opposite sides of the room for humidity wars.
that’s a crime against humidity
Yup, I just bought a tank jet printer, so clearly I’m turning my apartment into the world’s most inefficient print shop.
tank jet printer
Anyone who thinks this is a typo is a communist!
The Tankies They Don’t Want You To Know About
Heh. *The printers with refillable ink tanks.
I did actually google it and was on the fence on whether or not it was real after seeing some real products
