Many consumer brands as I mentioned elsewhere were built off online advertising to billions of dollars in revenues and valuations.
I also have a digital daily browser puzzle. I've grown the user base quite a bit by running one simple ad on Reddit with amazingly good metrics.
In the past I worked for F2P mobile game companies. Their business is based on running successful internet ad campaigns.
Could you share what you spend vs the players you attract? Any tips or tricks?
EDIT: Oh wow, you make Clues by Sam! It's a great puzzle and one I regularly see people gushing about. Great job!
My ad is just one image and some clickbaity headline. The image is very simple, high contrast, designed to pop out. I'm targeting all kinds of puzzle subreddits. I'm getting just about $0.15 cost per click in US. The budget is quite small, but this helps reaching out to new audiences who spread the game further to their friends. The majority of the growth is still organic, but ads do help. I'm still not sure if it's a net positive though, since I don't have strong monetization in the game, and don't do any fingerprinting of users, or much analytics at all.
But in general we just slap all kinds of videos there. Some perform 2x better than others, impossible to guess whuch ones, but in the end the range of success isn't massive. I haven't marketed many different kinds of products, but here's my take: If an ad is giving something like 20% return on ad spend, getting to 100% can be tough by just improving the ad. What matters more is that it's a product that is easy to sell. We sell escape game murder mystery magazines. Murder mysteries in any form are simply very easy to sell.
One was for a company that survives by selling ads - basically this was an ad selling ads! Given the title of the podcast, I assumed this was some sort of meta-joke, but evidently not.
So the sponsors of this podcast apparently believe that internet advertising works.
dotcoma•3h ago
It can help a small advertiser get a small number of customers to try out their offering.
It does not and will not create brands. If you disagree, please tell me about brands created by “Internet advertising” in the current century.
hackthemack•3h ago
dotcoma•3h ago
It should be available for free on Apple Books, Google Books, Kobo etc, or for 0.99 on Amazon.
compounding_it•1h ago
However in order to do this, whether you are selling or buying, you have to have the scale. And the scale of big players is now too big to compete.
And even if you do, your infrastructure will run on any of these big companies who can do anything to your traffic to keep their business and later pay fines for unethical practices that are minor compared to the profits.
satvikpendem•1h ago
Many 21st century consumer brands have been built by internet advertising. Seems like you do, based on your comment about your book, but in general I feel like many people who say stuff like the comment above don't actually work in marketing or startups, particularly non-tech physical goods based ones, or have even run their own ads on these platforms.
cwnyth•1h ago
I think it's safe to ask for a citation for this claim.
satvikpendem•1h ago
https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_t...
https://adlibrary.com/brands/gymshark
marcosdumay•1h ago
Anyway, Google, Meta and Amazon don't sell the king of ads that make brands. But there exist branding ads on the internet.
zetanor•1h ago
When you hire a non-technical purchaser, when production line 13's full-body discombobulator breaks and the maintenance guy says "we need a new full-body discombobulator", the purchaser has no idea what a "full-body discombobulator" is or who makes it but they'll Google "full-body discombobulator" and they'll click [Buy Now] on whatever link shows up so that production line 13 can continue printing half a million bucks an hour.