Why would a less legitimate company not pay more money to give you a worse deal with better margins? The intuitive dynamics to me would be that any way to trick consumers will be applied, and the bulk of the resulting spread will be captured by the ad companies via their auction systems. So we all get worse products with worse deals, and the difference goes into spying on people and convincing them to become more consumptive, i.e. to turn them into worse versions of themselves.

Never allow ads in your life. They're malicious in every way.

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crazygringo 8 hours ago | parent [-]

> Why would a less legitimate company not pay more money to give you a worse deal with better margins?

Because what matters is the total spend per resulting purchase, not spend per impression.

Because spam ad companies have a very tiny conversion rate, they can only pay a very small amount per impression before it becomes unprofitable.

Legitimate companies aren't usually trying to completely trick their customers. They are selling an actual halfway decent or good quality product. Therefore, if they are targeting well, they have a much much higher conversion rate and can therefore pay much more per impression.

	▲	ndriscoll 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I think our world models are just completely different here: I would say that "legitimate" companies are usually trying to completely trick their customers. e.g. price discrimination, shrinkflation, planned obsolescence, subscription or financing models to obscure costs, surreptitiously collecting and selling their customers' information, abusing psychology to create demand for things that no thinking person should want (e.g. junk food ads, or cigarette ads before they were banned), the list goes on. Even with the most straightforward to compare products like bank accounts, the biggest household names absolutely screw their customers. e.g. Chase gives like 0.01% APY on their savings accounts, or 0.02% on their "premier savings accounts". Capital One just settled a lawsuit for having two almost completely identical "high yield" accounts where the only difference was the less informed set of customers got half the interest rate (and neither was competitive with what you could get elsewhere).