> The great New Zealand public looks at the ad, reads the article, and goes out and buys the unadvertised product of Company Z because it's the one their friend Tony got for Christmas and he said it was good.

The patheticity of the scenario you describe, I think, speaks for itself. I'd like to pick up on this as a tangent to your tangent to Grishny's tangent to my tangent of Liface's original post. Is advertising WORTH the money people spend on it? I find it amazing that people might. Speaking for myself, I know I don't pay all that much attention to advertising, but, obviously, advertising does make me aware of some things that I wouldn't be aware of otherwise, so it's not *completely* useless. But still. When Pepsi spends millions on expensive TV ad campaigns, do they really get millions more in sales for it? Who is not already aware of Pepsi? Who is going to switch to Pepsi because of a flashy ad?

I know I don't understand the advertising world, because obviously bazillions of marketers get paid lots of money to get their products and services known, and they theoretically get paid because they understand all kinds of things about the most profitable ways to advertise. But in my own limited understanding, the only way I can see advertising being any good whatsoever is if you're just starting out and you're unknown. But even then, you all found RinkWorks, right? I didn't "advertise" in the sense of running a campaign. I stuck myself in some big search engines and let it go from there. It took a long time to build up the present traffic level, plus a little bit of luck with places like Yahoo and amused.com featuring the place. And I understand that commercial enterprises don't have that kind of time to wait for their audience to build. But how on earth does advertising work?

I checked out some advertisement packages on the web, realizing that I did not want to spend money on advertising RinkWorks but curious nonetheless to entertain the notion. I talked to a representative of a place that sold web page advertising packages (oddly enough, not the ad broker that sells the advertising on *my* site -- why I didn't just ask them, I have no idea), and they detailed all kinds of plans and stuff for how I could get my ad banners displayed all over the web. The prices were astounding. Of course, RinkWorks, being a free site, wouldn't make that money back anyway, but I was sort of amazed that ANY commercial venture could spend that kind of money on advertising and expect to make it back.

Not that I'm complaining. The extra money advertising on RinkWorks gives me is a very nice supplemental reward and incentive for keeping RinkWorks going. I just can't, in my limited understanding, figure out how it's also a good deal for the advertisers.