I think as a child I got viruses from one of the ads, you know, the ones would put on the side of the site. We had to call in a guy, to clean parents’ computer. I felt really guilty and never touched those ads again.
So Google’s and Meta’s main business are ads. And recently I felt confused. Do people click on ads? Don’t these ads feel phishy to them?
You mean like… oh purpose!?
There was a time long ago I did that to help them with their business. I’ve learned a lot since then and now I don’t do that anymore.
Did you stop because it affects your algorithm, it costs them money, or another reason?
Companies need money to survive. Not every company should survive though.
It is like mosquitos - I bear them no malice, and they are part of the food web too. I still swat them if then bite me. I am also okay with mosquito-cide on a mass scale.
Symbiosis and Mutualism are great, but advertising as it is practiced 99.99999% of the time today is Parasitic, and I don’t want to encourage it any further.
On the rare occasion, I find myself on a mobile website or an app, and I know what I want to tap, what I need to tap, so I move to tap it, and the damn ad loads slower (I swear as intended) which shifts everything on my screen causing me to inadvertently tap it.
I hate that so much, happens on my notifications list also, I go to click something and another notification pops up shifting everything
I don’t believe I’ve ever clicked on an ad without having been tricked into it by an overlay.
I also believe that the ad-bubble market is the biggest scam in Internet history. A whole ecosystem keeps the illusion alive that it actually does something other than exiting.
I have a slight amount of knowledge about it, having been heavily involved in watching ad campaigns’ performance from the advertiser’s side from time to time.
Personally I believe that there’s a ton of internet advertising that does effectively nothing except take money from companies with too much of it, and subsidize internet services so they can keep providing things to users for free (which, honestly, isn’t the worst thing in the world.)
My specific observations which came with a decent amount of data behind them, are:
- Google search ads, and similar ads that are being shown to people right at the instant they are looking for the thing the ad is for, people click on and sometimes buy the thing.
- Ads that are randomly shown to people, even tracking-pixel ads for people who have already visited your web site or whatever, do basically nothing in terms of directly driving conversions. They may have some positive impact on brand recognition and building legitimacy of the brand, but personally I’m a little skeptical that it’s worth it.
- Pretty much the only clicks you get from randomly-displayed ads – especially from dopamine-machine networks like Facebook – are people accidentally clicking on them who immediately navigate back away. Like, 99% for random web site ads, and 99.9% for dopamine-machine ads.
- Genuine social media presence is free and is effective.
Accidentally so many times.
goes to press download button HELLO CONTENT LAYOUT SHIFT clicks ad
Learned this one from runescape: You can get around this by always right clicking.
When I try to click the microscopic X to close and it flings me to the app store.
When it says “fuck it, i’m opening myself anyway”
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Accidentally? Because a lot of ads are designed to trick you into clicking on them.
I have a pihole that blocks most of them from loading, but sometimes I accidentally click on one.
The last time I intentionally clicked on an ad, when I was fired from my job and I kept seeing google ads because we used gmail for everything back then, and I knew it drove the CEO crazy that he was paying per clickthrough. So I would click on it and bounce around the website all the way to the cart, and then abandon the cart with thousands of dollars of stuff in it.
I’m pretty sure he could see my google account associated with the activity.
Adnauseam mentioned?
I’m confused by this. Your company had to pay when employees clicked ads in Gmail? I assume this the enterprise version? But then that implies that Google puts ads in the enterprise Gmail which sounds both unsurprising and crazy to me.
No, they paid when anyone clicked on their ads. I would click from my personal devices.
I was there in the late 90s, when hitting the wrong website (or a good one on a bad day) would spawn oodles of pop-ups and pop-unders. And any attempt to close even one of these windows would spawn 10 more. Rinse and repeat until these ads brought not only your browser to a grinding halt, but also your entire operating system, forcing a hard restart of your entire computer.
The moment an adblocking add-in was made for Phoenix (later Firefox), I installed it and never looked back.
I feel for those websites who rely on ad revenue to exist, but that well was thoroughly poisoned for me long before you (likely) ever existed. I will never permit a browser to exist on any of my systems without an ad-blocker of some kind, and I will configure all of my clients to have the same protections in place.
Every time my parents used the computer, even if it was only for a few minutes, it ended up looking like this
The moment an adblocking add-in was made for Phoenix (later Firefox), I installed it and never looked back.
Oh wow, I had totally forgotten that it started as phoenix. I only remember that name because the first time I downloaded the browser, the homepage read “Phoenix is now Firebird”.
I don’t even see ads lol
I’d say maybe the once 90s?
I don’t even see ads
I’m blind
You can still hear them though :(
The first and last time I clicked an ad was roughly 20 years ago. I was a child, playing RuneScape and orgazing a clan, and I wanted to post our clan events on a website.
An ad for one.com (a web host, called b-one back then) was shown above the RuneScape client. I thought about it and decided to click it. I landed on the website and made an account, played around a bit, and asked my mom if she’d pay for it. In that moment, not only did I become a paying customer, I became a web developer. The latter of which I still am to this day.
Being exposed to such life-altering artifacts on the daily seems like a terrible idea, so I’ve blocked ads ever since.
Every time I search a company website on Google and I don’t like the company and want them loose money. If I like the company I click the normal search result.
Oh I like this.
I have a pihole so I instinctively never click the ad result, because I don’t want companies to think ads are working.
I thought I was the only one that did that lol
System-wide ad blocking on all devices that support it.
Can’t even remember the last time I’ve even seen an ad lol
This is the way
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If you buy anything because a youtuber told you to, you’re a fucking idiot. Every time I see a sponsorship a year later it’s like “yeah you know that raid shadow legends shit? They’re an online casino for kids also they fund IDF genocide” or something of equal caliber.
Like maybe 1 in 800 sponsorships are just upstarts trying to get their foot in the market, the rest are just outright scams or evil as fuck.
It was when I wanted to click a link I was interested in but an ad that had delayed loading covered the link the moment I clicked.
I vomited acid blood the last time that happened to me. It wasn’t an ad but an image loaded causing me to click something else instead.
