its got to the point where places i expect to have ads have become mental blind spots. i dont even register whats there, my eyes just skip straight over it
Yup. I've even missed genuine search results or useful info because the website made the mistake of putting it in a place where my brain says 'just an ad'.
i genuinely go 6+ months at a time not updating my phone because i subconsciously/automatically close the 'you should update me' popup š like most of the time i wont even realise i did it for a bit. not the same thing but same idea, it feels like a popup ad.
My last phone update added an AI that Hijacked the power button to instead redirect you to setting up the AI so maybe avoiding updates is for the best at this point.
Yea the new IOS update seems mostly good + security update thatās nice. Then again half of the description is āwe added apple AI to even more spaces :)ā so they can go fuck themselves for now
I hate the addition of ai to everything. But damn if it isnāt useful for photos. My kid asked me the address of this arcade i took her to a few years ago. I couldnāt remember so I started scrolling through photos trying to find the pictures I took. It was taking a really long time so I just tried a search for āarcadeā. Found all the pictures I took that day. Easy enough to just check the location in the metadata. They had closed unfortunately. But it was damn easy to find thanks to ai.
Iām totally with you there. AI definitely has tons of amazing uses, data analysis in law firms or medical use cases, analysing pictures like you say, generating documentation for code, etc
My problem is just that everything is being turned into a chatbot when it was just a form or phone number before. And that I now get 100 popups even in Firefox asking me to use their AI. Letās just all be sensible about this please TwT
The problem is that OpenAI showed the market that they can get away with releasing an "unfinished" product. Some five years ago A.I really was unfinished and it has improved substantially, but the damage OpenAI did with enshittification hasn't left. If the top models currently are serviceable and usable, their enterprise versions even more so, the models what have you companies will offer you are as unfinished as A.I used to be back then.
And because A.I is all the craze in tech right now, the vast majority of these companies won't actually do any R&D or improve their models; they'll just slap the label 'A.I' on it and call it a day.
wtf... I'm already pretty annoyed with how whatsapp put ai into their app (search is now replaced by ai so insread of just getting the search result I'm looking for I get all kinds of irrelevant crap added too and it's way slower, and the ai button is blocking my view of new messages), but that's realy next level ai-pushing.
at this point I fully believe ai has so few actual usecases, compared to all the cases companies are just trying to push it where it doesn't make sense, that we'd all be better off if ai just completely disappeared tomorrow.
If I search for something and the results have my exact thing twice, one as "sponsored" and one as the regular search result I will ONLY click the search result, not the sponsored one
My brain has done this inadvertently with pinned posts on subreddits. When I open a new subreddit, with any of the pinned posts at the top my brain just assumes "that's an ad, ignore it"
this is called banner blindness and it's studied well. not sure if advertisers figured out a way around it but in general this is why those annoying ads taking up half a web page also pay so little they can barely offset the cost of hosting the website
I wonder if that's why I can always find the real download button on rom sites. I still check the URL to be sure, but 95% of them just don't look right.
could it be that would also be part of the reason why so many social media sites feel the need to change and update their UI's every few months too? every single time, they update, change things around, and suddenly all the useless unwanted features are in different places you have to "learn" to skip past again.
Ads use marketing tricks that work even when you're aware of them. Meaning the only safe move is to not engage. One of the more insidious is the mere exposure effect from psychology.
I don't mind certain types of more static advertising that isn't intrusive/obnoxious, but that seems to be rare these days.
I'm also fine paying for services, so long as they don't show ads.
fish is an aquatic, anamniotic, dill-bearing invertebrate animal with swimming fins and a hard skull, but lacking limps with digits. Fish can be grouped into the more basal jawless fish and the more common jawed fish, the latter including all living cartilaginous and bony fish, as well as the extinct placoderms and acanthodians. In a break from the long tradition of grouping all fish into a single class (Pisces), modern phylogenetics views fish as a paraphyletic group which includes all vertebrates except tatreepods. In English, the plural of "fsh" is fish when referring to individuals and fishes when referring to species
my mom says the same thing, and then has a convo the next minute with someone else about how crazy all those ads are. and i'm just sitting here like i thought you didn't listen to ads...
i barely know them, but that's because i don't watch cable, don't use apps for my media, and my browser is kitted out with ublock origin and sponsorblock. that and the lack of ads in piracy ensures that i only end up seeing ads when i look at reddit on mobile twice a week on transit.
avoiding ads like that is the only thing that works. ads are incredibly insidious little cryptids, merely perceiving them is enough for them to nudge your behavior just a little bit, usually without you even knowing.
Oh yeah, Iām sure subconsciously, Iām still picking up on them. I also rarely watch live TV anymore, and Iām much more aware of them on streaming (since for some reason, Tubi and Prime insist on only showing me the same 3-4 commercials all week).
That said, I also have ADHD and am super prone to zoning out without retaining information. While convenient when it comes to ads and commercials, it also means I struggle with audio books. (Fun fact: I can also do this while reading! Thereās nothing like suddenly realizing you just read an entire page and have no idea what it says.)
I learned that audiobooks while being occupied with something menial that needs a modicum, but not too much of my attention span, can actually help me stay on task. Chopping firewood, doing dishes, vacuuming or mowing the lawn. I also speed it up 2x-3x depending on the speaker which helps aswell.
I have gone through 5 books this winter which is five more than i have read. ( i read hamlet a few weeks back, currently finishing Way of Kings as audio, before picking up Shogun again (read it 15 years ago, now as an audio before starting the tv series. )
Same here. All my streaming services are the ad-supported plans. I refill my drink, use the bathroom, or just my phone. I could not tell you which drug was just advertised.
Honestly... there are a few products and services I will outright refuse to buy because of those ads. Congrats! Your commercials and ads made such a negative impression on me that I will never ever buy what youre selling.
Youtube having double advert breaks every 3 minutes for a 30-minute video will always be annoying. However, I will never buy youtube premium.
Exaggeration for effect. I did keep track when watching an hour-long video and it was around every 7-10 minutes with unskippable ads. Even videos that have their own ad breaks as part of the video have YouTube ad breaks inserted.
Right? I'm in this post to find out why people are seeing ads. I haven't seen one in years. Use firefox ffs. I don't even like firefox but it's much better than ads. It also blocks ads on amazon prime video which none of the chrome extensions do anymore.
Reddit is the only place I see ads most days. They are so unintrusive that I don't mind
Everywhere else, ad block
The FBI actually recommended that people download ad blocks because of how actually dangerous ads can be
On top of that, there are so many straight up illegal ads and scams on huge platforms that I block ads out of protest. Sure, content creators have to say "grape" and "unalived", but the ads YouTube forced in can have actual nudity, be for genuinely dangerous scams, etc and so forth
connect a PC or laptop to your TV and stop using the smart-tv functions alltogether. you can use really cheap and simple PC's like a NUC for this purpose that you can just stick to the back of the screen in some cases.
then use a browser in that with adblockers. you can even connect RF remotes etc to it so you don't have to control it with a mouse/KB if you so desire.
The only place i ever see ads is outside or in other peoples homes that i've not yet managed to convert.
I have started just closing the video if itās an ad longer than 5 sec then I will reopen it. Repeat until the ad is only 5 secs or there is no ad at all. If YouTube wants to waste my time, fine, but they wonāt win against me in a time wasting game. IDC if my little trick takes longer than the ad would have been. A 30secs unskippable ad for a 3min video is crazy work, and I wonāt stand for it.
The thing that I hate the most is time stamped ads on streaming shows. Like, I miss something before the break and it will play the ad as many times as I go back
I love my YouTube premium š I mostly watch YouTube on my tv, no easy way to get an ad blocker, and I watch YouTube waaaaay more than any other streaming service.Ā
The only subscription service I pay for is youtube premium. I do a lot of YouTube on my phone and i straight up cant be bothered to do whatever it is i need to do to make it ad free. Plus it comes with YouTube music so I just see it as Spotify + ad free youtube. Best bang for my buck by far.
I like YouTube premium because most of the money actually goes to the content creators. I want the people who are making the content I watch to get money, but I don't want to watch ads. The content creator doesn't get any money if I use an adblocker.
Same mood: Iāll hit skip, mute, and bail if the sponsor read drags. Ads arenāt āhelpfulā, theyāre trying to corner you. Clicking just to hurt them is messy though, just donāt engage.
i use sponsorblock and honestly it's a godsend on youtube these days. it's not 100% accurate because it relies on community contributions, but it does effortlessly skip like 95% of sponsor reads, unless the video came out like half an hour ago.
SponsorBlock and DeArrow (by the same developer) are the only way I can still use YouTube nowadays. My husband watches videos on his phone (in app, so no adblock or extensions) and I'm blown away by how many ads he has to sit through in a 10-15 minute video
I don't mind the sponsor sections on YouTube. I don't watch the kinds of people who do annoying ones. But watching in app instead of in Firefox the ads are horrendous. (I switch to the app for livestreams, because mobile Firefox doesn't support them well, though desktop Firefox is fine. And then occasionally I briefly forget to switch back to the browser until I get a bunch of ads thrown at me.)
If you have an android, there is ReVanced you can get which is the youtube app with sponsorblock & ad blocking built in along with a ton of other similarly useful features
If he's on Android, tell him to use newpipe. Blocks ads, allows for picture in picture, and lets you download videos directly from the app if you want to watch them offline.
I know there's a similar solution for apple but I'm not sure what it's called.
I have an adblocker and just look at the video timeline to see the "most replayed" which is 99% of the time skipping sponsorships.
Hell a good chunk of youtubers nowadays will make a chapter in the video to even more easily skip the sponsored segment. I always love that and in general any way a creator gets around their ads disrupting their work.
I only click to hurt them if the ad is something I really actively want to lose money, like an anti-choice ad or those āresearch chemicalsā that are clearly actually meant for people to inject them.
They keep complaining about ad blockers. But what did you expect would happen when you kept making ads so intrusive, you made the Internet borderline unusable without ad blockers?
I have ad blockers to protect me from malware that can be hidden in ads. If it wasnāt a safety thing, I might not bother, but as I canāt avoid malware without it, it stays up.
Even funnier is that videos are demonetised for not being advertiser friendly, and then they show ads on them anyway. Having their cake and eating it too.
Seriously I have no idea how people function without them. Everything will be fine until I go to a library or something and I see perfectly good websites load at a tenth of the speed, have so much visual noise I can't find what I'm looking for, and half the buttons are fake download links or fake articles. Sometimes there's even just uncensored nudity.
this pisses me off so much. they're sanitizing the entire internet for "advertiser friendliness" so much that they've even reached the minds of the generation who grew up with internet ads, and then advertisers just do this. how dare you
People who use adblockers were never going to buy ad products anyway. Itās like triple A video game companies complaining that people are stealing 70 dollars from them with every pirated copy.
I hate sponsored segments. I will skip them, and I won't buy things from them. But I won't begrudge the people who use sponsors (unless they advertise gambling or medical quackery. But I can forgive crappy overpriced headphones), as it's basically the only way to have sustainable free content.Ā
YouTube has become more and more infested with ads, with seemingly mostĀ videos on mobile serving me a 15 second unskippable ad and another ad. Ads at the end of videos. Ads when you pause the video that you have to close out of before you can look at the comments. And yet the one thing they're on top of is features to skip sponsored segments, because they hate that creators can make money that they don't get a cut of. As if the reason why creators turned to sponsorships isn't because YouTube would pull their monetization at the drop of a hat. As though they weren't disabling YouTube memberships because of how aggressively YouTube was marketing them outside the creator's control.
Ads are terrible everywhere but YouTube is leading the fucking charge.Ā
yeah, i mean sponsorblock is amazing and i'll continue to use it, but holy fucking shit the audacity of google to do that while running the biggest advertising empire on the entire internet and actively doing stuff like making their browser worse just so they can render adblockers inoperable
To be honest if I see YouTuber advertising blatantly garbage products like Raid, Raycons, Factor, Honey etc I will give them benefit of the doubt for being informed but I cannot stand when they go on this long tangent about how amazing the product it and how they use it everyday. Like if your are telling me that these Raycons are the best sounding headphones you've used I'm going to just assume you have no idea what you are taking about and move on to the next video. I don't care when YouTuber do sponsor reads, I want them to get that sponsor money so they can keep making content but when they take money from very well know scummy companies I will just stop watching their content. Also any NFT, Crypto or Gambling sponsor is an immediate block of the channel so I never see their content again.
I realized I mustāve been online too much when a lot of people I knew complained about intrusive ads, but they never encountered SponsorBlock and uBlock Origin or researched ad blockers.
I also recommend (on FireFox, not sure other sites or on mobile):
Behind the Overlay, which you can close any popup that your ad blocker doesnāt automatically dismiss.
PopUpOff - Popup and overlay blocker: Blocks popups and overlays, but Iāve noticed it misses some websites.
Reddit Ad Remover: blocks ads specifically on Reddit when using the website (if youāre only interested in adblocking on Reddit only).
And since the comment section is about YouTube:
YouTube Anti-Translate: disables YT auto-translation for video titles and descriptions
Original Audio in YouTube Videos: disables YT auto-dubbing.
The enshittification of the Internet has forced me more vigilant, so I can have an uninterrupted time. Big props to all the developers and testers and supports making these extensions.
And some other extensions just because (add links):
AI Content Shield: block AI-generated content in various websites like Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit (IIRC), Google
&udm=14, Google Search with udm=14 present, and Hide Google AI Overviews: block the AI-generated overview stuff in Google search results. Makes things feel like traditional search results instead of AI summaries and suggestions.
Disable AI: same as above but it works on DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Qwant, Brave too. Disables all their AI features.
Stop Autoplay Next for YouTube: prevents YouTube from automatically playing the next video in a playlist or recommended video section.
My favorite extensions that arenāt fandom related:
Library Extension: my favorite extension where you can chooses your libraries you have cards for, so when youāre on a book tracking sites or even Amazon, Kobo, B&N, etc, the extension tells you which of your libraries has that book, how many, and how many are available.
Save Image Type As: adds an option to save images as different file types (such as PNG, JPG, GIF, etc).
Sometimes I wish I could put Ad Nauseum on everything. Okay you can have your clicks, but I'll make the information you get from it completely useless.
Absolutely. And to all those who say "but all this stuff wouldn't exist without all the ad spam", I say let it all fail. Let the whole ad-driven industry crash down. One thing an ad has never done is point you in the direction of a product you actually want or need, and always points you towards the worst product or service, and wastes everybody's time.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply youāre not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. Itās yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially donāt owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, donāt even start asking for theirs.
Something else to think about to really drive the point how much you should hate the vermin...
Advertising, marketing, and so on - it's a war of attrition. It simply boils down to dumping more money than your competitors, and there's a relatively direct correspondence between money spent and advantage gained. Yes, occasionally someone manages to get a bigger advantage with less money used, but this doesn't tend to last long, because one of these happens:
1) this was only going to work once in that specific situation
2) the more efficient method is adopted by everyone else and it's back down to "just spend more money than the competition"
3) the more efficient method turns out to be illegal or is made illegal
So it is all down to spending massive amounts of money, and they're mostly massive because the money spent by competition is massive. There's a limit at some point, of course - because you can only make so much revenue selling so much product even if you sell it all at maximum possible price. At some point it will start cutting into other things, which is never a good thing.
As for where the money goes? The advertising industry, of course. They're the ones selling weapons to everyone in this war, so they get sick rich when the war never ends and everyone is encouraged to buy as much of it as possible to keep on "not losing".
Obviously, that cost is passed down to the consumer - part of every price you pay for a product goes to the advertisers in the end.
So you have this massive, tremendous chunk of industry sucking up money and resources, while shitting up every information space they can touch. And you're paying them to do that to you.
Fuck this cancer, the whole world is in a sore need of chemo.
I block ads everywhere I can. I don't watch TV but I mute it if an ad is on. Not that I hate ads, I just value my time and enjoy listening to silence or what I want to actually hear.
It's crazy that people willingly watch youtube ads, or like, play TV on high volume as ads play for 15 mins straight.
I don't even understand how marketing people think their job works. Ā The old story is that marketing is basically educational, albeit biased. Ā Then came the big asshole who turned everyone on to emotional appeals instead. Ā
But that was generations ago; by now there's multiple generations raised with omnipresent ads in every space, and I really dont think we see them at all. Ā It's unconscious habit for me to do what OP does, and scroll away, mute, dont look, dont listen, etc. Ā The few who force the issue successfully and are so annoying and insistent that I do actually know what their product and company is, only make me associate annoyance with that brand and avoid it in the future. Ā And I'm not that young even; it must be even more natural for current teens and 20-somethings. Ā Other than filling our world with garbage, informational and physical both, what do marketing people for big companies even think is happening in between "mass produced manipulative emotional appeals" Ā and "profit" and how do they sleep at night if the answer is just "we literally drown them in ads against their every attempt to escape until their every waking moment is Brand"?
I took a marketing class once and was told āif the ad leaves any kind of impression then it was successfulāĀ
They donāt care if itās annoying or oversaturated or useless nonsense, if they were able to get the brand name into your brain even for a split second then that is marketing successĀ
So its kinda funny that their attempts to force a message into our heads fail even more spectacularly because i cannot name a single advertisement ive seen in the last 24 hours, no jingles, no words
Just a minute of irritation at my entertainment being vandalized and another straw added to the back before i abandon streaming all together
Dosent help that the quality of media has degraded a good bit too (I keep watching older stuff, its got so much more substance and detail)
The point isn't that you'll be able to name any of them. The point is that the next time you shop for that product you see that brand and recognize it, because you're more likely to purchase something from a brand you recognize.
Such a weird take, there's a number of products with sufficiently annoying ads that I will literally never buy them out of spite even if they'd be useful to me
The thing to realize is you're a minority. Most people don't have the energy to keep track of which ads they remember being annoying or which were just there. Sure there are some meme ones, like Raid Shadow Legends or shit like that, but those are few and far between.
The purpose of ads is to make you think of their product when you're looking for something. Sometimes at the time of the ad, like "oh man a pizza sounds pretty good right now," but also sometimes weeks or months later. Like when most folks go to shop for car insurance (in the US at least), they'll compare rates from State Farm or Progressive as some of their first searches.
It's a multi-billion dollar industry. They wouldn't do it if it didn't work.
the thing about marketing is it's nothing more than just psychological manipulation. sometimes they're honest about it, sometimes they're still coping, but at the end of the day they measure public opinion meticulously and they do whatever they can to shift it. unfortunately, it very much works, statistics are read/write when you're at google's or facebook's level.
remember the cambridge analytica scandal? that kind of stuff is happening all the time, the platforms were just mad someone else did what should have been their job.
Yes, but an algorithm knowing what I like to browse is not the same as successfully advertising a product to me.
Great! Instagram has figured out I have cats and now it aggressive sends me ads to each and every cat product that they have. This still does not mean that any of these cat ads are successful. I still ignore them. I still have no interest in even looking at them. And, I actually am repulsed by every brand I see and usually go out of my way to not engage with them, because I assume any brand bothering to advertise on Instagram is trash and not worth it.
This would mean that their ads are not effective against me, yet I am, allegedly, their target audience. At least the algorithm thinks so. This is bad marketing. This means it isn't working.
statistically, marketing works. otherwise companies wouldn't spend money on it.
the reality is the paradigm that ads work by convincing you to buy something is just wrong. They mostly work by making you aware of a products existence. a TV ad isn't trying to convince you to buy a TV, it's mainly trying to convince you to buy their TV over other brands.
Also, sadly, the fact is most people do not in fact aggressively dodge ads. "and I'm not that young even, it must be even more natural for 20 somethings and teenagers" alot of those people just watch ads. i bring up AdBlocker extensions every chance I get in conversation and I'm always shocked that most people haven't heard of them.
I wonder if the idea that marketing and ads work, is marketing in itself. It doesn't need to actually function, it doesn't need to actually manipulate you, they just need to convince a business that they can. It doesn't need to be seen by YOU, only the person buying it.
And like theres a whole thing where people bot and manipulate youtube videos for ad revenue, and youtube half heartedly makes gestures at stopping them. Hell facebooks whole "pivot to video" with their made up watch statistics.
If a marketing company is able to convince a business that the marketing is worth buying, why wouldnāt they be able to convince you that the businessās product/service is worth buying?
Which is like another layer of scamming and at this point who is getting scammed like who's gonna go oh the ad didn't close might as well buy the thing right?
Liberty Mutual. Fuck that stupid guy and that damn song. And yes I know that means it's working, which is infuriating and why I will never use their services.
This is a misunderstanding of how marketing works.
You don't just "show ad, consumer buy"
It's mostly about awareness and subconscious influence, rather than any direct connection between brand and consumer. Maybe an ad caused a friend to buy a product, and it was good, and then they recommended it to you. Without the ad that's two sales lost without you ever even seeing it or knowing about them.
Your sentiment is how companies want you to think mostly, that you're kinda immune to advertising and never buy anything they want. Ignorance is easier to manipulate over awareness.
Billions and billions of dollars are spent all the time in this industry, It's positively gigantic. Marketing absolutely works on like 99% of people in some fashion.
It depends on business. Some companies (mostly large ones) use advertisement to boost awareness, some (mostly small and medium) expect that a banner will lead a client to perform a purchase.
General advertising (what 90% of us are exposed to 90% of the time) is about subconscious influence.
Professional advertising for professionals in a specific career is much more like what you are saying, where product specs are incredibly important for the pro/heavy hobbyist.
Even those professional ads might just be more about awareness, relying on a customer asking a salesperson about a particular brand in the firstplace. The salesperson then carries the role of selling the product based on consumer need and product design.
Subconscious influence only works if youāre already open to the idea. If you were thinking about ordering a pizza somewhere and got an ad for a place you liked, youād probably go for it. But itās a myth that you can keep playing something in the background to eventually make someone susceptible to it.
And given the AI bubble, I really wouldnāt quantify somethingās efficacy based on how much money goes into it.
manipulating a specific person into a specific thing is pretty difficult, yeah. manipulating a certain percentage of a general group into a specific thing though, we know for fact that works. it's an exact science, results are tracked meticulously and you almost always have multiple methods competing and evolving.
and the kicker? everyone in that group thinks they're immune. yet some of them still do end up buying the product. and i promise you're not different. yes, there might be some advertised products you resist, but you're guaranteed to fall for some others which you probably don't even notice.
the only way to be immune to advertising is to not receive it.
It's not meant to be as immediate as your pizza example. You might not be thinking about ordering pizza at the time you see an ad for a pizza place, but by seeing the ad you are more likely to consider that pizza place when you eventually think about ordering pizza in the future.
Dominoes isn't constantly advertising their latest promotions to get people to buy into that specific deal (though some of that does happen). They do it so that the next time you decide to order pizza your first thought is "Well Dominoes probably has some promotion going on. I'll check there first." Though even that is probably too explicit. Really what they're shooting for is that you think of them first and that there's some positive association with being affordable.
It also shocks me personally how few people seem to notice or care when a product or company is trying to manipulate them with scummy underhanded tactics, and will hand over money even when it's very obvious they've been cheated.
No, I wasn't gonna buy the product before I was lied to and very clearly screwed by its free trial as an incentive to make me cough up cash, and now I'm going to do absolutely everything in my power to never buy it and keep loved ones from buying, it rather than simply ignoring the product like usual. In fact, I'd sooner drag myself through a mile of broken glass on my stomach than willingly buy whatever product is being forced upon me via deceptive tactics, and I'll go out of my way to buy other options or simply buy nothing at all instead.
I acknowledge that advertising is necessary to provide services cheaply or for free, but the sheer lack of respect shown in advertising for the public's time and attention means I have no guilt using adblocker to minimise it.
If it was more curated: "here's 20 seconds of ads for 4 vetted products, enjoy the rest of your ad-free day of browsing," i wouldn't mind.
Ever think about how ads are so inherently annoying that even porn ads are annoying? You go out of your way to see porn, get more porn, and you're like "fuck, I'm so annoyed I have to watch this porn to watch that porn".
I hate the new trend of "interactive" or "choose your experience" ads. Don't make me participate in my torture. Ignoring them makes them take longer. How best to communicate a big fuck you to that idea? I dont know
That involves effort that I am simply too lazy to expend the energy for. It takes more energy to hate something, than it does to be apathetic towards it, and I reserve my hatred for things I actually care about.
It is a bit funny when you see the other way and a show, game, movie, or product you really like bombs and you see a good bit of people just be astonished that they did not market the product at all.
I watched a few shows/movies where I have seen fans lament the lack of marketing for the failure of it. Whether or not that is true is always a topic of debate I find.
When YouTube started running unskippable 30 second ads I started making a list of all the companies who used them and boycotting their products. If you can't catch my interest in the 7 second skip window (which claims to be 5 seconds but gives a full second of lead in on the 5 and the and a full second of trail off at 0) like everyone else, it tells me your product probably isn't strong enough for me to buy on it's own merrits.
i like that most of the examples are centered around ignoring the ad (muting, looking away) rather than using something like an adblocker. way too many people go around like "oh i pirate everything and i have 47 extensions to make my computer technologically incapable of rendering advertising material and if anyone i follow sponsors something i add it to my list of products to never interact with ever in my life!" and then turn around and go "wait why did my favorite content creator retire/my favorite website go down/the services i use start offering less and performing poorly? :^(" (turns out the makers of those things actually need money to keep them running).
back in the day we used to have to walk away from the tv for several minutes at a time if we were ininterested in the commercial breaks. i think you can survive clicking away to a different tab for 30 seconds instead of using an adblocker so that the content creators and websites that you're enjoying for free on demand can keep things running.
edit: or if you're gonna block all of ads ever at least commit to buying merch or donating to the creators and websites you do use. must get paid for one way or another.
Adds are annoying in the moment but Iām grateful that due to advertising YouTube many news sites and social media are free, in a world with fewer adds we wouldāve paying with our money rather than seconds of annoyance
I was at a family members place for Thanksgiving. They gave that live TV that you can pause rewind and fast forward. During one of the ad breaks, I paused whatever was on. The looks of confusion were puzzling to me. They were like āitās not gonna do anything to pause itā like I canāt fast forward it a little bit once I wait a little. Iād rather be staring at the transition to an ad than the ad itself. Then fast forward. I Ā donāt want to be bothered by ads period.
The local high school football field is sponsored by a car dealership. It's right next to a major highway and the sign on the football field is
_______SchoolDistrictFootballField
SPONSORED BY
________ DEALERSHIP
[Huge Logo]
The name of the municipal entity that owns the building--for public education--is dwarfed by the "Sponsored By" part--which is easily 3x bigger, not including the brand logo.
The football field for public schools is just a giant fucking billboard for a car dealership and I'm nauseated every time I drive by.
When I say "there should be a human right not to be advertised to" I am not joking, and I will react with violent contempt towards anyone who tries to argue against it.
I donāt understand why people have so much vitriol toward advertisement and marketing. Any ad has either introduced me to a product Iām interested in, or I just ignore it. The hatred and anger toward them is so strange to me. Itās just the cost of doing business - you need money to create entertainment. Ads provide that money. Otherwise the user needs to pay. Iād rather pay by watching or ignoring ads than pay with my own money.
On the one hand, who am I to complain about ads when YouTube has provided me hours of entertainment every week for 20 years.
On the other hand, their ads are absolutely madenning so I use Ublock Origin + Sponsorblock. There's a sense of entitlement in me, but the alternative is just unacceptable.
If I am honest, (some) ads have definitely influenced my purchase decisions. Nothing like "wow I never knew how much I needed a car until this ad" but definitely when I am buying an unfamiliar product, I gravitate towards familiar brands, and that familiarity likely comes from ads.
Anyone who thinks "I'm immune to ads" or "ads have the opposite effect on me" is just lying to themselves and cherry picking examples. Advertising is so pervasive that almost EVERY purchase you've ever made has been impacted by ads.
The amount of people who think they're somehow immune to marketing or that it doesn't work while literal billions are poured into it and returns are made is baffling.
Marketing works people, just because you're ignorant of how it works on you doesn't mean you're actually correct y'know.
Yeah marketing isnt about making someone go 'huh I should buy an iphone'. It's about influencing the outcome of 'do I like an iPhone or android more?'. 'of the androids, do I like a pixel or Samsung Galaxy more?'. People think they're immune but their preferences and knee jerk responses to those questions are directly from advertising manipulating you and the public sentiment around you.
Often, the goal of the ad isn't an immediate sell, it's brand awareness. Nord VPN knows that most YouTube viewers aren't clicking that link to get a VPN just because a creator told them to. They're banking that when those viewers do need a VPN, Nord is the first one they'll think of.
It's also why the sponsor is often mentioned at the beginning or end of a video when the ad read is in the middle.
And sometimes ads are genuinely useful to the consumer, but mainly in a "oh hey the next movie/season in this series is coming out soon" kind of way. Basically a notification that this thing you already wanted is now available.
But usually they are just hoping that when you do need their product that you will think of them first, or pick the product you recognize over the one you don't on the shelf.
Of course their are some ads that are so obnoxious they make you hate the company and actively avoid them. A Kubota dealership near me plays the most obnoxious "dear John" ad ever on the radio and i want them to go out of business so i never have to hear it again.
Itās multifaceted. Its about public awareness, social influence, and taking up marketing space. Gun to your head, could you name 10 toothpaste brands? Thatās the benefit of taking up space. Have you ever talked about something only to get an ad that seemed to be listening in? Itās not magic. Itās years and years of understanding sociology and big data. Everything is so much more insidious than people realize. Advertising doesnāt need to be as effective as people think to work. They donāt need the data people think they have to target them. I wonder if every opsec guy on this site has any idea how much information theyāre giving away every time they complete a captcha.
Youd be suprised. Many companies like fast food chains or sodas manage to stay constantly relevant because of the amount of ads they put out.
Gaming events often have people lining up to watch ads.
And movies basically require trailers.
With ads for obscure product, they are fully expecting that not everyone will buy the product, but even if 0.1% buys the product after seeing the ad, theyll make a profit.
Ads are the best ways to get people to buy stuff. Even if you think they arent influencing you, they probably are. Ads work, otherwise companies that only see numbers would be trying to push them so hard.
The idea is, supposedly, that it will put the product in your head so you will think to buy it āorganicallyā later without thinking of the ad. Maybe that worked with boomers, but advertising fills me with such petty anger that I purposely will buy something else instead of give money to advertisers.Ā
I mean yeah. They have entire teams of people doing everything they can to influence people to buy things. They wouldnāt exist if they didnāt work.
Iām sure weāve all bought stuff from ads without realizing it.Ā
Personally, as a kid I found the pillow pet ads particularly impressive and Iāve gotta say those were an absolutely solid purchase that lasted years lol.Ā
When I was looking for a bed frame i remembered seeing an ad for Thuma so I checked them out. So not a purchase in direct response, but I am glad I knew it existed because I love this bed frame.
has anyone ever actually bought a product after seeing it in an ad? anyone at all, ever?
The vast majority of people have the vast majority of their decisions based on a) marketing ads and b) opportunity at the shops.
Many many people see a McDonald's ad and, a few days later, think "You know what? I'd like a McDonalds". Humans are not as impervious to ads as we'd like to think.
its got to the point where places i expect to have ads have become mental blind spots. i dont even register whats there, my eyes just skip straight over it
Yup. I've even missed genuine search results or useful info because the website made the mistake of putting it in a place where my brain says 'just an ad'.
i genuinely go 6+ months at a time not updating my phone because i subconsciously/automatically close the 'you should update me' popup š like most of the time i wont even realise i did it for a bit. not the same thing but same idea, it feels like a popup ad.
My last phone update added an AI that Hijacked the power button to instead redirect you to setting up the AI so maybe avoiding updates is for the best at this point.
Yea the new IOS update seems mostly good + security update thatās nice. Then again half of the description is āwe added apple AI to even more spaces :)ā so they can go fuck themselves for now
Yeah I think I'll stick with android for awhile longer
I'll stick with android until they remove sideloading
Is there even an alternative for when they do
GrapheneOS, from what I know
I hate the addition of ai to everything. But damn if it isnāt useful for photos. My kid asked me the address of this arcade i took her to a few years ago. I couldnāt remember so I started scrolling through photos trying to find the pictures I took. It was taking a really long time so I just tried a search for āarcadeā. Found all the pictures I took that day. Easy enough to just check the location in the metadata. They had closed unfortunately. But it was damn easy to find thanks to ai.
Iām totally with you there. AI definitely has tons of amazing uses, data analysis in law firms or medical use cases, analysing pictures like you say, generating documentation for code, etc
My problem is just that everything is being turned into a chatbot when it was just a form or phone number before. And that I now get 100 popups even in Firefox asking me to use their AI. Letās just all be sensible about this please TwT
The problem is that OpenAI showed the market that they can get away with releasing an "unfinished" product. Some five years ago A.I really was unfinished and it has improved substantially, but the damage OpenAI did with enshittification hasn't left. If the top models currently are serviceable and usable, their enterprise versions even more so, the models what have you companies will offer you are as unfinished as A.I used to be back then.
And because A.I is all the craze in tech right now, the vast majority of these companies won't actually do any R&D or improve their models; they'll just slap the label 'A.I' on it and call it a day.
I actually use the AI, and that update still pissed me off.
I don't want to restart my phone via a menu. I want the visceral, haptic feeling of holding down the button like I'm suffocating it with a pillow.
You can change it back in settings just so you know.
Still basically something malware would do.
That's cause it is malware!
Malicious-software, it doesn't have to be unofficial or illegal to be malware
Holy shit thank you
haha damn, that sounds awful. ive got a weird phone manufacturer that im pretty sure isnt pulling that shit, but i appreciate the warning <3
wtf... I'm already pretty annoyed with how whatsapp put ai into their app (search is now replaced by ai so insread of just getting the search result I'm looking for I get all kinds of irrelevant crap added too and it's way slower, and the ai button is blocking my view of new messages), but that's realy next level ai-pushing.
at this point I fully believe ai has so few actual usecases, compared to all the cases companies are just trying to push it where it doesn't make sense, that we'd all be better off if ai just completely disappeared tomorrow.
I don't update anything anymore, security on Android is fine as it is and updates only serve to decrease performance or add adware.
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Recommended widgets are literally paid ads fwiw
They are, but still, when that recommended whatever happens to be the thing I'm actually looking for it'll take me much longer to see it.
If I search for something and the results have my exact thing twice, one as "sponsored" and one as the regular search result I will ONLY click the search result, not the sponsored one
My brain has done this inadvertently with pinned posts on subreddits. When I open a new subreddit, with any of the pinned posts at the top my brain just assumes "that's an ad, ignore it"
this is called banner blindness and it's studied well. not sure if advertisers figured out a way around it but in general this is why those annoying ads taking up half a web page also pay so little they can barely offset the cost of hosting the website
I wonder if that's why I can always find the real download button on rom sites. I still check the URL to be sure, but 95% of them just don't look right.
You feel like Indiana Jones choosing the right grail when you instinctively recognize it.
"The link of a true pirate."
You have chosenā¦ wisely.
yeah it's always the button that's in a logical place, or the text link, depending on whether a site has silicon valley or 1995 vibes.
seriously though, use an adblocker
adblocker literally made my life more peaceful. youtube, all the streaming platforms, all websites- it's so useful to use an adblocker
I mean they started making reddit ads that look like comments so don't worry. They're trying
oh yeah i noticed. i'll use old reddit as long as it's available though, and that hasn't made it here yet (or my adblock successfully blocks it)
could it be that would also be part of the reason why so many social media sites feel the need to change and update their UI's every few months too? every single time, they update, change things around, and suddenly all the useless unwanted features are in different places you have to "learn" to skip past again.
Yep. I treat most ads as cognitohazards.
Ads use marketing tricks that work even when you're aware of them. Meaning the only safe move is to not engage. One of the more insidious is the mere exposure effect from psychology.
I don't mind certain types of more static advertising that isn't intrusive/obnoxious, but that seems to be rare these days.
I'm also fine paying for services, so long as they don't show ads.
fish is an aquatic, anamniotic, dill-bearing invertebrate animal with swimming fins and a hard skull, but lacking limps with digits. Fish can be grouped into the more basal jawless fish and the more common jawed fish, the latter including all living cartilaginous and bony fish, as well as the extinct placoderms and acanthodians. In a break from the long tradition of grouping all fish into a single class (Pisces), modern phylogenetics views fish as a paraphyletic group which includes all vertebrates except tatreepods. In English, the plural of "fsh" is fish when referring to individuals and fishes when referring to species
Even things like commercial breaks on live TV - I tend to go into my nothing box and couldnāt tell you anything that was advertised.
my mom says the same thing, and then has a convo the next minute with someone else about how crazy all those ads are. and i'm just sitting here like i thought you didn't listen to ads...
i barely know them, but that's because i don't watch cable, don't use apps for my media, and my browser is kitted out with ublock origin and sponsorblock. that and the lack of ads in piracy ensures that i only end up seeing ads when i look at reddit on mobile twice a week on transit.
avoiding ads like that is the only thing that works. ads are incredibly insidious little cryptids, merely perceiving them is enough for them to nudge your behavior just a little bit, usually without you even knowing.
Oh yeah, Iām sure subconsciously, Iām still picking up on them. I also rarely watch live TV anymore, and Iām much more aware of them on streaming (since for some reason, Tubi and Prime insist on only showing me the same 3-4 commercials all week).
That said, I also have ADHD and am super prone to zoning out without retaining information. While convenient when it comes to ads and commercials, it also means I struggle with audio books. (Fun fact: I can also do this while reading! Thereās nothing like suddenly realizing you just read an entire page and have no idea what it says.)
I learned that audiobooks while being occupied with something menial that needs a modicum, but not too much of my attention span, can actually help me stay on task. Chopping firewood, doing dishes, vacuuming or mowing the lawn. I also speed it up 2x-3x depending on the speaker which helps aswell.
I have gone through 5 books this winter which is five more than i have read. ( i read hamlet a few weeks back, currently finishing Way of Kings as audio, before picking up Shogun again (read it 15 years ago, now as an audio before starting the tv series. )
I remember ads just enough to refuse to buy anything that annoyed me with one.
I watch a lot of live tv for sports, and the main effect ads have had on me recently is to make me despise the sports gambling industry
On my phone I use Firefox for browsing Reddit so I can avoid ads there too.
The mobile browser version works well enough for me
Commercial breaks mean it's time to switch the channel.
Same here. All my streaming services are the ad-supported plans. I refill my drink, use the bathroom, or just my phone. I could not tell you which drug was just advertised.
Honestly... there are a few products and services I will outright refuse to buy because of those ads. Congrats! Your commercials and ads made such a negative impression on me that I will never ever buy what youre selling.
That and if they're spending that much on ads they're not spending it on the product. Especially bad if it's insurance.
Looking at you, Liberty Mutual. The ads were funny the first time. Now I never want anything to do with them
Itās funny because in the days when ads were just on tv or whatever, sometimes I would think āyeah I could go for a burger nowā or whatever.
But yeah, now itās just so much noise.
Youtube having double advert breaks every 3 minutes for a 30-minute video will always be annoying. However, I will never buy youtube premium.
Exaggeration for effect. I did keep track when watching an hour-long video and it was around every 7-10 minutes with unskippable ads. Even videos that have their own ad breaks as part of the video have YouTube ad breaks inserted.
Damn, that makes me appreciate my years of UBlock even more
It is still working with Firefox and YouTube is entirely ad free.
Yeah the dude in the post doesn't hate ads enough to block them, fucking rookie. I dont see any ads most days.
Right? I'm in this post to find out why people are seeing ads. I haven't seen one in years. Use firefox ffs. I don't even like firefox but it's much better than ads. It also blocks ads on amazon prime video which none of the chrome extensions do anymore.
Im usually watching on a TV these days, not by phone or PC.
May I suggest taking a look at NextDNS?
Reddit is the only place I see ads most days. They are so unintrusive that I don't mind
Everywhere else, ad block
The FBI actually recommended that people download ad blocks because of how actually dangerous ads can be
On top of that, there are so many straight up illegal ads and scams on huge platforms that I block ads out of protest. Sure, content creators have to say "grape" and "unalived", but the ads YouTube forced in can have actual nudity, be for genuinely dangerous scams, etc and so forth
i use old.reddit on pc (with ublock origin) and relay for reddit on android, no ads
I like how reddit has intentionally made their new <images> not show up on old reddit as a fuck you to people not switching.
Really? I guess another reason to love Reddit Enhancement Suite Reddit Enhancement Suite Reddit Enhancement Suite
You guys use youtube without adblockers?
No alternative for it if you're watching on TV.
A computer and a cable go pretty hard if you wanna watch YT on TV.
Don't even need a cable a lot of the time now. You can just cast from your laptop to your TV if you have the right set up.
Just connect a laptop to the tv
SmartTube
connect a PC or laptop to your TV and stop using the smart-tv functions alltogether. you can use really cheap and simple PC's like a NUC for this purpose that you can just stick to the back of the screen in some cases.
then use a browser in that with adblockers. you can even connect RF remotes etc to it so you don't have to control it with a mouse/KB if you so desire.
The only place i ever see ads is outside or in other peoples homes that i've not yet managed to convert.
I have started just closing the video if itās an ad longer than 5 sec then I will reopen it. Repeat until the ad is only 5 secs or there is no ad at all. If YouTube wants to waste my time, fine, but they wonāt win against me in a time wasting game. IDC if my little trick takes longer than the ad would have been. A 30secs unskippable ad for a 3min video is crazy work, and I wonāt stand for it.
I use a firestick and installed SmartTube.
The thing that I hate the most is time stamped ads on streaming shows. Like, I miss something before the break and it will play the ad as many times as I go back
God forbid you try to watch Youtube on your TV, then itās ads every 3-5 minutes!
Use adblock on PC and third party apps on smartphone.
Hell, use adblock on smartphone. Works great on Firefox.
Why don't you just get an ad blocker??
I love my YouTube premium š I mostly watch YouTube on my tv, no easy way to get an ad blocker, and I watch YouTube waaaaay more than any other streaming service.Ā
The only subscription service I pay for is youtube premium. I do a lot of YouTube on my phone and i straight up cant be bothered to do whatever it is i need to do to make it ad free. Plus it comes with YouTube music so I just see it as Spotify + ad free youtube. Best bang for my buck by far.
I like YouTube premium because most of the money actually goes to the content creators. I want the people who are making the content I watch to get money, but I don't want to watch ads. The content creator doesn't get any money if I use an adblocker.
Same mood: Iāll hit skip, mute, and bail if the sponsor read drags. Ads arenāt āhelpfulā, theyāre trying to corner you. Clicking just to hurt them is messy though, just donāt engage.
i use sponsorblock and honestly it's a godsend on youtube these days. it's not 100% accurate because it relies on community contributions, but it does effortlessly skip like 95% of sponsor reads, unless the video came out like half an hour ago.
SponsorBlock and DeArrow (by the same developer) are the only way I can still use YouTube nowadays. My husband watches videos on his phone (in app, so no adblock or extensions) and I'm blown away by how many ads he has to sit through in a 10-15 minute video
ETA:
links for those who want them-
Sponsorblock: https://sponsor.ajay.app/
Dearrow: https://dearrow.ajay.app/
I don't mind the sponsor sections on YouTube. I don't watch the kinds of people who do annoying ones. But watching in app instead of in Firefox the ads are horrendous. (I switch to the app for livestreams, because mobile Firefox doesn't support them well, though desktop Firefox is fine. And then occasionally I briefly forget to switch back to the browser until I get a bunch of ads thrown at me.)
If you have an android, there is ReVanced you can get which is the youtube app with sponsorblock & ad blocking built in along with a ton of other similarly useful features
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If he's on Android, tell him to use newpipe. Blocks ads, allows for picture in picture, and lets you download videos directly from the app if you want to watch them offline.
I know there's a similar solution for apple but I'm not sure what it's called.
Revanced will strip the app of ads and sponsors. or Firefox mobile with extensions is another way.
I have an adblocker and just look at the video timeline to see the "most replayed" which is 99% of the time skipping sponsorships.
Hell a good chunk of youtubers nowadays will make a chapter in the video to even more easily skip the sponsored segment. I always love that and in general any way a creator gets around their ads disrupting their work.
Itās wild how annoying an ad read sounds to me now whenever one slips through, since using sponsorblock. Such a good toolĀ
Now this sounds like an ad read for sponsorblock. My brain is basically mush at this point
Firefox + uBlock Origin + DeArrow + Sponsorblock.
YouTube is what I want it to be, not what they want.
+ return youtube dislike + video quality settings + disable autoplay + youtube shorts redirect
i swear half my extension loadout is just build around making youtube usable
I happen to use AdNauseum, which is automated clicking that actively screws with the analytics.
I love it, it costs them money for 'clicks' and creates a useless ad profile.
I only click to hurt them if the ad is something I really actively want to lose money, like an anti-choice ad or those āresearch chemicalsā that are clearly actually meant for people to inject them.
They keep complaining about ad blockers. But what did you expect would happen when you kept making ads so intrusive, you made the Internet borderline unusable without ad blockers?
I have ad blockers to protect me from malware that can be hidden in ads. If it wasnāt a safety thing, I might not bother, but as I canāt avoid malware without it, it stays up.
Also websites won't enforce TOS on ads that break it. (cough coughYouTube and google)
Even funnier is that videos are demonetised for not being advertiser friendly, and then they show ads on them anyway. Having their cake and eating it too.
Seriously I have no idea how people function without them. Everything will be fine until I go to a library or something and I see perfectly good websites load at a tenth of the speed, have so much visual noise I can't find what I'm looking for, and half the buttons are fake download links or fake articles. Sometimes there's even just uncensored nudity.
this pisses me off so much. they're sanitizing the entire internet for "advertiser friendliness" so much that they've even reached the minds of the generation who grew up with internet ads, and then advertisers just do this. how dare you
People who use adblockers were never going to buy ad products anyway. Itās like triple A video game companies complaining that people are stealing 70 dollars from them with every pirated copy.
I hate sponsored segments. I will skip them, and I won't buy things from them. But I won't begrudge the people who use sponsors (unless they advertise gambling or medical quackery. But I can forgive crappy overpriced headphones), as it's basically the only way to have sustainable free content.Ā
YouTube has become more and more infested with ads, with seemingly mostĀ videos on mobile serving me a 15 second unskippable ad and another ad. Ads at the end of videos. Ads when you pause the video that you have to close out of before you can look at the comments. And yet the one thing they're on top of is features to skip sponsored segments, because they hate that creators can make money that they don't get a cut of. As if the reason why creators turned to sponsorships isn't because YouTube would pull their monetization at the drop of a hat. As though they weren't disabling YouTube memberships because of how aggressively YouTube was marketing them outside the creator's control.
Ads are terrible everywhere but YouTube is leading the fucking charge.Ā
This pisses me off so much. It's such blatant disregard and disrespect for the people actually making the only thing people go to YouTube for.
yeah, i mean sponsorblock is amazing and i'll continue to use it, but holy fucking shit the audacity of google to do that while running the biggest advertising empire on the entire internet and actively doing stuff like making their browser worse just so they can render adblockers inoperable
To be honest if I see YouTuber advertising blatantly garbage products like Raid, Raycons, Factor, Honey etc I will give them benefit of the doubt for being informed but I cannot stand when they go on this long tangent about how amazing the product it and how they use it everyday. Like if your are telling me that these Raycons are the best sounding headphones you've used I'm going to just assume you have no idea what you are taking about and move on to the next video. I don't care when YouTuber do sponsor reads, I want them to get that sponsor money so they can keep making content but when they take money from very well know scummy companies I will just stop watching their content. Also any NFT, Crypto or Gambling sponsor is an immediate block of the channel so I never see their content again.
Ad blocker+ sponsorblock
This.
I realized I mustāve been online too much when a lot of people I knew complained about intrusive ads, but they never encountered SponsorBlock and uBlock Origin or researched ad blockers.
I also recommend (on FireFox, not sure other sites or on mobile):
Behind the Overlay, which you can close any popup that your ad blocker doesnāt automatically dismiss.
PopUpOff - Popup and overlay blocker: Blocks popups and overlays, but Iāve noticed it misses some websites.
Reddit Ad Remover: blocks ads specifically on Reddit when using the website (if youāre only interested in adblocking on Reddit only).
And since the comment section is about YouTube:
YouTube Anti-Translate: disables YT auto-translation for video titles and descriptions
Original Audio in YouTube Videos: disables YT auto-dubbing.
The enshittification of the Internet has forced me more vigilant, so I can have an uninterrupted time. Big props to all the developers and testers and supports making these extensions.
Saving this. Thanks.
Of course!
And some other extensions just because (add links):
My favorite extensions that arenāt fandom related:
Sometimes I wish I could put Ad Nauseum on everything. Okay you can have your clicks, but I'll make the information you get from it completely useless.
I just started using it a month ago and it's been great! I think I've cost them approximately $1700 in wasted clicks for ads I never saw.
I have a hard time believing it's that much. I've apparently cost them tens of thousands of dollars according to the 'ad vault' thing.
Oh me too, but it's great knowing the clicks are wasted and their algorithm is getting confused rather than informed
Absolutely. And to all those who say "but all this stuff wouldn't exist without all the ad spam", I say let it all fail. Let the whole ad-driven industry crash down. One thing an ad has never done is point you in the direction of a product you actually want or need, and always points you towards the worst product or service, and wastes everybody's time.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply youāre not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. Itās yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially donāt owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, donāt even start asking for theirs.
--Banksy
Such a damn great quoteĀ
Something else to think about to really drive the point how much you should hate the vermin...
Advertising, marketing, and so on - it's a war of attrition. It simply boils down to dumping more money than your competitors, and there's a relatively direct correspondence between money spent and advantage gained. Yes, occasionally someone manages to get a bigger advantage with less money used, but this doesn't tend to last long, because one of these happens:
1) this was only going to work once in that specific situation
2) the more efficient method is adopted by everyone else and it's back down to "just spend more money than the competition"
3) the more efficient method turns out to be illegal or is made illegal
So it is all down to spending massive amounts of money, and they're mostly massive because the money spent by competition is massive. There's a limit at some point, of course - because you can only make so much revenue selling so much product even if you sell it all at maximum possible price. At some point it will start cutting into other things, which is never a good thing.
As for where the money goes? The advertising industry, of course. They're the ones selling weapons to everyone in this war, so they get sick rich when the war never ends and everyone is encouraged to buy as much of it as possible to keep on "not losing".
Obviously, that cost is passed down to the consumer - part of every price you pay for a product goes to the advertisers in the end.
So you have this massive, tremendous chunk of industry sucking up money and resources, while shitting up every information space they can touch. And you're paying them to do that to you.
Fuck this cancer, the whole world is in a sore need of chemo.
I block ads everywhere I can. I don't watch TV but I mute it if an ad is on. Not that I hate ads, I just value my time and enjoy listening to silence or what I want to actually hear.
It's crazy that people willingly watch youtube ads, or like, play TV on high volume as ads play for 15 mins straight.
I don't even understand how marketing people think their job works. Ā The old story is that marketing is basically educational, albeit biased. Ā Then came the big asshole who turned everyone on to emotional appeals instead. Ā
But that was generations ago; by now there's multiple generations raised with omnipresent ads in every space, and I really dont think we see them at all. Ā It's unconscious habit for me to do what OP does, and scroll away, mute, dont look, dont listen, etc. Ā The few who force the issue successfully and are so annoying and insistent that I do actually know what their product and company is, only make me associate annoyance with that brand and avoid it in the future. Ā And I'm not that young even; it must be even more natural for current teens and 20-somethings. Ā Other than filling our world with garbage, informational and physical both, what do marketing people for big companies even think is happening in between "mass produced manipulative emotional appeals" Ā and "profit" and how do they sleep at night if the answer is just "we literally drown them in ads against their every attempt to escape until their every waking moment is Brand"?
I took a marketing class once and was told āif the ad leaves any kind of impression then it was successfulāĀ
They donāt care if itās annoying or oversaturated or useless nonsense, if they were able to get the brand name into your brain even for a split second then that is marketing successĀ
Yeah, subliminal messaging stuff
Like a parasite
So its kinda funny that their attempts to force a message into our heads fail even more spectacularly because i cannot name a single advertisement ive seen in the last 24 hours, no jingles, no words
Just a minute of irritation at my entertainment being vandalized and another straw added to the back before i abandon streaming all together Dosent help that the quality of media has degraded a good bit too (I keep watching older stuff, its got so much more substance and detail)
The point isn't that you'll be able to name any of them. The point is that the next time you shop for that product you see that brand and recognize it, because you're more likely to purchase something from a brand you recognize.
Correction, i remember old spice
Im never going to buy old spice because it has a negative association, the red shade spurs vitriol
Such a weird take, there's a number of products with sufficiently annoying ads that I will literally never buy them out of spite even if they'd be useful to me
The thing to realize is you're a minority. Most people don't have the energy to keep track of which ads they remember being annoying or which were just there. Sure there are some meme ones, like Raid Shadow Legends or shit like that, but those are few and far between.
The purpose of ads is to make you think of their product when you're looking for something. Sometimes at the time of the ad, like "oh man a pizza sounds pretty good right now," but also sometimes weeks or months later. Like when most folks go to shop for car insurance (in the US at least), they'll compare rates from State Farm or Progressive as some of their first searches.
It's a multi-billion dollar industry. They wouldn't do it if it didn't work.
This is pretty fallacious. People do things that don't work all the time. There's a pretty good argument that digital advertising is a bubble.
the thing about marketing is it's nothing more than just psychological manipulation. sometimes they're honest about it, sometimes they're still coping, but at the end of the day they measure public opinion meticulously and they do whatever they can to shift it. unfortunately, it very much works, statistics are read/write when you're at google's or facebook's level.
remember the cambridge analytica scandal? that kind of stuff is happening all the time, the platforms were just mad someone else did what should have been their job.
People will say marketing doesn't work and then complain their algorithms know everything about them.
They're the same system.
Yes, but an algorithm knowing what I like to browse is not the same as successfully advertising a product to me.
Great! Instagram has figured out I have cats and now it aggressive sends me ads to each and every cat product that they have. This still does not mean that any of these cat ads are successful. I still ignore them. I still have no interest in even looking at them. And, I actually am repulsed by every brand I see and usually go out of my way to not engage with them, because I assume any brand bothering to advertise on Instagram is trash and not worth it.
This would mean that their ads are not effective against me, yet I am, allegedly, their target audience. At least the algorithm thinks so. This is bad marketing. This means it isn't working.
statistically, marketing works. otherwise companies wouldn't spend money on it.
the reality is the paradigm that ads work by convincing you to buy something is just wrong. They mostly work by making you aware of a products existence. a TV ad isn't trying to convince you to buy a TV, it's mainly trying to convince you to buy their TV over other brands.
Also, sadly, the fact is most people do not in fact aggressively dodge ads. "and I'm not that young even, it must be even more natural for 20 somethings and teenagers" alot of those people just watch ads. i bring up AdBlocker extensions every chance I get in conversation and I'm always shocked that most people haven't heard of them.
I wonder if the idea that marketing and ads work, is marketing in itself. It doesn't need to actually function, it doesn't need to actually manipulate you, they just need to convince a business that they can. It doesn't need to be seen by YOU, only the person buying it.
And like theres a whole thing where people bot and manipulate youtube videos for ad revenue, and youtube half heartedly makes gestures at stopping them. Hell facebooks whole "pivot to video" with their made up watch statistics.
If a marketing company is able to convince a business that the marketing is worth buying, why wouldnāt they be able to convince you that the businessās product/service is worth buying?
My answer involves such naked contempt for those businesses that I don't think I'm allowed to say it on Reddit.
Do you think the people who run those businesses dont buy other products too?
Even if you say "it only works on idiots"
....theres a lot of idiots in the world
Life is great on the other side, I swear I haven't seen an ad for years at this point.
Now the ads are adding fake x and skips and it pisses me off. I will never buy that product or download the apps doing that shit
its mostly to get money from false clicks
Which is like another layer of scamming and at this point who is getting scammed like who's gonna go oh the ad didn't close might as well buy the thing right?
I am so adblocked up I barely ever see ads. And the few I see? The advertised product immediately goes into the "never buy, ever" bucket.
Iām not that hostile to ads, but I think I have yet to buy a product in response to one.
i can actually think of a couple times where i started actively avoiding things i was previously fine with because the ad for it was so damn annoying
Same. If the ad annoys me enough, Iāll avoid the product just on principle.
Liberty Mutual. Fuck that stupid guy and that damn song. And yes I know that means it's working, which is infuriating and why I will never use their services.
This is a misunderstanding of how marketing works.
You don't just "show ad, consumer buy"
It's mostly about awareness and subconscious influence, rather than any direct connection between brand and consumer. Maybe an ad caused a friend to buy a product, and it was good, and then they recommended it to you. Without the ad that's two sales lost without you ever even seeing it or knowing about them.
Your sentiment is how companies want you to think mostly, that you're kinda immune to advertising and never buy anything they want. Ignorance is easier to manipulate over awareness.
Billions and billions of dollars are spent all the time in this industry, It's positively gigantic. Marketing absolutely works on like 99% of people in some fashion.
It depends on business. Some companies (mostly large ones) use advertisement to boost awareness, some (mostly small and medium) expect that a banner will lead a client to perform a purchase.
General advertising (what 90% of us are exposed to 90% of the time) is about subconscious influence.
Professional advertising for professionals in a specific career is much more like what you are saying, where product specs are incredibly important for the pro/heavy hobbyist.
Even those professional ads might just be more about awareness, relying on a customer asking a salesperson about a particular brand in the firstplace. The salesperson then carries the role of selling the product based on consumer need and product design.
Subconscious influence only works if youāre already open to the idea. If you were thinking about ordering a pizza somewhere and got an ad for a place you liked, youād probably go for it. But itās a myth that you can keep playing something in the background to eventually make someone susceptible to it.
And given the AI bubble, I really wouldnāt quantify somethingās efficacy based on how much money goes into it.
manipulating a specific person into a specific thing is pretty difficult, yeah. manipulating a certain percentage of a general group into a specific thing though, we know for fact that works. it's an exact science, results are tracked meticulously and you almost always have multiple methods competing and evolving.
and the kicker? everyone in that group thinks they're immune. yet some of them still do end up buying the product. and i promise you're not different. yes, there might be some advertised products you resist, but you're guaranteed to fall for some others which you probably don't even notice.
the only way to be immune to advertising is to not receive it.
It's not meant to be as immediate as your pizza example. You might not be thinking about ordering pizza at the time you see an ad for a pizza place, but by seeing the ad you are more likely to consider that pizza place when you eventually think about ordering pizza in the future.
This. It's all about brand awareness.
Dominoes isn't constantly advertising their latest promotions to get people to buy into that specific deal (though some of that does happen). They do it so that the next time you decide to order pizza your first thought is "Well Dominoes probably has some promotion going on. I'll check there first." Though even that is probably too explicit. Really what they're shooting for is that you think of them first and that there's some positive association with being affordable.
Ever seen a movie?
If you've seen a movie based on the trailer, you've bought a product in response to an ad.Ā
I am so deep in the adblocking game that I get physically repulsed by ads when my adblocking fails.
It's genetic for me, generational even. My late grandpa would start cussing and switch the channel the second a commercial break started.
It also shocks me personally how few people seem to notice or care when a product or company is trying to manipulate them with scummy underhanded tactics, and will hand over money even when it's very obvious they've been cheated.
No, I wasn't gonna buy the product before I was lied to and very clearly screwed by its free trial as an incentive to make me cough up cash, and now I'm going to do absolutely everything in my power to never buy it and keep loved ones from buying, it rather than simply ignoring the product like usual. In fact, I'd sooner drag myself through a mile of broken glass on my stomach than willingly buy whatever product is being forced upon me via deceptive tactics, and I'll go out of my way to buy other options or simply buy nothing at all instead.
Ads are the most annoying part of capitalism
Advertised by a youtuber? No way i am buying that.
I acknowledge that advertising is necessary to provide services cheaply or for free, but the sheer lack of respect shown in advertising for the public's time and attention means I have no guilt using adblocker to minimise it.
If it was more curated: "here's 20 seconds of ads for 4 vetted products, enjoy the rest of your ad-free day of browsing," i wouldn't mind.
And youtube ads are still better vetted than all the fuckery going on with mobile game/platform ads
I'd even be willing to accept an ad before or at the end of every video, it's the ones that interrupt part way through the video that I don't likeĀ
One of the reasons I just stopped watching cable tv in the days before The Internet. Now history repeats.
20 seconds of ads for an entire days worth of access? And they have to personally vet each product?Ā
Muting ads - I feel seen
Ever think about how ads are so inherently annoying that even porn ads are annoying? You go out of your way to see porn, get more porn, and you're like "fuck, I'm so annoyed I have to watch this porn to watch that porn".
I make their jobs impossible by not being able to afford anything anyway
"Care to help us with a brief survey? Which of these products have you heard of?" I've never heard of any products, goodbye
I hate the new trend of "interactive" or "choose your experience" ads. Don't make me participate in my torture. Ignoring them makes them take longer. How best to communicate a big fuck you to that idea? I dont know
Drink verification can.
That involves effort that I am simply too lazy to expend the energy for. It takes more energy to hate something, than it does to be apathetic towards it, and I reserve my hatred for things I actually care about.
It is a bit funny when you see the other way and a show, game, movie, or product you really like bombs and you see a good bit of people just be astonished that they did not market the product at all.
I watched a few shows/movies where I have seen fans lament the lack of marketing for the failure of it. Whether or not that is true is always a topic of debate I find.
When YouTube started running unskippable 30 second ads I started making a list of all the companies who used them and boycotting their products. If you can't catch my interest in the 7 second skip window (which claims to be 5 seconds but gives a full second of lead in on the 5 and the and a full second of trail off at 0) like everyone else, it tells me your product probably isn't strong enough for me to buy on it's own merrits.
i like that most of the examples are centered around ignoring the ad (muting, looking away) rather than using something like an adblocker. way too many people go around like "oh i pirate everything and i have 47 extensions to make my computer technologically incapable of rendering advertising material and if anyone i follow sponsors something i add it to my list of products to never interact with ever in my life!" and then turn around and go "wait why did my favorite content creator retire/my favorite website go down/the services i use start offering less and performing poorly? :^(" (turns out the makers of those things actually need money to keep them running).
back in the day we used to have to walk away from the tv for several minutes at a time if we were ininterested in the commercial breaks. i think you can survive clicking away to a different tab for 30 seconds instead of using an adblocker so that the content creators and websites that you're enjoying for free on demand can keep things running.
edit: or if you're gonna block all of ads ever at least commit to buying merch or donating to the creators and websites you do use. must get paid for one way or another.
The amount of times that obnoxious ads made me go out of my way to avoid a product I might have otherwise considered
Adds are annoying in the moment but Iām grateful that due to advertising YouTube many news sites and social media are free, in a world with fewer adds we wouldāve paying with our money rather than seconds of annoyance
I was at a family members place for Thanksgiving. They gave that live TV that you can pause rewind and fast forward. During one of the ad breaks, I paused whatever was on. The looks of confusion were puzzling to me. They were like āitās not gonna do anything to pause itā like I canāt fast forward it a little bit once I wait a little. Iād rather be staring at the transition to an ad than the ad itself. Then fast forward. I Ā donāt want to be bothered by ads period.
The local high school football field is sponsored by a car dealership. It's right next to a major highway and the sign on the football field is
_______ School District Football Field
SPONSORED BY
________ DEALERSHIP
[Huge Logo]
The name of the municipal entity that owns the building--for public education--is dwarfed by the "Sponsored By" part--which is easily 3x bigger, not including the brand logo.
The football field for public schools is just a giant fucking billboard for a car dealership and I'm nauseated every time I drive by.
When I say "there should be a human right not to be advertised to" I am not joking, and I will react with violent contempt towards anyone who tries to argue against it.
I donāt understand why people have so much vitriol toward advertisement and marketing. Any ad has either introduced me to a product Iām interested in, or I just ignore it. The hatred and anger toward them is so strange to me. Itās just the cost of doing business - you need money to create entertainment. Ads provide that money. Otherwise the user needs to pay. Iād rather pay by watching or ignoring ads than pay with my own money.
On the one hand, who am I to complain about ads when YouTube has provided me hours of entertainment every week for 20 years.
On the other hand, their ads are absolutely madenning so I use Ublock Origin + Sponsorblock. There's a sense of entitlement in me, but the alternative is just unacceptable.
has anyone ever actually bought a product after seeing it in an ad? anyone at all, ever?
If I am honest, (some) ads have definitely influenced my purchase decisions. Nothing like "wow I never knew how much I needed a car until this ad" but definitely when I am buying an unfamiliar product, I gravitate towards familiar brands, and that familiarity likely comes from ads.
Anyone who thinks "I'm immune to ads" or "ads have the opposite effect on me" is just lying to themselves and cherry picking examples. Advertising is so pervasive that almost EVERY purchase you've ever made has been impacted by ads.
People on Reddit who say "I'm immune to ads" think ads are supposed to be like videogame trailers lol
How many of us still have all these jingles and slogans in our head? Maybe she's born with it..
Yes, or else they wouldn't be paying to have ads
The amount of people who think they're somehow immune to marketing or that it doesn't work while literal billions are poured into it and returns are made is baffling.
Marketing works people, just because you're ignorant of how it works on you doesn't mean you're actually correct y'know.
Just repeating the name in the background 100x makes that the first thing you think of when you want x thing.
Yup a lot of the time it's that simple. It even works with more expensive products like cars.
All the advertisers are looking for is for you to go to a dealership with their cars and ask a salesperson "what about X/Y brand?"
Salesperson does the rest.
Yeah marketing isnt about making someone go 'huh I should buy an iphone'. It's about influencing the outcome of 'do I like an iPhone or android more?'. 'of the androids, do I like a pixel or Samsung Galaxy more?'. People think they're immune but their preferences and knee jerk responses to those questions are directly from advertising manipulating you and the public sentiment around you.
Often, the goal of the ad isn't an immediate sell, it's brand awareness. Nord VPN knows that most YouTube viewers aren't clicking that link to get a VPN just because a creator told them to. They're banking that when those viewers do need a VPN, Nord is the first one they'll think of.
It's also why the sponsor is often mentioned at the beginning or end of a video when the ad read is in the middle.
And sometimes ads are genuinely useful to the consumer, but mainly in a "oh hey the next movie/season in this series is coming out soon" kind of way. Basically a notification that this thing you already wanted is now available.
But usually they are just hoping that when you do need their product that you will think of them first, or pick the product you recognize over the one you don't on the shelf.
Of course their are some ads that are so obnoxious they make you hate the company and actively avoid them. A Kubota dealership near me plays the most obnoxious "dear John" ad ever on the radio and i want them to go out of business so i never have to hear it again.
Itās multifaceted. Its about public awareness, social influence, and taking up marketing space. Gun to your head, could you name 10 toothpaste brands? Thatās the benefit of taking up space. Have you ever talked about something only to get an ad that seemed to be listening in? Itās not magic. Itās years and years of understanding sociology and big data. Everything is so much more insidious than people realize. Advertising doesnāt need to be as effective as people think to work. They donāt need the data people think they have to target them. I wonder if every opsec guy on this site has any idea how much information theyāre giving away every time they complete a captcha.
Youd be suprised. Many companies like fast food chains or sodas manage to stay constantly relevant because of the amount of ads they put out.
Gaming events often have people lining up to watch ads.
And movies basically require trailers.
With ads for obscure product, they are fully expecting that not everyone will buy the product, but even if 0.1% buys the product after seeing the ad, theyll make a profit.
Ads are the best ways to get people to buy stuff. Even if you think they arent influencing you, they probably are. Ads work, otherwise companies that only see numbers would be trying to push them so hard.
There is like near zero chance anyone will use your app or play your game on phone if they didn't get it advertised.
So just in that huge as f yet very specific market, something close to 99% of revenue comes basically from adverts.
Most of digital goods market while not as extreme will still be very high to that.
Remind me what phone/computer/tablet you have?
The idea is, supposedly, that it will put the product in your head so you will think to buy it āorganicallyā later without thinking of the ad. Maybe that worked with boomers, but advertising fills me with such petty anger that I purposely will buy something else instead of give money to advertisers.Ā
I got an ad for a weekend sale at my grocery store. I didn't buy anything they advertised but I did think 'oh yeah I was making a grocery list'
I mean yeah. They have entire teams of people doing everything they can to influence people to buy things. They wouldnāt exist if they didnāt work.
Iām sure weāve all bought stuff from ads without realizing it.Ā
Personally, as a kid I found the pillow pet ads particularly impressive and Iāve gotta say those were an absolutely solid purchase that lasted years lol.Ā
When I was looking for a bed frame i remembered seeing an ad for Thuma so I checked them out. So not a purchase in direct response, but I am glad I knew it existed because I love this bed frame.
The vast majority of people have the vast majority of their decisions based on a) marketing ads and b) opportunity at the shops.
Many many people see a McDonald's ad and, a few days later, think "You know what? I'd like a McDonalds". Humans are not as impervious to ads as we'd like to think.
What annoys me most is that the algorithm keeps assuming absolutely wild things about what I would and would not buy.