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 watched some trailers on YouTube for upcoming movies. That is probably the most intentional consumption of advertisements I make; I even search them out specifically.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Can’t even remember the last time I’ve even seen an ad lol

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.

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.

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.

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.