I’d suggest that the title should be, “Competition for Google AdWords is so strong that unsophisticated advertisers can no longer get a good return. Where do I promote my business now?”

> Also, In my own experience for my business ( also entertainment) I have found reddit ads to be useful.

Reddit is very hit or miss depending on your target audience.

Depending on your Reddit target audience, a lot of people could have adblock installed. They might be loyal to communities that have approved vendor lists where everyone parrots the same vendor recommendations back and forth in every thread, so not being part of that game means you're left out. In some niches, the subreddit moderators have a financial relationship with vendors and they'll put their weight into swaying every conversation away from competitors.

For other niches, none of this applies and Reddit can be a good ad destination. It really depends

Thank you. This is a perfect example of clickbait. I trusted the HN crowd, clicked the link, and immediately realized the trap. I'm upset at how effective it is. And also commend the author for publishing an article specifically engineered to waste the viewers time.

Based on personal experience, I would be wary on spending much on Reddit ads without carefully measuring the results. Some real world data:

https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/08/11/what-i-learned-spe...

I think he's aimed in the right direction with the observation about short videos.

I tried to load his website. It took a full minute to come up. Maybe that's the HN hug of death or something, but this is surely issue #1 to resolve.

Beyond that I would ask whether targeting the "young'uns" directly is the correct strategy. His business is party entertainment, kids' birthday parties could be the biggest slice of that, but the kid isn't the purchasing decisionmaker, and there are all these other opportunities (like corporate events) too.

And then I would consider whether paying for ads in shorts is the right or only way to approach the world of video. The thing about video is it's huge, lucrative, and eating up more of people's time every year. People are moving from the text Internet, to watching videos. I would think given the nature of the business this guy has raw footage which can be turned into entertaining videos, or can produce it pretty quickly. I'm increasingly surprised by how much some people can earn on Youtube, by creating videos that also function as marketing collateral for their business. He will ultimately need to geotarget to get customers, so yeah that's probably paid ads, but a good YouTube channel would build authority, making sales easier to close, and might also make him more money than you'd expect via ad revenue.

It's been some years since I've had to put ads on the web, but I found Reddit ads insanely effective. Really, Google ads have been dead for a long time. I found them hardly effective at all since maybe 2011.

I forgot YouTube has ads, thanks.

I do occasionally post (free) on Reddit, it's not that big here though

> When I hear "Google" I assume search, oof (sigh of relief).

If Google Ads is dead/dying the search is soon to follow...

Hm good point but if one were to try to reach visibility via let's say contacting the creators themselves or making reddit showcases themselves?

I am not sure what might work better, sponsorships or Ads. Of course some are definitely icky sponsorships but if one were to align with small youtubers who develop their own things and you enjoy their content and there might be an overlap etc.

I personally have an ad blocker so I don't really know what might work for. I guess organic marketing? But how does one achieve it?

Any good books / ideas on more sustainable forms of marketing aside from paying the large corporations a sort of land tax basically?

for my life, I haven't found ads useful at all, so I block them

I see paid ads as a short-term goal; the business seems to be local, so people should find this when looking for this specific service in their city.

Google ads is dead precisely because their search product is dead.

Ever since Google bought double click, their ads business has been their search business. They are the same product.

Any suggestions for local business? Things that operate only within a specified area. Google worked well for those.

How did you run campaigns on reddit? Reddit ads had the worst performance among all platforms I tried, literally zero conversion.

Without search ad revenue Google is dead.

Remember when people wrote things online because they had something useful to say and share and that was enough?

Now it’s slop factory of people having a writing quota to get enough ads because they don’t want to work. Particularly true for tech writers who praise things like leetcode then can’t get a real job.

Now it’s supercharged by ai and they’re upset how accessible their slop job is. I just find that funny I suppose.