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People in Silicon Valley Don’t Click on Ads

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Re: People in Silicon Valley Don’t Click on Ads

#41
post #35
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you didn't know it was one.

Really? How about if you see something you actually want and are looking for? Is that really so difficult to imagine?

Most ads seem to link to products/services that are not related to the content of the page that I'm currently looking at. Instead, they present targeted content based on browsing habit profiling. I'm far less likely to click on an ad that is out of context with what I'm currently thinking about.

Re: People in Silicon Valley Don’t Click on Ads

#42
post #33

Most people here seem to think that one clicks ads only by accident. If this were true such clicks would never lead to a purchase or just associate a brand with annoyance. I simply can't believe that. Sure, mostly, I see ads for stuff I have just purchased, sometimes for months but there also have been useful ones from time to time for me (mostly home automation/Raspberry Pi stuff), also my brain seems wired not to i…

The problem is there is no filtering, thanks to having a paying customer (ad maker), and then horrible ads get shown. And they slow my experience down, take over my website, use technologies that can infect my otherwise uninfected computers, and confuse me when I want to click download.

I learned from an early age that every single ad was essentially evil. All of it was a trick to get me to click something I did not want. Maybe, if they hadn't done that (and if they had ever really stopped... cause they haven't) I wouldn't have Privacy Bader, uBlock, and Disconnect running all at once.

In the beginning all I had wanted to do was get actual information on a topic or download the latest version of something for Windows. And every time I see someone not running highly aggressive adblockers I can understand why they think somethings on the internet are so complicated. "Just google it" -> "Yea, and click which irrelevant ad which takes up the whole first fold of the page on my not Retina MBP?"

Re: People in Silicon Valley Don’t Click on Ads

#43
post #12

Ironically, advertising business is mainly run by ad blocker users.

I heard that Google had to rename their ad management portal's CSS styles because the site was broken for customers using ad blockers. :)

Well, still didn't work for me! :P (Privacy Badger, Disconnect, uBlock)

But I'm rather aggressively blocking anything/everything I can.

Re: People in Silicon Valley Don’t Click on Ads

#44

Why would I ever click on an ad?

How could anyone resist the allure of "Punch the Monkey"? Or Bonzi Buddy? :-) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy http://www.mikeonads.com/2007/03/01/punch-the-monkey/

Oh man, I remember the days. When I was younger my dad had to teach me that it was an Ad. I wanted that free (X) so badly. I also loved punching the monkey. So horrible, yet so much fun.

Re: People in Silicon Valley Don’t Click on Ads

#45
post #35
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you didn't know it was one.

Really? How about if you see something you actually want and are looking for? Is that really so difficult to imagine?

Then I would have searched for it and found the link that way.

Re: People in Silicon Valley Don’t Click on Ads

#46
post #33

Most people here seem to think that one clicks ads only by accident. If this were true such clicks would never lead to a purchase or just associate a brand with annoyance. I simply can't believe that. Sure, mostly, I see ads for stuff I have just purchased, sometimes for months but there also have been useful ones from time to time for me (mostly home automation/Raspberry Pi stuff), also my brain seems wired not to i…

[deleted]

Re: People in Silicon Valley Don’t Click on Ads

#47
post #33

Most people here seem to think that one clicks ads only by accident. If this were true such clicks would never lead to a purchase or just associate a brand with annoyance. I simply can't believe that. Sure, mostly, I see ads for stuff I have just purchased, sometimes for months but there also have been useful ones from time to time for me (mostly home automation/Raspberry Pi stuff), also my brain seems wired not to i…

Quite often (for not completely understood reasons), I will see a interesting ad and purposely avoid clicking it but immediately Google the advertised company/product.

Considering my ignorance of analytics, my "ad avoidance" might be easily correlatable and considered a "click" on the obviously influential ad, especially when the ad that I was avoiding was presented by Google.

Re: People in Silicon Valley Don’t Click on Ads

#48
post #33

Most people here seem to think that one clicks ads only by accident. If this were true such clicks would never lead to a purchase or just associate a brand with annoyance. I simply can't believe that. Sure, mostly, I see ads for stuff I have just purchased, sometimes for months but there also have been useful ones from time to time for me (mostly home automation/Raspberry Pi stuff), also my brain seems wired not to i…

Personally, I've never discovered anything specifically from an ad worth purchasing, but I have found interesting things to purchase after an advert inspired me to research a topic further.

Frankly, your comment reads as someone whose livelihood depends on advertising.

Re: People in Silicon Valley Don’t Click on Ads

#49
post #18

I think this has a large effect on opinions in an often revisited internet topic "moving away from ads". Whenever a service starts to offer a paid alternative, or people get on the topic of tracking, or micropayments comes up, it's always struck me that commenters seem used to effectively free content and seem to just ignore that there are people subsidizing their internet usage by clicking on ads comparatively all t…

> Quality content, services, and products are expensive to make. An internet where we pay for it instead of it being supported by user targeted ads isn't going to be covered by paying 10 cents per article you really liked.

Searching tells me that CPM is typically between $1 and $10. That implies ad income per site view of $0.001-$0.01, right? The fact that clicks are worth $1, or even $100, is irrelevant. What matters is ad income divided by site views. If every viewer paid that price, enforced by a paywall, the owner would earn as much as they had from ads.

Re: People in Silicon Valley Don’t Click on Ads

#50
post #33

Most people here seem to think that one clicks ads only by accident. If this were true such clicks would never lead to a purchase or just associate a brand with annoyance. I simply can't believe that. Sure, mostly, I see ads for stuff I have just purchased, sometimes for months but there also have been useful ones from time to time for me (mostly home automation/Raspberry Pi stuff), also my brain seems wired not to i…

> Do most HN-ers really believe all ads are fraudulent rip-offs designed to trick us just into clicking on them?

Some ads are pushing adware, malware or worse, for sure. And some AdSense ads are designed to look like search results, to trick people looking for Chrome or whatever. But even honest ads are designed to trick us into buying stuff that we hadn't planned on. Or to trick us into impulse buying, without proper research, reading product reviews, asking friends, and so on.

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