I belong to a hand full of the advertising groups and am constantly getting bombarted with notices/ads. However, they seem to be a nessacery evil for someone just starting out selling kitties. Who reads the ads people put out? or do people just send out an ad in hopes that someone will actualy read it and not delete it right away.
For some time I helped Charm working for a region. One of our duties was to regularly send out ads, via a robot so they went to a number of groups. Being the sort who takes note of what works and what does not, I noted two things:
First, yes, a great many people DO simply ignore the ads. This didn't surprise me in the least since, long ago, I ran direct-mailing campaigns for some software packages I'd developed. I'd learned that virtually ALL unsolicited contacts failed to develop into a sale.
My first observation was that, yes, there are a LOT of these messages.
And, yes, many (sometimes it felt like ALL) were repeated over, and over.
And, all to often, those repeated messages were highly inaccurate; often listing cats which were not actually present, if one went to check.
And, as one would expect, this leads to an expected reaction. People tend to notice that the messages from certain individuals are repetitive or inaccurate. These senders garner a LOT of negative reactions and people quickly learn to ignore them, even if they do, eventually, correct and change their messages.
But, what I noticed was, yes, if the message was handled properly, virtually every time we sent out a message, someone actually DID respond: meaning, at least, they came to look at the offerings.
I found, if care was taken to ensure the message is timely and accurate, and changes EVERY time, people DO respond.
So, to answer the underlying question: Yes, some people DO read at least some those messages. And, if you want yours to be read, you need to change them up, keep them timely, and keep them up-to-date.
But, if you want to generate an unfavorable impression, and simply have people ignore you, then set up a robot, give it a message, and have it send out the same message, every hour, day after day, for weeks and months and, you'll attain your goal.
I am in several secondary market kitty groups and as a matter of course I turn off chat and notices because I simply get overwhelmed by the sheer number of repetitive notices that are sent every couple of hours.
Very often I was not recieving notices I actually wanted to read and suddenly having half a dozen group IMs fly open with the exact same message because the poster was simply copying and pasting to every group became annoying so off they all went.
If I need to know something I periodically scan through that groups notices.
I know I'm not alone in automatically turning these off so I do wonder if they actually work.
I'm in 41 groups. I get notices from 5 tops.
I turn off the notices in second market groups, but when I would be in the market to buy, would just open the group profile and look at the notices from there.