the amount of nonsense on this page is like, actually insane. look how tiny the thing i wanted is!
that's all i got
(i realize i didn't mention/doesn't show that this is the official google play store app thing on android, so it's not some shady third party thing)
you could abstract this a bit and it would apply to like ~90% of what "platform capitalism" produces - "thing you actually asked for: 5% of screen real estate" + "thing people paid us to advertise: 60% of screen real estate" + "things our recommendation code barfed up for you: 35% of screen real estate".
some people will counter with "yeah well this is what actually makes money" but it's only ever about miserably grinding out pennies on the dollar. if you were to add up the total human energy completely wasted on this shit vs the actual capital return, it would be horrifying on an existential level.
and this is a huge part of our global economy that is massively, massively overvalued, and it's going to be pretty destructive when that inevitably collapses.
bigger picture aside, this is also a great illustration of how strong platform monopoly power is right now in mobile app markets - Apple and Google have the duopoly on lock and can show users useless noise like the above, and we just kinda have to tolerate it. feels a bit like the Internet Explorer 6 era with web browsers, except that there's no Firefox 1.0 coming along to spark competition (and structurally it's unlikely there will be).
best of all, there's a good amount of data that advertising isn't even worth the expense
A 2021 study1 on 288 brands with TV ads concluded that > 80% of the brands studied lose money on their ad investments
This isn't a new realization, but advertisers are very invested in making people think ads are worth it. we see this a lot more from online advertisers these days. Surprise though, they2 keep3 getting4 sued5 for fraudulently claiming their efficacy
