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.
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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.
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:
Accidentally so many times.
goes to press download button HELLO CONTENT LAYOUT SHIFT clicks ad
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?
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
I don't even see ads lol
I'd say maybe the once 90s?
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
When I try to click the microscopic X to close and it flings me to the app store.
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.
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.
System-wide ad blocking on all devices that support it.
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.
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.
Does accidentally clicking a mobile ad because the x was too small count?
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.
Sometimes I hate click on ads from organizations I don't like so they have to pay a couple of cents. 😬
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.
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
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.
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.
I don't recall ever doing so.
Probably one of the “throw the shoe at GWB” or “snipe OBL” sidebar ads in the early 00’s
Never
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 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.
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.
I rarely see them, have never clicked one.
I suspect very few people do.
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.
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.
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.
Ublock origin.
There were some nicely packed boobs. I like boobs.
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.