Yes, most people. Adblockers are used by a minority.

They absolutely are. Everything I got from my family this past Christmas was slop from the TikTok shop. They just clicked the first ad they saw and bought whatever. I even got two of the same item because my brother didn't realize he clicked two ads for the same thing. I've been calling it Dropshipmas.

You think that's an obscene amount of money? The intermediary services that collect, collate, aggregate, etc. that same data in the first place before selling it to companies like your employer? That's where the insane money is. That's the long game. 🤢🥲

I showed my sister ad block and she was like why would i want to block ads. She said she has her algo dialed in and the ads just show her products she probably wants to buy.

There are enough stories about somebody installing a pi-hole and a family member getting angry because now the ads for all the pretty things are gone.

Ads Georg, who lives in a cave and looks at adverts 17.7 billion times a day is an outlier and should not be counted.

I'm going to push back on this. The experiments that had scientific rigor shown that broad ads were only marginally less effective then personalized ones while being way cheeper.

A lot of what you see may be attributing conversion to sales that would happen anyway. Classic examples would be do you use branded search keyowords? Off course you do, despite the body of evidence that it only cannibalize the organic search.

But there are other much more complex mehanics in play. Each sestem takes away more and more control to replace it with "autootymization", so you truly have no idea to whom and when your ads is shown. Exact keywords are broader then broad "back in a day". Who knows how google is mixing your ad components, an now AI will dynamically change the ad content and placement using unknown criteria. All this to obscure that what we do is advertisal (?) equivalent showing a pizza ad to people who finished giving their order to the waiter.

Measurable online was here to save us from ineffective offline. Big data was here to save us from innefectove CPC. Algorithms were here to save us from paralism of to much data and now AI is here to save us from all this producing mostly a negative ROI anyway.

I honestly belive we were in the middle of a massive online advertising bubble, that we manage to cover up with even bigger AI bubble.

We are fucked.

I work in this space and I'm appalled at how much targeted ads make my company.

And here is the hint (with the fencepost) that it might be more wishful thinking on the customers side (the companies renting the service). Similiar to the AI slop bubble.

Most people use apps or standard Chrome. And Google targeted the most popular adblocker there deprecating Manifest V2 and using only V3 by default (maybe V2 is already removed?)

I was at Costco with my roommate this last weekend looking at coffee. They went straight for one saying they liked the design on the packaging. I asked if they were going to buy coffee based solely on how the packaging looks. They said “Yeah, that’s how advertising works.”

We're on a decentralized message board that praises Linux and Self Hosting. We're not the target market for this stuff. My mother-in-law? She buys every damn Alibaba drop shipped trinket that promises whatever from a Facebook ad. My wife is constantly suckered into stuff advertised on Instagram.

Yeah like McD reminding you about their big Mac and fries. They know you know about it but they want to think about food because you might be slightly hungry and could eat. They are not ads but subliminal messages.

It's about being in your mind-space, even days later in the shop. Which works 50/50 on some people and not at all on the others. But that's good enough to bother all of humanity i guess.

Not once, even when I was a little kid, have I been convinced to want a product more because of an ad like that. People know about McDonald's, they know about Coca-Cola, they know about Hilton, they know about Disney+, the only real reason they have to advertise is to tell us about their new products that some of them have once in a while, or a deal of some kind. I can understand Dreamworks advertising a new movie for about a week, after that, the public probably knows. Same thing for Chick-Fil-A's new sandwiches and whatnot. But they never stop. They go for a month and a half, two even. Other brands, like Marriott, nothing's changed. We know that we can buy a hotel room and get free breakfast, we know, we'll pay for it if/when we need it, but we're not getting a room just for the "experience". These ads must be working, they've been dumping money into them for over a century at this point, maybe I'm just too autistic to understand how.

100%. Ads are just corporate propaganda. What would the public do if they didn't have their symbols shoved in their face every waking hour?

I don't think the websites all started thinking "I'll harvest data for the inevitable surveillance state"

Google actually started with great intentions and hoped to translate the data into revenue via "normal" ads

But... Dogy ass holes paid better than ads, and, like most companies, whenever they get successful/big enough, everything goes out the window in favour of profits

when i used apps with targeted ads, amongst generic type of stuff i also used to get two polar opposites of ads:

1. ah, we see you're in poland and use english a lot, want to learn english?

2. ah, we see you're in poland and use english a lot, we can help you get your immigration papers for legal employment

both at the same time btw. apparently being a polish national who speaks english fluently marked me as some sort of ad-anomaly

the ads also believed that i was a senior? at some point i even got a spam call inviting me to join a study on back pain T–T like bro you're at least 10 years early, relax

If the ad companies can't even figure out the language(s) that their targets understand, their knowledge of their target must be essentially zero.

Sorry but this is the wrong takeaway here. They are so incredibly good at segmenting and profiling their audiences, they just don't really give a fuck about serving good ads (or any other service for that matter) anymore. Cambridge Analytica anyone?

They were the seed that started the surveillance machine, but you're completely right nowadays the real ""value"" is elsewhere

I mean microtargetting the ads would mean they'd get less ad revenue. I think the big ones are

A) they use the data to evaluate markets and target new markets.

B) they sell it to police/intelligence agencies to fluff up their sales with bigger data numbers even though some of the data is "likes popcorn" and "bought a spoon off amazon"

C) corporate espionage type stuff, you collect info on a lot of people but then ID your main competitors or detractors to read their chat logs.

"Fuck you, I'm eating!"

I have a similar account for everything that I expect to have some form of tracking. Yet all of these services that are supposed to spy on me to find out exactly what I'm interested in have not once succeeded in targeted me with advertising for something I have any interest in getting. I've only seen them work for people who have Facebook or something that actively listens for things to make ads about, which I don't have.

At one point, the advertising algorithm for Tinder decided what I needed in my life was a tractor. A massive, eleven tonne tractor intended for work on a large farm.

It probably wouldn't fit up my driveway.

Yeah, I dare say there's companies that benefit from it, but P&G is one of those companies that exist purely on creatures of habit buying the same big branded boxes every month, because they haven't fallen quite far enough in life to consider supermarket-brand products.

In much the same way as nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, no clueless husband ever got told off for bringing home P&G branded fanny pads.

I will admit I have looked into products (not clicked-through) shown in apps where ads were targeted and fed in, and couldn’t be bypassed in a simple way (e.g. instagram). It’s how I eventually found a decent mattress. But this is a 1 in a million instance given how many ads they show.

Do you mean specifically from online advertising? Because unless they live in an impoverished country and never buy commercially purchased products they almost certainly have purchased something they’ve seen in an ad. Many people think they aren’t influenced by advertising, because they haven’t seen an ad for Coca-Cola and then immediately gone out and purchased a bottle of Coke, but advertising can be very influential in subtle ways that many people don’t even notice.

Amazon: I see you just bought one coat rack; would you like to start your coat rack collection with these other coat racks?

Facebook is the same : "Oh I see you're married! Do you want to befriend other hot women? Let us introduce you!"

Just think how many people started making sourdough bread during covid lockdowns. That may not have been intentional advertising, just a few people starting a thing & then it was everywhere, and so many people who'd never cooked a day in their life became obsessed with sourdough bread. Advertising fills in the blank when you say, "Fuck it, let's just _____"

I think hotwords worked the best on me because I thought it was a link to something in the article. But then the law changed and they had to put "ad" on the links and it killed them. Laws work, some what.