7 ms·

The fact that the ad model has worked so well is always a nice reminder of how much of a bubble I live in. Personally I have never intentionally clicked on a Go

The fact that the ad model has worked so well is always a nice reminder of how much of a bubble I live in. Personally I have never intentionally clicked on a Google/YouTube/etc ad. Never. I wonder if the general population has been getting more tech-savvy and skeptical of ads over time, but this change takes a very long time to play out. I sometimes see my dad clicking on ads because he doesn't understand the mechanics behind them, but he'll die pretty soon, and a younger more tech-savvy generation will replace him.

wodenokoto 4y ago
People say the same thing about billboard and TV advertisement. Yet they work very well.
FpUser 4y ago
>" have never intentionally clicked on a Google/YouTube/etc ad" Same here
tsss 4y ago
I intentionally click on Google Image ads quite often. When you're looking for furniture or art they're quite relevant.
poisonborz 4y ago
Ads are becoming way more complex entities than a banner/image that you click on. Companies are recognizing this and investing accordingly - think of influencer sponsorships, video inserts, in-game tokens, campaign based mobile apps. There are constantly more pipes to market through, there is restructuring the same way billboard/print advertising started to drop in the 2000s.
mancerayder 4y ago
It's not clicking. It's that it may have popped up somewhere in your awareness, the industry calls this an impression. That's monetized along with that space on the sides and within articles and content. It's like real estate that this industry trades at low latency.
m348e912 4y ago
>Personally I have never intentionally clicked on a >Google/YouTube/etc ad. Never. You may not have clicked on a YouTube ad, but you still needed to _watch_ some or part of that ad. Maybe you weren't influenced, but you were at least exposed to whatever the advertiser was selling.
pprotas 4y ago
I am with you here. It is baffling to me how there are people using the internet without an adblocker on every device!
- locusofself 4y ago
  almost every website has a paywall now that detects adblockers and nags you. the number of distinct websites I regularly visit has dwindled drastically. If Im not on reddit/HN or reading documentation, I pretty much stick to the few sites I have subscriptions to.
  - trieste92 4y ago
    Sounds like the adblocker isn't good enough
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
xnx 4y ago
You don't have to have clicked on an ad to have been influenced by one.
- loveparade 4y ago
  Yes, but CTR and conversion metrics still matter to ad buyers. It's much more difficult to measure the influence on my subconscious and attribute that.
  - lll-o-lll 4y ago
    Is it though? Television ads worked for years without any direct feedback. I assume a company can just look at before and after revenue…
  - jrockway 4y ago
    I think that there is some weird effect in the ad business where this isn't the case. Look at sponsorships or untargeted ads; Red Bull may sponsor someone jumping out of a balloon at the edge of space, but it's probably hard to convert that investment to a number of extra cans of energy drink sold. I see a lot of video ads like that in the same way. Everyone watching Overwatch League is just there idling for in-game rewards for watch time and probably have no idea who the sponsors are. And, all these children inflating YouTube view counts because the thumbnail has a weird face they can't resist clicking, aren't buying razor blade subscriptions or workstation monitoring systems that the video sponsors are advertising. (Hi Linus.) I could never figure out if advertisers don't know what's going on, or they merely don't want to know. I get the feeling that companies value brand perception so heavily they don't know they're getting ripped off by the distribution networks. Or, individual ad executives just want people to talk about their ad at the water cooler, so don't purchase ads to most efficiently use their employer's marketing budget, but rather maximize impressions to inflate their personal brand. Like I said, I don't know; maybe everyone knows about all of these things and they think untracked ad impressions are worth what they're paying. It's a mystery to me, but I'm somewhat surprised the traditional ad industry is alive and well. (The really insidious new form of advertising are paid endorsements and rigged reviews. If you search for "best X 2023", 100% of the results are ads presented as research. Truly evil and ruined ... everything.)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Rury 4y ago
Idk, but the drop in revenue is due to companies (eg coca-cola), no longer wanting to pay alphabet to have their ads displayed on alphabet's platforms, not so much as a drop in the amount of people clicking ads. (I say no longer wanting, there's still companies wanting obviously, demand for a spot on the platform is just lower). And it's mostly just the effects of monetary tightening, and companies trying to prepare for tight times.
- taeric 4y ago
  I think this gets really close to the actual story. A ton of the money in all faangs, is between the big companies. Google paying to be the default search engine. Microsoft doing the same. Everyone paying to be the top Google result. How many stupid large payments are between the big players directly?
  - killjoywashere 4y ago
    as I understand it, Mozilla's business is almost entirely funded by sending clicks to Google.
cscurmudgeon 4y ago
YouTube ads have gotten vey scummy too. A lot of get rich or get fit ads though I just listen to music or lectures there. And it seems common for others and now people have learned to avoid YouTube ads.
- kenhwang 4y ago
  This is usually a sign of advertiser flight. Usually big reputable brands are easily the top bidders getting their ads shown, and in the absence of those, the much lower bidding scams can get through.
- throwaway14356 4y ago
  its much to expensive to promote things with small profit margins. You cant sell your 2 buck widget for 3 you have to sell it for 39.99
qilo 4y ago
I'm clicking somewhat often on youtube ads, because there's no way to escape them without the content blocker, so you have to watch the ad anyway. So if I have to wait anyway until the ad ends, I just waste aditional click. But I never buy anything nor have any interest in the advertised product. I do this mainly for 2 reasons: - waste the budget of annoying/scam ads in hope that in the future I'll see less of those - support the content creator
- bushbaba 4y ago
  Their model likely detected you as an outlier and might disregard your clicks
  - sbierwagen 4y ago
    If google thought your IP was from a click farm, wouldn't it block you from youtube entirely, to avoid wasting the bandwidth?
    - Blackthorn 4y ago
      No way. Imagine the terrible user experience when that goes wrong.
    - 314 4y ago
      Why give free information to your adversary instead of ignoring their clicks silently?
- wwweston 4y ago
  > there's no way to escape them without the content blocker You can pay for the service, which supports it and the content creators, plus you get a few extra goodies. I started doing it about a year ago for the "play in background" feature, but the no-ads thing has been nice.
- chrismorgan 4y ago
  > there's no way to escape them without the content blocker, so you have to watch the ad anyway I’m confused. So you use the content blocker.
I_AM_A_SMURF 4y ago
I think your bubble might be very tech heavy. My wife (a millennial) and her friends buy things from ads All. The. Time.
- ambrose2 4y ago
  I must also be in this bubble because this blows my mind. I have never bought anything from an ad. Maybe a few times a year on something with really good targeting like Instagram I’ll click on it if it’s interesting and I want to learn more, but I wouldn’t buy it. I just can’t imagine spending money that way, rather than “I need to solve x or do y so I need z so I will find it and buy it”.
- jemmyw 4y ago
  What do they buy?
  - I_AM_A_SMURF 4y ago
    Beauty products, phone cases, cheap jewelry stuff like that.
    - jemmyw 4y ago
      ah. Should sick my millennial wife on them. Her clothes have to be literally falling apart at the seams before she consents to considering new ones. Doesn't wear beauty products. Had a knitted case made for her phone 5 years ago. I did not seek out a person with these attributes but I'm pretty glad about it. The only downside is she isn't that tolerant of me buying tat either.
- trieste92 4y ago
  This. Gen Z's I know will buy random shit like shoes or phone cases off of Instagram Me personally? Seeing something on Instagram is enough of a reason for me to never buy it. Same for influencers telling me to buy something, I'd rather they eat shit But for ads that get interleaved with organic Amazon results, a lot of these are harder to spot (and also more innocuous imo)
drewbitt 4y ago
If I don’t like a company but have to visit their site, I’ll click on their Google ad that often appears and cost them the $1. Particularly if I’m using my work machine
- jliptzin 4y ago
  But what do you do if you also don’t like google?
  - _boffin_ 4y ago
    give Microsoft, Yandex, Bidu, yahoo, or someone else the ad revenue...?
baxtr 4y ago
I can recommend the book “Attention Merchants” by Tim Wu. People get used to Ads in any format over time like you noticed. But the fight for our attention will never stop. So in Google’s case, maybe their model won’t work in the future. The ad money will go somewhere else.
- godelski 4y ago
  Are people getting used to native advertising though? It seems prolific to me but I still just hear people brag about how advertising doesn't affect them because they don't click on things. People are used to basic advertising (billboards, commercials, and web page images) but I don't think people are used to other types of advertising. I also don't think people understand how all the basic advertising works. For example, many car commercials aren't always trying to get you to buy a car but rather build brand prestige. These types of ads have existed for quite a long time but I don't think people acclimated to them because they still misunderstand how ads work (or rather the diversity in purposes of ads).
xyst 4y ago
The only times I click on them are by accident. Sometimes they get through my multi layered ad defense.
AlbertCory 4y ago
I was in Google Ads 2008-10, and people from outside the company always said, "Oh, I never click on ads!" To which I responded, "Well, someone does, or we wouldn't have all this free food." There's a simple test of your hypothesis, which they can do easily inside Google but it's harder to do from outside: has CTR gone down over the years?
- rdsubhas 4y ago
  You cannot expand the mouth of the funnel (grow the market) and keep conversion static at the same time. Maybe something like rate of change of CTR is stable relative to the rate of change of traffic.
- blitzar 4y ago
  CTR are and always have been comically small - its like spam and scam calls - a pure (big) numbers game.
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    Like spam: 1% of a gigantic number is still a pretty big number.
- bamboozled 4y ago
  ...or, companies just think it's enough to be putting ads infront of people and paying for that privilege ?
  - readthenotes1 4y ago
    About 2010 I published a stupid little Android app and added ads to it just because I wanted the experience. I was shocked to actually make $25 a week off of an app that I didn't think anybody was really using. I put the ad someplace where people had to click on it on purpose, and I guess a lot did. That or Google did it for me
- loveparade 4y ago
  I don't think it's that simple of a hypothesis to verify, even inside Google. There are lots of reasons why CTR may be constant or go up despite fewer people converting through ads. Examples are bots, crawlers, more kids playing with iPads, or malicious website design, e.g, I have clicked on ads because I was tricked on it by the HTML/JS, but that doesn't help the advertiser because I'm not going to buy anything. CTR only matters in the short-term. In the long-term, what matters is if the market of advertisers believes ads are profitable for them. If their CTR goes up 10x but they cannot verify conversions, they may eventually stop buying ads. That won't happen quickly, because attribution is so hard and you can never be sure where your conversions really come from, but the decline of ads may still happen over a longer time frame.
petesergeant 4y ago
I am tech savvy and run ad blockers on all my devices. However I consume Instagram through an app, and can’t be arsed setting up an ad blocker that would deal with that. I have bought a whole bunch of stuff through Instagram ads. I see too many ads on Instagram, but not enough to make me stop using it, and the ads are apparently relevant enough. I assume this is a large reason why websites are so keen for you to use their apps.
- Helmut10001 4y ago
  I run an ad blocker centrally on my router (pfSense with pfblockerng on an APU2.D4), which has an automatically updated list of all known ad servers worldwide, directing traffic for those into a DNS sink. No device configuration needed. Cannot be detected by websites.
  - Thorrez 4y ago
    Couldn't JavaScript on the page notice that ads aren't loading?
    - Helmut10001 4y ago
      No, DNS sinkholes silently replace queries by a valid internal IP - to JavaScript, it looks like the resource is loading, but the webbrowser actually just displays whitespace instead of the app. Check for example this page [1] - if you run AdBlock, it will be detected. My page just looks void of Ads with pfblockerng [2]. It works inside Apps (Android etc.) and games or youtube videos, too. There are ways to get around this, like e.g. hardcoding IPs that are not known to serve Ads, but this needs additional work and 99% of ads don't do this. Benefits of router based DNS sinkholes: - cannot be detected by websites with anti-adblock scripts - no memory consumption on clients - fewer web browser plug-ins needed - lower device CPU utilization from AdGuard PC/Android apps, uBlock extensions etc. - protects all network devices without requiring extra work - browser, software and OS independent - device and PC independent. - implements redundancy should users remove/disable browser plug-ins [1]: https://next-episode.net/ https://next-episode.net/ [2]: https://imageupload.io/i/pL0x1yM8eC https://imageupload.io/i/pL0x1yM8eC
babyshake 4y ago
I click on search ads sometimes, but it's only when it happens to be the same result that I'm already looking for and it saves me an extra second finding that same result below. This doesn't seem to be very valuable to the advertiser, but I'm sure preventing me from getting distracted or persuaded by another result in that next second has some value.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  Entire model is hostile to those advertising. At least in these cases. You need to advertise your company name in searches so that your competitors advertising on your name don't beat you. This can only last as long as there is competitors willing to pay for those adds. Which might be getting tighter.
wewxjfq 4y ago
My dad browses the web without adblocker on his smartphone and tablet and he never clears his cookies on these devices either. It should be easy to target him with advertisement, and yet he mentioned how irrelevant all the ads are and that he couldn't understand why companies kept paying for them. So they can't show him interesting ads despite observing his browsing activity for years. I believe the only effective form of online advertisement is saturating search results with sponsored links, which is also kind of scummy because it hinges on making the ads look like regular search results.
- Corrado 4y ago
  I've noticed this mostly on Google properties, YouTube in particular. Most of my YouTube viewing is done on my TV through an Amazon FireTV device, so I see a lot of ads. Now, Google knows me very well and should be able to target me with super effective and compelling advertisements. Yet, I get tons of ads for products that I would never, ever purchase. Things like women's beauty products (not a woman), alcohol (never drink), trucks (not interested). While things that I would be interested in are never seen; science fiction movies, technology news, etc. I really don't see how Google (or any other ad company) are successful at all. I'm guessing they are just spewing ads to everyone on the planet and hoping that some stick. It feels like the "male enhancement" emails have the exact same process and probably work just as well.
- twelve40 4y ago
  haha my favorite one is retargeting on things i already bought. Like Columbia pants hounding me for weeks on every website after i already bought them.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
intronic 4y ago
Don't goog collect either way? You get presented an ad: - click and advertiser gets charged - don't click and the ad word cost goes up so advertiser pays more to present the ad next time (because click through rate went down) I always thought it was an amazing scheme, collect both ways. Or did I get it wrong? Was ages ago when I looked at it. I don't click either...

wodenokoto 4y ago

People say the same thing about billboard and TV advertisement. Yet they work very well.

FpUser 4y ago

>" have never intentionally clicked on a Google/YouTube/etc ad" Same here

tsss 4y ago

I intentionally click on Google Image ads quite often. When you're looking for furniture or art they're quite relevant.

poisonborz 4y ago

Ads are becoming way more complex entities than a banner/image that you click on. Companies are recognizing this and investing accordingly - think of influencer sponsorships, video inserts, in-game tokens, campaign based mobile apps. There are constantly more pipes to market through, there is restructuring the same way billboard/print advertising started to drop in the 2000s.

mancerayder 4y ago

It's not clicking. It's that it may have popped up somewhere in your awareness, the industry calls this an impression. That's monetized along with that space on the sides and within articles and content. It's like real estate that this industry trades at low latency.

m348e912 4y ago

>Personally I have never intentionally clicked on a >Google/YouTube/etc ad. Never. You may not have clicked on a YouTube ad, but you still needed to _watch_ some or part of that ad. Maybe you weren't influenced, but you were at least exposed to whatever the advertiser was selling.

pprotas 4y ago

I am with you here. It is baffling to me how there are people using the internet without an adblocker on every device!

locusofself 4y ago
almost every website has a paywall now that detects adblockers and nags you. the number of distinct websites I regularly visit has dwindled drastically. If Im not on reddit/HN or reading documentation, I pretty much stick to the few sites I have subscriptions to.
- trieste92 4y ago
  Sounds like the adblocker isn't good enough
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

xnx 4y ago

You don't have to have clicked on an ad to have been influenced by one.

loveparade 4y ago
Yes, but CTR and conversion metrics still matter to ad buyers. It's much more difficult to measure the influence on my subconscious and attribute that.
- lll-o-lll 4y ago
  Is it though? Television ads worked for years without any direct feedback. I assume a company can just look at before and after revenue…
- jrockway 4y ago
  I think that there is some weird effect in the ad business where this isn't the case. Look at sponsorships or untargeted ads; Red Bull may sponsor someone jumping out of a balloon at the edge of space, but it's probably hard to convert that investment to a number of extra cans of energy drink sold. I see a lot of video ads like that in the same way. Everyone watching Overwatch League is just there idling for in-game rewards for watch time and probably have no idea who the sponsors are. And, all these children inflating YouTube view counts because the thumbnail has a weird face they can't resist clicking, aren't buying razor blade subscriptions or workstation monitoring systems that the video sponsors are advertising. (Hi Linus.) I could never figure out if advertisers don't know what's going on, or they merely don't want to know. I get the feeling that companies value brand perception so heavily they don't know they're getting ripped off by the distribution networks. Or, individual ad executives just want people to talk about their ad at the water cooler, so don't purchase ads to most efficiently use their employer's marketing budget, but rather maximize impressions to inflate their personal brand. Like I said, I don't know; maybe everyone knows about all of these things and they think untracked ad impressions are worth what they're paying. It's a mystery to me, but I'm somewhat surprised the traditional ad industry is alive and well. (The really insidious new form of advertising are paid endorsements and rigged reviews. If you search for "best X 2023", 100% of the results are ads presented as research. Truly evil and ruined ... everything.)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Rury 4y ago

Idk, but the drop in revenue is due to companies (eg coca-cola), no longer wanting to pay alphabet to have their ads displayed on alphabet's platforms, not so much as a drop in the amount of people clicking ads. (I say no longer wanting, there's still companies wanting obviously, demand for a spot on the platform is just lower). And it's mostly just the effects of monetary tightening, and companies trying to prepare for tight times.

taeric 4y ago
I think this gets really close to the actual story. A ton of the money in all faangs, is between the big companies. Google paying to be the default search engine. Microsoft doing the same. Everyone paying to be the top Google result. How many stupid large payments are between the big players directly?
- killjoywashere 4y ago
  as I understand it, Mozilla's business is almost entirely funded by sending clicks to Google.

cscurmudgeon 4y ago

YouTube ads have gotten vey scummy too. A lot of get rich or get fit ads though I just listen to music or lectures there. And it seems common for others and now people have learned to avoid YouTube ads.

kenhwang 4y ago
This is usually a sign of advertiser flight. Usually big reputable brands are easily the top bidders getting their ads shown, and in the absence of those, the much lower bidding scams can get through.
throwaway14356 4y ago
its much to expensive to promote things with small profit margins. You cant sell your 2 buck widget for 3 you have to sell it for 39.99

qilo 4y ago

I'm clicking somewhat often on youtube ads, because there's no way to escape them without the content blocker, so you have to watch the ad anyway. So if I have to wait anyway until the ad ends, I just waste aditional click. But I never buy anything nor have any interest in the advertised product. I do this mainly for 2 reasons: - waste the budget of annoying/scam ads in hope that in the future I'll see less of those - support the content creator

bushbaba 4y ago
Their model likely detected you as an outlier and might disregard your clicks
- sbierwagen 4y ago
  If google thought your IP was from a click farm, wouldn't it block you from youtube entirely, to avoid wasting the bandwidth?
  - Blackthorn 4y ago
    No way. Imagine the terrible user experience when that goes wrong.
  - 314 4y ago
    Why give free information to your adversary instead of ignoring their clicks silently?
wwweston 4y ago
> there's no way to escape them without the content blocker You can pay for the service, which supports it and the content creators, plus you get a few extra goodies. I started doing it about a year ago for the "play in background" feature, but the no-ads thing has been nice.
chrismorgan 4y ago
> there's no way to escape them without the content blocker, so you have to watch the ad anyway I’m confused. So you use the content blocker.

I_AM_A_SMURF 4y ago

I think your bubble might be very tech heavy. My wife (a millennial) and her friends buy things from ads All. The. Time.

ambrose2 4y ago
I must also be in this bubble because this blows my mind. I have never bought anything from an ad. Maybe a few times a year on something with really good targeting like Instagram I’ll click on it if it’s interesting and I want to learn more, but I wouldn’t buy it. I just can’t imagine spending money that way, rather than “I need to solve x or do y so I need z so I will find it and buy it”.
jemmyw 4y ago
What do they buy?
- I_AM_A_SMURF 4y ago
  Beauty products, phone cases, cheap jewelry stuff like that.
  - jemmyw 4y ago
    ah. Should sick my millennial wife on them. Her clothes have to be literally falling apart at the seams before she consents to considering new ones. Doesn't wear beauty products. Had a knitted case made for her phone 5 years ago. I did not seek out a person with these attributes but I'm pretty glad about it. The only downside is she isn't that tolerant of me buying tat either.
trieste92 4y ago
This. Gen Z's I know will buy random shit like shoes or phone cases off of Instagram Me personally? Seeing something on Instagram is enough of a reason for me to never buy it. Same for influencers telling me to buy something, I'd rather they eat shit But for ads that get interleaved with organic Amazon results, a lot of these are harder to spot (and also more innocuous imo)

drewbitt 4y ago

If I don’t like a company but have to visit their site, I’ll click on their Google ad that often appears and cost them the $1. Particularly if I’m using my work machine

jliptzin 4y ago
But what do you do if you also don’t like google?
- _boffin_ 4y ago
  give Microsoft, Yandex, Bidu, yahoo, or someone else the ad revenue...?

baxtr 4y ago

I can recommend the book “Attention Merchants” by Tim Wu. People get used to Ads in any format over time like you noticed. But the fight for our attention will never stop. So in Google’s case, maybe their model won’t work in the future. The ad money will go somewhere else.

godelski 4y ago
Are people getting used to native advertising though? It seems prolific to me but I still just hear people brag about how advertising doesn't affect them because they don't click on things. People are used to basic advertising (billboards, commercials, and web page images) but I don't think people are used to other types of advertising. I also don't think people understand how all the basic advertising works. For example, many car commercials aren't always trying to get you to buy a car but rather build brand prestige. These types of ads have existed for quite a long time but I don't think people acclimated to them because they still misunderstand how ads work (or rather the diversity in purposes of ads).

xyst 4y ago

The only times I click on them are by accident. Sometimes they get through my multi layered ad defense.

AlbertCory 4y ago

I was in Google Ads 2008-10, and people from outside the company always said, "Oh, I never click on ads!" To which I responded, "Well, someone does, or we wouldn't have all this free food." There's a simple test of your hypothesis, which they can do easily inside Google but it's harder to do from outside: has CTR gone down over the years?

rdsubhas 4y ago
You cannot expand the mouth of the funnel (grow the market) and keep conversion static at the same time. Maybe something like rate of change of CTR is stable relative to the rate of change of traffic.
blitzar 4y ago
CTR are and always have been comically small - its like spam and scam calls - a pure (big) numbers game.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  Like spam: 1% of a gigantic number is still a pretty big number.
bamboozled 4y ago
...or, companies just think it's enough to be putting ads infront of people and paying for that privilege ?
- readthenotes1 4y ago
  About 2010 I published a stupid little Android app and added ads to it just because I wanted the experience. I was shocked to actually make $25 a week off of an app that I didn't think anybody was really using. I put the ad someplace where people had to click on it on purpose, and I guess a lot did. That or Google did it for me
loveparade 4y ago
I don't think it's that simple of a hypothesis to verify, even inside Google. There are lots of reasons why CTR may be constant or go up despite fewer people converting through ads. Examples are bots, crawlers, more kids playing with iPads, or malicious website design, e.g, I have clicked on ads because I was tricked on it by the HTML/JS, but that doesn't help the advertiser because I'm not going to buy anything. CTR only matters in the short-term. In the long-term, what matters is if the market of advertisers believes ads are profitable for them. If their CTR goes up 10x but they cannot verify conversions, they may eventually stop buying ads. That won't happen quickly, because attribution is so hard and you can never be sure where your conversions really come from, but the decline of ads may still happen over a longer time frame.

petesergeant 4y ago

I am tech savvy and run ad blockers on all my devices. However I consume Instagram through an app, and can’t be arsed setting up an ad blocker that would deal with that. I have bought a whole bunch of stuff through Instagram ads. I see too many ads on Instagram, but not enough to make me stop using it, and the ads are apparently relevant enough. I assume this is a large reason why websites are so keen for you to use their apps.

Helmut10001 4y ago
I run an ad blocker centrally on my router (pfSense with pfblockerng on an APU2.D4), which has an automatically updated list of all known ad servers worldwide, directing traffic for those into a DNS sink. No device configuration needed. Cannot be detected by websites.
- Thorrez 4y ago
  Couldn't JavaScript on the page notice that ads aren't loading?
  - Helmut10001 4y ago
    No, DNS sinkholes silently replace queries by a valid internal IP - to JavaScript, it looks like the resource is loading, but the webbrowser actually just displays whitespace instead of the app. Check for example this page [1] - if you run AdBlock, it will be detected. My page just looks void of Ads with pfblockerng [2]. It works inside Apps (Android etc.) and games or youtube videos, too. There are ways to get around this, like e.g. hardcoding IPs that are not known to serve Ads, but this needs additional work and 99% of ads don't do this. Benefits of router based DNS sinkholes: - cannot be detected by websites with anti-adblock scripts - no memory consumption on clients - fewer web browser plug-ins needed - lower device CPU utilization from AdGuard PC/Android apps, uBlock extensions etc. - protects all network devices without requiring extra work - browser, software and OS independent - device and PC independent. - implements redundancy should users remove/disable browser plug-ins [1]: https://next-episode.net/ https://next-episode.net/ [2]: https://imageupload.io/i/pL0x1yM8eC https://imageupload.io/i/pL0x1yM8eC

babyshake 4y ago

I click on search ads sometimes, but it's only when it happens to be the same result that I'm already looking for and it saves me an extra second finding that same result below. This doesn't seem to be very valuable to the advertiser, but I'm sure preventing me from getting distracted or persuaded by another result in that next second has some value.

Ekaros 4y ago
Entire model is hostile to those advertising. At least in these cases. You need to advertise your company name in searches so that your competitors advertising on your name don't beat you. This can only last as long as there is competitors willing to pay for those adds. Which might be getting tighter.

wewxjfq 4y ago

My dad browses the web without adblocker on his smartphone and tablet and he never clears his cookies on these devices either. It should be easy to target him with advertisement, and yet he mentioned how irrelevant all the ads are and that he couldn't understand why companies kept paying for them. So they can't show him interesting ads despite observing his browsing activity for years. I believe the only effective form of online advertisement is saturating search results with sponsored links, which is also kind of scummy because it hinges on making the ads look like regular search results.

Corrado 4y ago
I've noticed this mostly on Google properties, YouTube in particular. Most of my YouTube viewing is done on my TV through an Amazon FireTV device, so I see a lot of ads. Now, Google knows me very well and should be able to target me with super effective and compelling advertisements. Yet, I get tons of ads for products that I would never, ever purchase. Things like women's beauty products (not a woman), alcohol (never drink), trucks (not interested). While things that I would be interested in are never seen; science fiction movies, technology news, etc. I really don't see how Google (or any other ad company) are successful at all. I'm guessing they are just spewing ads to everyone on the planet and hoping that some stick. It feels like the "male enhancement" emails have the exact same process and probably work just as well.
twelve40 4y ago
haha my favorite one is retargeting on things i already bought. Like Columbia pants hounding me for weeks on every website after i already bought them.
deleted 4y ago
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intronic 4y ago

Don't goog collect either way? You get presented an ad: - click and advertiser gets charged - don't click and the ad word cost goes up so advertiser pays more to present the ad next time (because click through rate went down) I always thought it was an amazing scheme, collect both ways. Or did I get it wrong? Was ages ago when I looked at it. I don't click either...