A bit late to the party, but... well...

If a streaming service has an ad-free tier, the ads shown aren't really there to sell the things they advertise. Oh, sure, the buyer of the ad wants your money, but they didn't pay a bunch to show you that ad and the revenue from the ad buy just has be "slightly higher than spam" to be worthwhile.

"Ad-Supported' tiers exist to differentiate the higher cost points. Which is why the ads frequently aren't aligned with natural break points in the video. And why in some cases it's the same two or three ads shown for every artificial and clumsy break.

The ads you are seeing exist primarily as an advertisement for the ad-free tier.

That's the neat thing, they don't.

Marketing looks like it is there to make you buy products, but it's a well-known fact that this doesn't work, and online ads specifically allow performance measurements, and they show that it's not worth the money.

So what are ads actually there for then?

First, remember that the thing that marketing departments are best at is marketing their own importance to company management. They are really good at convincing their companies that if they stop marketing, everything will collapse. So in this way, marketing is there to finance the marketing department, and everyone's too scared to stop marketing, because if they do they will be seen as the biggest idiots ever.

Second, marketing is there to provide a small revenue stream to the platform where you see the ads, but more importantly to punish you for not paying premium. Youtube makes you watch a shitton of ads, not because they care about whether you buy anything from the ads, but to punish you for not paying premium and to get you to do so. A premium customer brings in orders of magnitude more money than an ad-only customer.

Why do you think some of the most advertised things are... predatory loans and gambling.

Honestly for me the worse of it is, basically on linkedin and similar, people pretending to be recruiters, opening with a fake job posting and asking for your resume, then to follow it up with "Hey you know I don't think this resume is going to get by, can I put you in contact with my resume company, they will sharpen up your resume for $300. Umm... so yeah, don't know if you guessed this, but I have no clue when my next paycheck is coming in, this isn't the time to ask me to drop a large amount of money on something that may not do anything.

Idiots live in debt by throwing money on bullshit all the time

If you don't have money for either product then you are not their target demographic, and thus, you being inconvenienced or delayed does not concern them in the slightest.

Their goal is to get money from the people who have money. How they affect people with no money is not a factor in their decisions, since no money will be acquired from them regardless.

It's not about buying, it's about staying in your head, even if you don't remember it explicitly.

This kinda boring, menial, repetitive propaganda doesn't try to make you buy something straight away, it's to make you numb to it, to know it, to receive it without thinking, so then it tries to affect you. It tries to turn nothing into anything resembling truth, it turns advertisement and news, into an endless cycle of boring things that get hammered by the "a lie told 1000 times turns into truth" line.

It doesn't affect you when you're watching it, it affects you when you see or do anything relating to it.

When you need to buy new tires, you know what to buy, you don't buy based on technical sheets, you buy it knowing it, even not explicitly.

(A take from Adorno and Horkheimers "Dialectic of Enlightenment", the part where they talk about the media, culture, art, etc)

It is a way to enshittify the free version, as an ad for the premium version of the same.

People keep saying that ads are to get the brand into my head, but they dont realise thats a bad thing for the company. I specificly buy brands i DONT see ads for because i believe if they arent spending money on ads but are still being sold in storesz they must be spending that money on bettering the product instead.

Credit card debt.

There are plenty of idiots that get sucked into those ads. Well shit, the 2024 US election proves it too.

Nobody cares if you have money or not. It's about reaching a lot of users and finding one's that are willing to buy

On the other hand, you never see ads for beans and yet you can't stop thinking about them.

What makes you think advertisers are selling to you? They are selling YOU to the next advertisers. As in, they are selling your data!

Because you still have to be inconvenienced for not paying the premium.

The fact that McDonald's exists is proof that advertising works.

They aren't worried in the literal you, in one sense.

Advertising is a temporal numbers game. Any one random single individual (or household) at any given time is insignificant. You are a speck of dust in the wind.

On the flip side, advertising is (or can be) a long game. At the moment you may be too young, too poor, too healthy, too whatever for their ads to be relevant. However, if they advertise enough and you see enough of these ads, it can make an impression (even if subliminal). And down the line when you're old enough to need dick pills and making just enough to afford them, you're now aware that dick pills exist and suddenly now that you're in the market for dick pills your reptilian brain will remember that jingle "Like a rock" and how Dicken's dick pills are the key to feeling 18 again. Suddenly you're sucking down Dicken's pills like they're candy.

I find it wild that people are still under the impression that advertising doesn't work. I get it, you block ads, you aggressively ignore them, you feel like they never influence you. Same here. But they do influence us. A little bit here and there. Then consider that most people are way more suggestible than we are. If ads didn't work, they would've never been a thing.

You might think you cannot afford to buy most things advertised, but the numbers don't lie. They'll get you eventually. Even if it's just $3. Not having money never really stopped people from spending it anyhow.

Ads these days are run like internet scams they are there to trick the most vulnerable.

if anything, they should ADD ads to premium users because they have more money

Because you might have money someday

Because you saved that money so that you could buy their product!

Ads make people believe that you need the product and not wish to have it. They show it so much that the brain literally thinks that it is a need and has to be bought even if it takess you go in debt.

They think you are stupid.

Enough people are.

I mean, I'm too stingy to pay for premium but I do buy detergent.

They don't care about you. They care about the people that do have the money.

It's not just about purchasing, but also reputation, familiarity, etc.

On the other hand, when the "product" is a F2P mobile game that also sustains itself through ads that are mostly F2P mobile games that sustain themselves through ads...

like, who is paying for all this?!?

(Turns out some of the games in ads are actually P2W. I've also decided to never play another F2P mobile game and start buying some again instead.)

I appreciate the sentiment because I also hate ads, but just because you're not spending your disposable income on premium doesn't mean you couldn't theoretically spend it on something else.

Especially when it's for vacation spots, booking sites, or luxury cars. Keep spending that money for no return, guys, because absolutely none of that is happening. (I want to say "not happening anytime soon," but who am I kidding? I'm already in my upper 30s and I can't fathom making that kind of money.)

What you can, or cannot afford is irrelevant. You're a pair of eyeballs and they're paid for eyeballs.