183
Google quietly raised ad prices to boost search revenue, says executive
(www.theverge.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Harsh but true. I also need to sell stuff to people, and I hate ads, I realize that other people hate ads too and that in fact ads generally suck. The solution is word of mouth advertising, not ever-more-intricate tools. The real truth is that what the ad companies are selling is the idea that ads are actually cost efficient and worthwhile, and the gullible customers are actually the advertisers, not the people who they're trying to flog stuff to.
Unfortunately, bad ads suck. Many advertisers with a lot of money don't care, they just target everyone, so you see ads about things you have no interest in. Or a site uses an ad platform that doesn't allow such accurate targeting (but they pay the website more for showing them) and you get horrible spammy ads.
As fucking annoying as Google ads can be, they're still better than the competition because they actually have strict rules and regulations about what you're allowed to show.
For most of my customers, they make at least double their money back on ads, because we make sure it's super narrow focus and only people who are already interested should be seeing the ads.
This highly depends on the site of course, if their site looks untrustworthy or bad in some way, nobody will buy their product or service, so we're super clear about that up front. This also ensures we're always working with legitimate businesses too.