Is Online Advertising Actually Worth the Cost?

For years companies have looked towards the internet to help increase sales and peddle their goods online. Popup ads, banner ads, scrolling ads, ect all are something that any internet user is very familiar with. Companies like facebook and google are primarily funded by selling and connecting ad space with retailers who want to take out that space. But the real question is, do online ads really work, and are they worth the money?

First we need to account for people who actually never look at ads with adblock, which is most likely the majority of technical people out there. So if you are selling a product marketed towards these people, you will most likely have a bad time getting the message across. According to adblock’s website, more than 615 million devices use their software to block ads. Companies don’t actually pay for ads that get blocked, but like I said before, if you are targeting a demographic that would most likely use adblock, it probably isn’t worth the money. With around 77 billion dollars in internet advertising a year, you might expect ad buyers to get more for their money.

The best demographics to actually target with ads are the people that were not raised on the internet and aren’t as skeptical as others online. The older generation who may still click banner ads because they are interested in what they are selling are probably still worth advertising to. I know specifically my mother has, on more than one occasion clicked banner ads and signed up for something she was later charged for.

Also paying google for preferential ranking with certain search terms is also worth the investment. If you are a fringe or niche business that can accumulate a large amount of sales by being the top of a google search, that ranking could be all the difference between being successful or a failure. This is why there is steep competition for websites to use search engine optimization to get to the top of the list. Overall most companies partaking in this form of online advertising are seeing good returns from it.

Other than the cases I talked about in this article, I think many companies are realizing that regular online advertising might not actually be worth the cost. This is why so many companies have pulled out in recent years. The age of websites running completely off ad revenue might be quickly coming to an end. For people in my generation, completely ignoring ads is part of our nature and we hardly ever click on them. A better use of money to reach our audience would be to directly advertise with specific people, such as youtubers or podcasters. There you will actually have a chance to see your product talked about and featured.

The other option is to pay adblock to let your ads through, which is what some companies have started to do in the last two years. Websites now can recognize you are using adblock and other still have ads shown because they have a deal with adblock. I still don’t know how successful this type of advertising is though. Do you think the age of online ads being able to fund free content or entire websites is over? Do you or have you purchased things online from ads before? How often do you usually do this? I would be curious to know

-Calaber24p