> [citation needed]
I can't really give financial, but believe me, after having to spend 30k$ more because of some problems, we only had about 6k$ to pay for 5k$ a month of expense. After a year, in a location surrounded by restaurants (more than a dozen), with quite a bit of event closeby, with quite a bit of people going around, the amount of people that found out about us outside of ads, is barely a handful.
After a full year, even while spending for ads, even if we can count on 1 hand the number of people that had a bad experience, we are still barely profitable and still, almost everyone only finds us with ads and not word of mouth. We still have a pretty big list of people that wait after our third room impatiently, I think there's not a day where there's not someone that mentions it.
The thing is, even if an escape room is fun, even if I think that anyone can enjoy them, sadly our public is a tiny fraction of the population and even if theses enthusiast talks about it to others, it just doesn't reach enough other enthusiast people.
> One is imagining that in a world without ads, her experience would be the same as her not advertising.
Then you would have to explain to me how she could reach people between 10 km to 300 km aways without ads in the first 6 months of existence.
> The other is that something that is bad for a given business is something that's bad for society.
Her business is great, people are all crazy about the experience, that's a few thousands of peoples that wouldn't have that experience that they enjoyed quite a bit, simply because they are too few in a huge market.
> For every ad you see today, ask yourself how much useful new information you have gained from it.
From the ads itself? More than 0. From the content that has been paid from it? More than thousands actually. I wouldn't have read your comment, simply because Hacker News is a place that advertize ycombinator startup.
> Note that the biggest spenders on ads are brands you've already heard of, suggesting that your theory needs some revision.
It's actually exactly what I'm talking about. You think about Coke regularly? I'm pretty sure you don't.
It's sad but in this world of so many choice, you need to keep reminding people you exist or else they may switch to another choice they may see more (doesn't even have to be ads related, could be just more people that consume it at that moment, could be a location that have a contract with that brand, etc..).
So both in a world where you are known or not, you need to remind people that you are a possibility to even be considered.
Even in the amazing marketing space that is a supermarket where you can extremly easily browse a good amount of choice, brands pay for the right of a specific shelf because that will sell more.
Imagine how much worse it is when you don't even have all the choices in front of you.