Strypey

"When ad spend on media peaked 20 years ago, advertising accounted for 1.25% of our entire GDP. But now, in this increasingly digital days, it's around 0.75%."

#ColinPeacock, 2026

https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/mediawatch/audio/2019028882/who-s-winning-the-war-where-ad-money-goes-chathams-scandal

So what does this tell us? What all the wailing and gnashing of teeth about the big DataFarms hoovering up most of the remaining ad spend obscures or avoid admitting;

Advertising is a dying industry. Has been since the net went mainstream.

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#podcasts #RNZ #MediaWatch #advertising

Who’s winning the war, where ad money goes, Chathams scandal

The bulk of the big money advertisers spent in our media goes offshore to big online operators. What's the future for the ad industry here? Also: mixed messages about when the war will end in Iran, and a startling scandal in the Chathams that hit the headlines too late.

RNZ
Mar 31 at 1:16pmWeb
Show threadStrypeyMar 31

If we ever needed ads to tell us what products and services existed, we certainly don't now. We've got search engines for that, and review/ Q&A sites tell us which ones are any good, and which suppliers are reliably trustworthy.

Media platforms that relies on ads for revenue are dinosaurs, and the asteroid hit about 20 years ago. The DataFarmers are hoovering up the bulk of the shrinking ad spend because they hire the best snake oil salesmen, not because they provide any real value.

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Show threadStrypeyMar 31

Putting on my tinfoil hat on, I suspect the vast majority of online ad clicks are fake, a practice known as 'click fraud'. A lot of studies have been done on different methods of click fraud; the use of automated systems, mechanical turking, and other such scams. Such as this 2024 review of methods;

https://doi.org/10.5120/ijca2024923300

The actors with the best access to the relevant data have no incentive to reveal the true rates they discover, and may even be accomplices in the fraud themselves.

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Show threadStrypeyMar 31

Ad spend will continue to shrink and concentrate in the hands of con artists. As far as media ads are concerned, they've mostly gone already, and they're not coming back. Despite the arse-covering, rearguard action the ad industry is mounting to cover that up.

If media are to survive as commercial businesses - and I'm not sure that's even desirable - or survive in any operational form, they're going to need to find new revenue sources. Fact.

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Show threaddick_turpin  Mar 31

@strypey I'm not sure that's true. Printed news seems to refuse to die, and its demise was foretold over thirty years ago.

The thing you need to understand about sales is that it is the art of selling the things you didn't realise you needed.

This is why supermarkets not only move things around but also place stuff at the end of the aisle so that you impulse-buy when you pass it while looking for where they moved the tomato ketchup to.

Show threadStrypeyMar 31

@dick_turpin
> Printed news seems to refuse to die, and its demise was foretold over thirty years ago

That's not what MediaWatch and other media industry news outlets tell me. Thousands of newspapers have closed their doors over the last 20 years, mostly small community papers, but also city-scale dailies, especially in the US. Glossy magazines are all but dead as a print medium, although some mastheads survive on life support in digital form.

If any survive, it will be on new revenue sources.

Show threaddick_turpin  Mar 31

@strypey Meh, most of the 'local' papers found their way to the bottom of bird cages and rabbit hutches anyway. The mainstream media outlets are still going mainly because they can't seem to get their online presence right.

Your advertising budget is better spent on FB and X these days. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Show threadStrypeyMar 31

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@dick_turpin
> Printed news seems to refuse to die

> most of the 'local' papers found their way to the bottom of bird cages and rabbit hutches anyway

Used newspaper is a highly useful material (great for wrapping broken glass too, lighting fires, etc). Doesn't mean the papers weren't read and valued in the community, or that advertising in them was ineffective prior to the web rendering ads pointless.

Show threadStrypeyMar 31

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@dick_turpin
> Your advertising budget is better spent on FB and X these days

As I said;

> DataFarmers are hoovering up the bulk of the shrinking ad spend because they hire the best snake oil salesmen, not because they provide any real value

One study I looked at (can't find it right now) claimed that up to 70-90-something percent of Xitter clicks were click fraud.