Wherever I go, I often see the sentiment “This website has ads, so it’s trash” pop up in conversations. And honestly I don’t quite get why. 90% of the internet has always had ads, you just scroll past them and mind your business. At least they’re personalized now so you can pick a topic you like instead of diapers and miscellanous spammy trash as there once were.
“At least they’re tracking everything I ever do, all the websites I ever visit and everything I look up, storing that data forever in data centers to tie to me so they can know everything they want about me forever, and making a profit off of me so they don’t have to work a day in their life” - This is how it actually works.
If you pay for a finite amount of mobile data, and want to find the answer to something but first have to watch a 30 second ad, wouldn’t you be upset that you are paying with your own money to use a portion of your limited data just to load something irrelevant that you don’t want to see? And while you think about how you are losing money and precious time on this Earth during those moments, you can think about how your time will go straight into the wallet of the creepy 30 year old dude who paid for you to watch his ad. And get this, you can do this for every single ad you ever see! Which not too long ago was nowhere, and now they are everywhere they can be jammed in:
Website banners, side bars, autoplaying video ads, suggestions, promoted posts and anything sponsored or promoted in the app store / play store, social media ads like in Snapchat and instagram, ads before every video on youtube, mobile game ads, ads before a movie, billboards you have to see while you drive on a road, airplanes carrying a banner behind them polluting the sky with an ugly ad, on every bus stop, before your favorite podcast, before any movie at any movie theater that you already paid for a ticket to see, before you can see the recipe you want to make, on the back of grocery receipts, between each song on the radio, every 10 minutes on Hulu, every 5 minutes on Twitch, plastered all over your $900 Samsung smart 4k TV and unable to be disabled, written inside the game case of your latest video game, and also full screen once you start your new $60 EA game, eventually they will be on the home screen of your phone, before you can accept a phone call, before you can read new text messages, and eventually you’ll be watching an ad to dial 911. Hope your emergency can wait 30 seconds!
You know all those useful youtube videos with detailed, quick instructions how to save a life, like CPR instructions? Would you mind sitting through 2 15-second ads while your friend chokes to death?
On the plus side, OP, it takes less time than a 30 second ad to install an adblocker. Have you ever tried Ublock Origin? Not only is it free, respects your privacy, limits ad tracking, and lets you remove anything annoying on any website, including every single ad ever made automatically without you having to do anything, but it also works on PC, Mac, Linux, Android, but not iOS because Apple likes to be annoying. There are other safari adblockers in the app store though.
Also last thing, there’s a reason why the U.S. F.B.I. officially recommend using an adblocker just to browse the web. Not only do they have the potential to let your system (even with a good antivirus) be susceptible to a malware attack, transmitted just by loading the ad… But they also just plain suck! Nobody likes them for good reason!
Indeed and people often say “if an ad is annoying I’ll never buy that product, so ads don’t work on me, also they’ve never made me click on or run out and buy something” !
However advertising is accompanied with thorough independent market research and sales numbers and companies can directly see the impact of their ad campaigns. It’s indisputable.
In the long term it’s also about brand recognition, we see a “stupid ad” today and in a year when we’re looking for that kind of thing we are more likely to choose that brand over another and we don’t know why but “this jams seems better”. The effect is proven, scary and it’s something we’re relatively helpless against. It doesn’t help that our brains sometimes register things running in the background on the TV while we’re petting the dog. Product placement in movies works like that too, if we notice it we think it’s obvious and stupid, but we still notice it and even when we don’t notice it our helpful subconscious is right there helping us remember.
Moving into even worse territory, on social media like Facebook they can profile us enough to know where we’re leaning politically and if we’re not entirely confident in our political stance they can show us ads that looks like product ads but are designed to nudge our political stance a bit to the side in the desired direction.
The effect of ads on the subconscious is scary. It’s not complete mind control but it can influence us without us noticing.
Not on social media ? No problem, they still build up shadow profiles. A Google executive once bragged at a conference that they know everything we’ve done since the first day we got on the Internet. Hyperbolic maybe but that confidence comes from somewhere.