Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- > Marketers are addicted to bad data
This article cites a random Statista page for the "36% percent of people in the UK use an adblocker" stat.
by natnat - Meta is most certainly addicted to bad data.
I believe this because Facebook continues to send spam to an e-mail address that was only used by me for my cat, and only once; and the cat has been dead for 15 years. The dead cat address received three spams from Facebook just yesterday.
There is also bad data out there about another cat that died ten years ago. He keeps getting snail mail from political candidates trying to convince him that they're deeply interested in the cares and concerns of people like him. A dead cat.
by reaperducer - If it gets you paid, it's good data.
If it makes your clients happy, it's good data.
Business data is for business purposes, not for science purposes.
by brudgers - A lot of the time you are running experiments and seeing how the data changes, not looking at the data in a vacuum.
Many of the example critiques here don't apply so much when looking at the changes in data:
- if I got 50% more hits on my site this week vs last week, that's meaningful despite 36% of people blocking ads
- if my open rate doubled when I changed my email subject, also meaningful
The other examples are hard to pick holes in as they simply say "Z is a lie", but I can be looking at multiple data sources to decide how much of a lie Z is.
by pandog - This has been known a long time. Freakanomics did a two part podcast on does advertising actually work. It is long but well worth a listen if you want to hear some science about advertising.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...
The second part goes into internet advertising.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...
There are transcripts of the episodes on the page if you want to read instead of listen.
by hackthemack - The biggest spenders in the marketing business are doing so primarily to justify their own size. That is to say, if you're a trillion dollar business, you are going to spend a billion dollars on advertising purely to say that you spent a billion dollars on advertising. The quality of the data - or the clicks - matters less than the fact that you've bought your brand a sense of ubiquity. It's fractally nested corporate classism.
Direct response marketing - i.e. when you are buying ads specifically to get someone to buy a book - is a far smaller fraction of the market. It had a moment in the early 2000s when Google and later Facebook figured out how to extract lots of information about their customers and sell it on to other direct response marketers. But even then, the really lucrative marketers aren't legitimate businesses, they're scammers using the ability to micro-target ads to find their biggest rubes as cheaply and silently as possible.
If you're a regular person trying to buy ads for a legitimate business, you're probably going to get swamped by all of this and taken for multiple rides by several different kinds of scam.
by kmeisthax - I work in adtech. We actually had to mangle some of our analytics data because it didn't match the broken data a client was used to. Our data was more accurate, but because the numbers didn't match the other analytics suite the client used, so we had to make it worse.
I wish I was joking.
by jhartikainen - The average time on site and bounce rates I have got from advertising my software inside ChatGPT and Reddit are so terrible that I can only assume that most of the clicks I am paying for are fraudulent, although it is not clear who is doing the fraud.
https://successfulsoftware.net/2026/08/13/my-experience-buyi...
https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/08/11/what-i-learned-spe...
by hermitcrab