this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2026
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Fight For Privacy
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The actual truth is the people paying for ads are rubes.
When it came out that Facebook’s “pivot to video” numbers were all fake nobody batted an eye. Marketing departments have failed to apply any statistical rigour for decades and all fall prey to the the idea that if you target ads well enough they work.
If you even have a marketing department they exist to spend money, so as long as they have charts and graphs they’ll ignore the users and keep asking for budget.
From what I remember, this pivot to video thing fucked a number of companies. Including cracked and college humor.
Read a great article by a guy who was questioned as to why the company's advertising spend wasn't resulting in sales. He had the IT chops to dig in, found 77% of "clicks" were bots. He laid out his testing and results very nicely.
I am amazed that companies keep throwing money at internet advertising.
I believe it. I've worked with this data for a long time, it's mostly bots. If you think Google and Meta somehow have a magic wand to remove them you're wrong
Yup. It's human storage in pointless jobs doing feckless shit to justify those jobs. They'll pump the numbers (and/or blame other teams on any flagging sales) in an endless cycle of bullshit. Marketing works strongest internally at most companies.