this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2026
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Microblog Memes
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I work in this space and I'm appalled at how much targeted ads make my company.
Every smart person I know is using adblocking too. So is there's like a percentage of people who eats ads all day and open their wallets up?
We're on a decentralized message board that praises Linux and Self Hosting. We're not the target market for this stuff. My mother-in-law? She buys every damn Alibaba drop shipped trinket that promises whatever from a Facebook ad. My wife is constantly suckered into stuff advertised on Instagram.
Yes, most people. Adblockers are used by a minority.
I wouldn't believe it if I didn't have multiple friends who I have recently noticed don't have ad blockers. Absolutely feral behavior and they were properly shamed for it.
An unfortunate truth.
Some people justify it by stating that they keep ads because they want to support the websites, but don't know that at the very least they should be blocking trackers and 3rd party cookies
Even then the proper way to do that would be to Adblock and then whitelist sites you support and know don’t have turbo intrusive ads
I swear to god some sites are so filled with ads you can't even buy things from them.
Yeah that's what I do, but if they don't know about adblock, they're not gonna know about that.
Same thing on every other creative platform. People don't know that it's much better off for the creators to receive support in buying merch or patreon than it is for them to get a small fraction of what YouTube makes in ad revenue
Are these people actually clicking on the ads and making purchases through them? Because if all they’re doing is letting the ads clutter space, but not interacting with them, does that really support the site at all?
Someone on here some weeks ago had a beef with me saying I skip passed promo content in YouTube videos. They said something about wanting to support the videomakers. K, but if I’m not in the market for a new mattress (as an example of an ad I sometimes hear), it doesn’t make sense for me to listen to the sponsored mattress read-through. If I don’t make a purchase with the YouTuber’s promo code, then what’s the difference if I skip a couple minutes ahead? Do I owe a video “respect” by listening anyway? And if for some reason the advertiser cares more about me listening to their spiel than about me actually making a purchase, well, that’s silly and sucks for them.
There are some things advertised that I’m never going to buy no matter how much they’re shown to me. Meal kits, gambling sites, men’s boxers, these are all things I’ve seen countless sponsored ad placements mid-video for, and they are all things I don’t use and can’t see myself using. Yet the ads persist.
So I will continue skipping.
For the most part, no, it doesn't support the site, since most Google ads are PPC (Pay-Per-Click).
Sure but the metrics that companies produce after running an ad campaign to see if it was effective do not depend on those pay per click metrics. They will generally look at what the total sales or total amount of engagement with their content was pre and post the marketing campaign. If the number goes up they call it a success and will pay for another ad campaign. I guess the real question is are ad payouts for sites hosting them still generally based on pay per click or other engagement analytics that run after the campaigns are finished. That I am unsure of
It's not actually most. It's just enough to cover the ad spend.
Someone needs to create malware that installs ad blockers. That will more than half their conversion rate.
Most people access 'the web' via phone apps. There's no adblocker for those.
There's plenty, with a bit of doing. Definitely not as easy as installing ublock through a browser extension store but very doable
On iPhone? And on android without rooting?
uBlock Origin Lite on Apple App Store (pretty new): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id6745342698
uBlock Origin for Firefox on Android: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/ublock-origin/
I know about this and already have it on Firefox. I specifically mentioned phone apps. That means apps or games with ads.
Firefox on android can just install extensions. No clue about the iphone. I remember some chromium browsers also having extensions on Android but I'm not 100% sure which ones.
There's also DNS blocking of ads which can be set in your DNS settings or be part of your VPN connection. This will effectively block all ads too (even embedded ones in apps). On android ofc, yet again no clue about apple.
On iOS it’s the same, extensions for browser or DNS for apps
Most people use apps or standard Chrome. And Google targeted the most popular adblocker there deprecating Manifest V2 and using only V3 by default (maybe V2 is already removed?)
Ads Georg, who lives in a cave and looks at adverts 17.7 billion times a day is an outlier and should not be counted.
Why? That seems like a pretty typical number for someone scrolling through Facebook without an ad blocker based on what I see from my family.
They absolutely are. Everything I got from my family this past Christmas was slop from the TikTok shop. They just clicked the first ad they saw and bought whatever. I even got two of the same item because my brother didn't realize he clicked two ads for the same thing. I've been calling it Dropshipmas.
💀
"compliant consumer" is a mental illness
Oh shit I forgot all about this! After the holidays, everyone in the office was talking about all the garbage they got, and most of them were talking about how many sales/deals they got off of Tiktok.
Garbage in garbage out
How did you find out? Did you talk about it?
They were pretty happy to volunteer the info. He still gave me the duplicate!
I showed my sister ad block and she was like why would i want to block ads. She said she has her algo dialed in and the ads just show her products she probably wants to buy.
as i have commented on another thing:
Understand that we in the minority position here and the "compliant consumers" are intelligent humans making just as many choices and trade offs with different values, skills and priorities just as we are doing.
I think there is a solid argument to make for both sides since the issue is morally relative and only one side has a working solution. I could never support it but i can see why others do.
That hurts my brain to hear, oh my!
There are enough stories about somebody installing a pi-hole and a family member getting angry because now the ads for all the pretty things are gone.
You think that's an obscene amount of money? The intermediary services that collect, collate, aggregate, etc. that same data in the first place before selling it to companies like your employer? That's where the insane money is. That's the long game. 🤢🥲
Middlemen make the most money of any profession.
Market Makers. Insurance. Everyone involved in the mortgage world. Research publications. Mid-level managers.
I'm a mid-level manager. I do make a good amount of money.
Was about to comment similarly 🤪
I'm going to push back on this. The experiments that had scientific rigor shown that broad ads were only marginally less effective then personalized ones while being way cheeper.
A lot of what you see may be attributing conversion to sales that would happen anyway. Classic examples would be do you use branded search keyowords? Off course you do, despite the body of evidence that it only cannibalize the organic search.
But there are other much more complex mehanics in play. Each sestem takes away more and more control to replace it with "autootymization", so you truly have no idea to whom and when your ads is shown. Exact keywords are broader then broad "back in a day". Who knows how google is mixing your ad components, an now AI will dynamically change the ad content and placement using unknown criteria. All this to obscure that what we do is advertisal (?) equivalent showing a pizza ad to people who finished giving their order to the waiter.
Measurable online was here to save us from ineffective offline. Big data was here to save us from innefectove CPC. Algorithms were here to save us from paralism of to much data and now AI is here to save us from all this producing mostly a negative ROI anyway.
I honestly belive we were in the middle of a massive online advertising bubble, that we manage to cover up with even bigger AI bubble.
We are fucked.
And here is the hint (with the fencepost) that it might be more wishful thinking on the customers side (the companies renting the service). Similiar to the AI slop bubble.