What was the last time you clicked on an ad?

PsychrolutesMarcidus@lemmy.blahaj.zone to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 176 points –

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?

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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.

Ads work, but if you're on lemmy you're not the target audience.
Raid shadow legends is profitable.

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.

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".

Banner ads, not for a long long time, at least not intentionally.

Last week I needed parts for my snowblower, and Amazon was not helpful finding what I needed, so I googled the info I had. A competitor’s ad appeared as the first result. I was skeptical as hell as I clicked on it - my experience has always been similar to yours - but they had a comprehensive, easy-to-use database of parts, with diagrams, part numbers, in-stock notes, and cost all on the same page. No hacky website, just the right information presented well. Wound up giving them the business.

I guess not everyone is a rabid, cheating, lying SOB. Just many people. Lol

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.

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.

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.

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.

On my devices I don't see ads because PiHole and uBlock... But this week while using someone else's device, and I saw an Ad, I tried to click the 'x' button, but accidentally clicked the ad because they make the button tiny.

Screw ads.

I rarely click on them. If I like what I see I'll manually Google the product since I don't trust the link they give me.

Oh yeah, all the time. Not for anything I need though. Just for private jets, million dollar pieces of industrial mining equipment, and centrifuges.

Ubiquitous surveillance means constant opportunities to provide wrong data.

Does accidentally clicking a mobile ad because the x was too small count?

I've clicked retargeting ads a few times, if they're offering me an abandoned cart coupon ("finish your order at our store and save 10%"). I've worked in ad tech in the past, and retargeting ads (ads that show products you've previously viewed or expressed an interest in) have extremely high clickthrough rates.

I saw an ad in Instagram reels around a week ago for a Chinese company that makes big LED signs like you see at the front of stores like Safeway or Best Buy or whatever. Not interested in the product, but I was intrigued because the guy in the ad was Chinese but had a Texan accent. Turns out he uses a different accent in each of his ad videos. That was amusing. I did click the ad to see the quality of the product.

Turns out he uses a different accent in each of his ad videos.

Politicians do this too. I will never not laugh at Hillary Clinton doing a southern accent or Putin popping a gasket trying to speak English.

This is the video I saw: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C0gPnVluYL7/ (I swear my comment isn't an ad lol). I thought that was just the way he talks, but then I watched his other videos and he does so many other accents. They actually seem like decent quality products.

I don't mind ads that are unique in some way, and not produced by a marketing agency that seems to use the same approach for all their clients (like car ads).

Sometimes I hate click on ads from organizations I don't like so they have to pay a couple of cents. 😬

Same energy as that time antifa bought out all the tickets of a hate concert with fake accounts so the concert was empty and penniless.

I barely ever encounter ads on desktop.

On mobile I've clicked on ads for (legitimate looking) games before. Half the time it's an immediate uninstall, but once in a while I find something good

Intentionally? Maybe 10 years ago.

True story, it was a "get a free iPad" ad, and I kid you not, I ended up getting an ipad (with some effort and a few emails). It was an ad in an app.

I have ads unblocked on a site that I like to support, and that serves relevant ads that are generally clean.
Generally, they're ads for equipment from manufacturers I'm actually interested in, so I will occasionally click on them.

Probably one of the “throw the shoe at GWB” or “snipe OBL” sidebar ads in the early 00’s

There was a warez site that politely asked to click their ads to support them, which I did. This was around the year 2000, adblocking nor user tracking were really a thing.

It's not about clicks, it's about attribution. That is also why they all want to track you. It's not just about targeting ads. If you buy something in a webshop and the advertiser can show that you saw a (related) ad for that somewhere in the last X days/weeks then the sale is attributed to the advertiser and they get paid a fee. That is why they want to track anything and everything. The more data they collect, the higher the chance they can show attribution. No clicks required.

I'm not necessarily saying you're wrong but is there any source for this? Because every ad partner I've ever seen has been pretty explicit about getting paid per interaction.

How many times do you order a pizza when the pizza ad appears on tv?

It’s not about getting your instant interaction, it’s about getting repetitive exposure. Clicks are even more valuable though.

Why ad partners deal only with clicks? I don’t know. It’s how it’s started years ago and no one has been able to change it I guess.

Clicks are a pretty good way to measure engagement of your audience, even if your only goal is just to build brand recognition. If you're showing tons of people an ad, and no one's clicking, it's probably because they DGAF about what you're showing them and the impact is very minimal.

Platforms like Facebook and Yelp definitely will sometimes try to push you to a package which is pay-per-impression, and they have a whole presentation which tries to make it sound like it's worth it, but the times that I've analyzed their performance it's been ridiculously bad. Like, "kind of looks like every click we're getting is an accidental click" bad. I looked at our Facebook campaign for a company I worked for once and we were literally paying $300-500 per conversion with every other part of the pipeline already set up and tested. They just sell you on pay-per-impression packages and then show your ads to a ton of people who scroll past them instantly. In my opinion.

I go out of my way not to do so. Whenever I search for some specific items and see "Sponsored," I'll scroll down until I get the same listing without the ad link.

Maybe about a year ago. It was an actual offer from a site I knew already and was too lazy to go and check it manually. Never making that mistake again as for months afterwards every ad I got was from this site. I now use adblock on my phone as well so I don't see anything but I bet I'd still get ads from that site if I didn't.

I don’t think I’ve ever intentionally clicked an ad, with the very very infrequent exception of product results that come up in searches. It’s literally never been to buy the product, though. It’s to see if I’m interested in doing more shopping around. Ads are never for the best priced or highest quality product, but if it’s something you’ve never looked into before they can be informative, and it’s easy to access.

But since I started running a pihole years ago, I don’t even do that, because it gets blocked when I click it. Rightly so, it was a bad strategy anyway.

Been a really long time I have actually clicked on an actual ad, unless we're including closing the pop up thing every time you boot up Steam. I couldn't remember the last ad I actually clicked on if we're not including the Steam thing.

I've clicked on some IG ads before. They have good targeted ads, to be honest. I think I clicked on a game that gives you a mechanical representation of electrical concepts called Spintronics.

I actually bought a cheap laser mouse off a banner ad once back when you could still find mice with balls in them. I think it was like 15 bucks, arrived no problem, and my credit card didn't get stolen, so it was a win I guess?

Might've been the last time I clicked an ad, and it was 20+ years ago. Oh wait no my news app a few years ago had a top made out of gold being sold for about $150 as an executive desk toy. I checked it out because I was sure it would link to a new satire site like the onion. Turns out it was real and my news app thought I was really into gold tops for a few weeks.

I rarely see them, have never clicked one.

I suspect very few people do.

My girlfriend asked me to whitelist her device on our home network so we can see those on Google as « she needs them to do shopping » Edit: typo

Lol ?!? My girlfriend did no such thing! (My boyfriend didn't either!)

Tell yours to use more small local shops, for the sake of the environment. Honestly it isn't tough to shop without ads that steal your money, credit card, and identity.

Sorry my autocorrect fucked the sentence 😅 it swapped “my” with you”

Ha! Here I was thinking it was some sort of garbled "your mum" joke.

Nah dude, I never understood why some people get their kicks by being nasty online :)

Thankyou for restoring my faith in you, mate. I hope the girlfriend shopping issue works itself out (perhaps she should use her phone hotspot to connect her shopping machine if she wants to be scammed? I use mine for some stuff on occasion, if and as necessary, and my boyfriend and other housemates are thus not affected) and I hope the rest of your weekend is excellent.

I wish you a very nice weekend to you as well!

Just to add some extra detail, apparently if you look for clothes/shoes the ads are actually legit in the sense that they will just have a display on g@@gle but, if you do want to purchase, clicking will then take you to H&M or what have you. It has been years that ads are non existent for me so I got used to look for the sites where I want to shop but… she taught me that certain people use ads to discover stuff…

Sorting the safe from the scam seems a terrible way to spend an arvo playing roulette, but sure if she feels she must. Personally I have been very successful searching without those advertisements. You can hover over them as you go past, and their links are invariably complex enough to nope the hell out. I don't need that sort of risk in my life.

If she honestly wants to shop H&M (USian I'm guessing?) or David Jones or whatever, she should go to their website. Even the most humble local shops have websites these days, my local custom paper seller has, like most shopfronts, had its website long before the shopfront arrived in the world. And buying from the small and local is better for the environment, better for your home town, and more reliable.

Only accident ever. I hate ads. Always have. I go out of my way to not buy things over advertised to me.

Bought a sweater I saw in an ad. Like a 70s style one, like it was the sweater that inspired both Tron and the Twister board game. Hasn’t arrived yet but I’m hopeful it isn’t complete trash.

Last year I clicked on an ad for a video game. The process was so clunky that I was better off Googling it and taking the link to its Steam page.

Advertisements aren't necessarily obtrusive or a bad thing. There are several content creators, Webstores, mailing lists, etc. that I'm subscribed to and whose ads I look forward to because I don't use social media but still want to be aware of new releases. I clicked on an ad from HYDRA + FOTOGRAFÍA that I got in my inbox earlier today

Google's and Meta's main business are ads?? I do doubt this! Their main business is hoarding data about you and everybody and selling that data to anyone willing to buy it.

Alphabet (Google's parent company) made $224 billion on Google ads in 2022, and $58 billion on everything else put together (according to page 31 of their annual report). They do lots of stuff, but Google ads have always been over 80% of their revenue with everything else just noise around the edges.

Neither Google nor Meta sell data. The data is what makes the company valuable, so it doesn't make sense for them to sell it (otherwise, competitors could just buy their data). They keep all the data for themselves, to improve their ad targeting algorithms.

On purpose? I vaguely remember doing so once several years ago, but I don't remember what the ad was for.

On desktop I'm at no risk of accidentally clicking on ads because I have uBlock Origin, but on mobile, more specifically on the YouTube app, I'll occasionally accidentally tap an ad or "promoted" video.

If you use Firefox for Android you can install ublock. Also there are third party YouTube apps without ads.

Fatty McFuckface (aka: Clive Palmer) was running non stop ads in Australia during the last election. Every ad I clicked through cost him a fraction of a cent.

I probably turned ad block off long enough to click on at least one ... I think

I scroll past the sponsored Google result links to get to the non-sponsored one that was "identical". I haven't intentionally clicked an ad in a while. Generally if I want to click an ad I just Google what I need to not need to. I use a pi-hole so generally I don't see them.

I might click on some sponsored results in Google search if it was the result I was looking for either way.

Intentionally? Probably when ads for Wheel of Time Season 2 started showing up and I clicked through to see if they had a release date.

Unintentionally through misclick? Probably yesterday

Unintentionally through deception? Seconds ago

Years. Hell, it's months since I've even seen one ... and that was just because sometimes when you start your browser a page will load before the adblocker is loaded.

I dont think I've ever click on an ad on purpose. I've clicked for mistake I closed right away. Never ever bought anything from an ad.

For the Samsung galaxy s3. What a disappointment that became! Never again.

Crossellers, sure. But actual ads, I cannot remember ever having voluntarily clicked on one. Not once in my entire >40 years of life.

There were some nicely packed boobs. I like boobs.

I just don't like if I forget to go incognito VPN and shop to buy something, then buy something, so I'm done shopping for it, but then see it non stop in adds for the next 2 months.

I ALREADY BOUGHT A DAMNED PAIR OF WORK BOOTS!

A couple weeks ago when I bought a new wallet. Which I’m very pleased with so far.

Never since I installed a program that prevents me from doing so by accident.

Recently had one for a world of Warcraft private server which seemed cool

I’ve been on the internet since before it had ads and have never once intentionally clicked on one. These days I always have at least one ad blocker running, so I never see them.

Been a long time. The last time I got affected was via a Shockwave/Flash banner ad for the movie "Moulin Rouge," which dates this story. It's not so much that I clicked on it, but it was on a forum banner ad. I didn't get a virus as much as I got "VOULEZ-VOUS COUCHER AVEC MOI!!" screaming from my speakers from out of nowhere with no warning.

While the head of our Canadian operations was in my office.

Who, of course, spoke French.

Thankfully, she just teased me about it and I didn't get fired.

Been using an ad blocker ever since.

I accidentally clicked in a ad in the past week. Does it count?

Sometimes I click on ads for mobile games if I think they actually look fun. They just redirect straight into the app store so there's not much chance of anything bad happening

Quite often:

  • To support the site the ad is placed on
  • To cost money to the ad's sponsor if I don't like them

I sometimes click on Instagram-Ads because some of them are so unhinged that I have to find out what they are about?

I’ve clicked on ads (primarily Instagram actually) because it is an ad that is for a product or service I was actually looking for but didn’t have the time/knowledge to actually go searching for it

I don't remember ever clicking an ad. I probably have, but I don't remember ever doing it.

I pay for as much content as I can, to avoid that vomit.