Agreed. At best most of the stuff I ended up buying from an Instagram ad turned out to be oversold or overpromised and underdelivered. While not a scam outright, it's sort of training me to avoid buying anything from ads...
There is an entire network of "get rick quick just by my pdf" intagramers, who peddle a pdf teaching you how to find a chinese product, make a website, and then drop ship that chinese product for 3x the cost to unsuspecting buyers.
Probably 75% of products you see on instagram ads, you can go find on temu for their actual cost, usually at 80% discount.
It got so bad that even non-tech savvy people around me learnt to do a lot of research about any product shown on Instagram ads.
To me any product advertised on Instagram, or through YouTubers sponsorships, have become synonymous with overpromised bullshit if not outright scams. Every single time I see a sponsorship deal on a YouTube video I do some research just to validate it, and the vast majority of it are outright shitty products.
It's been working great as a signal of what products not to buy.
One of my theories is that there isn't actually enough honest companies buying ad space to satisfy the shareholders in companies like Alphabet or Meta. If they actually care to also filter out the ads for junk products and services, there would probably be a minor collapse in the industry.
Honest companies are priced out by scammy companies, and as long as these companies share the profits they are totally fine profiting off scams. They make more money off the scams, simply put.
