The fact that your Facebook ads are worse is probably because you're in the EU. I'm in the US, and I am getting fairly relevant ads for Broadway shows, data infrastructure products, discounted hotel packages, and climbing gym subscriptions - things that I am actually considering purchasing. And we haven't even brought up intent-based ads (Google search).

Word of mouth benefits incumbents. Advertising at least enables newcomers to temporarily burn money to gain mindshare, while “slow diffusion” will lock society into a “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” state forever.

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ben_w a day ago | parent [-]

> And we haven't even brought up intent-based ads (Google search).

OK, those also suck, for different reasons.

If I search for a thing, a search engine's entire job is to show me about that thing. That the engine's website puts a different thing that whatever the search algorithm thought was the best thing at the top because an advertiser paid for it to be so, is strictly worse. It's worse when the ad is not correct for obvious reasons, but it's also worse when the ad is also the best thing to show me, because in that condition it was already at the top and shouldn't have needed to pay to get there.

> Word of mouth benefits incumbents.

Ads generally (but not always) benefit whoever is richest, which is usually (but not always) the incumbent. This is why Coca Cola spends so much money on ads, even when those ads say nothing about the product itself e.g. the current GenAI Christmas ad.

> Advertising at least enables newcomers to temporarily burn money to gain mindshare, while “slow diffusion” will lock society into a “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” state forever.

How long had ChatGPT been out before OpenAI's first ad for it?

The Google search engine itself, I heard about from word of mouth back in the 90s when all of us were using AltaVista, which I also only knew about from word of mouth. Firefox, word of mouth. LiveJournal and then Dreamwidth, word of mouth. Facebook, word of mouth. Skype, Telegram, AeroPress, Huel, these are all things I learned about from word of mouth.

If I understand correctly, "word of mouth" is also known in marketing-speak as "going viral".

	▲	yunyu a day ago \| parent [-]
		You are talking about consumer marketing. I am talking about B2B marketing for prescription medications, enterprise SaaS, etc. These are separate markets and the analogies don't quite hold here - the scam problem etc is practically nonexistent for high-LTV goods with high bid costs, and newcomers are typically well funded enough to periodically outbid incumbents (or implement better targeting). The big-ticket B2B products that one hears of from word-of-mouth are usually the worse ones, since there is rarely any "going viral" to speak of. > That the engine's website puts a different thing that whatever the search algorithm thought was the best thing at the top because an advertiser paid for it to be so, is strictly worse. This is not clearly worse than the result being selected by the whims of some arbitrary Google engineer, or being easily gamed by SEO blogspam bots. At least the advertiser stands to lose something if they bid incorrectly. >How long had ChatGPT been out before OpenAI's first ad for it? Just because some products were able to grow organically doesn't imply that paid marketing never benefits startups. This is a false equivalence. I also find it funny that the vast majority of your example products (everything except Huel or Aeropress?) make a lot of money from advertising. Maybe consider why they still exist.