People also forget how inexpensive and ephemeral individual ads are. A display banner on a quality site costs less than a tenth of a penny.
And it’s like a room on a cruise ship — the boat is gonna sail one way or another. So it has to be sold.
Advertisers might choose to let Facebook arbitrage those impressions into a cost per click model — at pennies per click instead of hundredths per view. Tradeoffs galore in that model.
When you aggregate these numbers into a $600b industry, you start to see how sweating some of the finer details just doesn’t matter.
There’s one thing that advertisers agree on: ads work in the aggregate.
You can tell by turning them all off. Ask Kraft Heinz.
Beyond that it gets fuzzy. Is it inefficient? Yes. Does anyone agree on the actual mechanics? No. Is the data wildly inaccurate? Sure. Is there grift? Totally.
Yeah, seems to assume you're going to put protectors around the 'good' plants or something at first. Still, I could see some interesting swarm behavior opportunities for the right types of plants and growth stages...