This doesn’t make them any more likable; far from it; but one ‘feature’ that makes the very popular is the fact that it’s way easier to extend tracking links into the real world when you have a mechanism that makes entering some ghastly base64 salad of a URL easy; and makes entering the entire thing blind somewhere between ‘very much the lowest friction option’ and ‘practically mandatory’ depending on the implementation of the QR reader.
If the user needs to type it out you basically have to use a short, sensible, bland URL. No way are you getting someone to accurately enter a paragraph worth of UTM parameters or whatnot; and some cryptic link shortener thing is going to be much harder than just domainname.tld
With QR codes, though, the granularity with which you can track which code people scan is limited only by the economics of the printing process you are using: if there’s a tooling cost per-change you are going to have to do them in batches; but if you are using one of the lower volume arrangements where it’s just a per-page cost generating unique URLs for each and every one is technically trivial.
I’m not giving any of the adtech vermin a link; but “QR code analytics” will bring up a bevy of people extolling the tracking virtues of the format.
It’s my suspicion that this is the reason why you sometimes see QR codes in place of normal text in frankly incongruous places(art museum signage? Because you could print the QR code that directs me to the artist’s statement on your website but not print the artist’s statement on a little placard?). Sometimes you do just need to make a text string reliably machine readable(as with the original inventory/part tracking use case; or TOTP pairing or whatnot); but there are a lot more cases where you don’t need it; but some brand manager or sales analyst or KPI junkie is getting the shakes just thinking about another way to quantify the target’s behavior.
I, admittedly…may be more than a trifle bitter about how we can’t even keep some of our own communications people from using superfluous QR codes against employees at the same time we have an upsurge in phishing attempts using QR codes to obfuscate their payloads or get targets to look at them on unmanaged devices with tiny screens where it’s way easier to dodge security measures or verify URLs and certs…
