advertising

Marketing adopted AI faster than almost any function and has the least reliable evidence about whether it helped. This lesson maps the capability honestly across the funnel, separates the uses where output volume is the point from those where quality is, and explains why marketing's measurement problem makes the question unusually hard to answer.

A creator with a million followers can earn a fortune or almost nothing, depending entirely on how the audience is monetized. Learn the seven distinct income models, from ad revenue share to sponsorships to memberships, who carries the risk in each, which ones depend on a platform's goodwill, and why the mix a creator chooses matters more than the size of their audience.

Half the money spent on advertising is wasted; the trouble is knowing which half. Learn why measuring whether an ad caused a sale is genuinely hard, why last-click attribution flatters the wrong channels, how privacy changes broke the tracking that measurement relied on, and the three-part toolkit that replaced it: incrementality, media-mix modeling, and privacy-preserving reporting.

In the moment a page loads, a request describing you is auctioned to thousands of potential buyers and the winner's ad is delivered, all before you see anything. Learn the supply chain behind that: the buy side and sell side, real-time bidding, how you become a targetable audience, and how much of an advertiser's money is eaten on the way through.

Nobody sets the price of an ad slot by hand. An auction does it, billions of times a day, in the time it takes a page to load. Learn why advertising runs on auctions, how the second-price idea makes bidding honest, why the highest bid often loses to a better ad, and why the industry quietly switched from second-price to first-price auctions.