Comment by crazygringo
17 hours ago
> 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.
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 like 0.3% in their "high yield" account while everyone else including Capital One's other, otherwise identical account was giving over 4%. It's not quite fraud, but I'd call that a scam from a major company. Part of the lawsuit alleged that they excluded existing customers with the worse account from ad campaigns about the better one. You can't do that without profiles on everyone, and that's exactly the sort of thing where even for products from the same company, they will absolutely use information about you to advertise to you the worst deal they think you'll take.
Surely you understand there's a massive difference between crypto scams and fake boner pills, vs. real genuine potato chips that now come in a slightly smaller size or phones that don't work for quite as many years as you'd like?
Not really? The phone that breaks early or the bank scamming their customers on interest rates probably scams any individual mark for more than the fake boner pills. Gambling, which mainstream companies like "family friendly" Disney advertise and participate in, scams more people out of larger sums money than whatever crypto thing you're thinking of. Phone carriers or car manufacturers selling your location are at least as bad as whatever BonziBuddy was doing.
Regardless, imagining there were a difference in the direction you believe, it would be one of degree, not kind. Scams by large companies backed by large advertising campaigns are still scams.