If it ever comes to pass that I can't learn or figure out a way to block ads, I'll stop visiting sites that show ads. Obviously, that will severely limit my choices, but probably that's a good thing.
this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2026
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They've basically dismantled society so Amazon can think I'm some kind of toilet seat and/or chainsaw collector. Clown shit.
Imagine if you and a friend entered a large, empty cafeteria, got your meal, sat down, and started eating. It would be so quiet your voices would echo. Then two more people come in and do the same thing. They start talking and it gets just a little bit more difficult to hear your conversation, so you and your friend start talking louder. Then more and more people come in start talking and the background noise gets louder than the foreground sound until you need to wear earplugs just to hear yourself chew.
That is the state of advertising. If only one player in a market advertised, they might derive some advantage but now people have to pay advertisers to scream the name of their product just because their competition does and no one can even hear the name of the product because everyone is screaming.
This, and coupled with the fact that businesses cross state and international lines. They’re not just competing with local businesses (which get drowned out in the noise created by the volume of money spent by big business) but they’re competing sometimes with national and international businesses. So 50 years ago you probably had to put up with mostly local stuff but maybe a national business like a car maker or airline, now it’s everyone that can do business where you live or might be.
They wouldn't waste money on ads if they didn't work enough to at least break even on them. They work. People with adblockers or who do not click on ads are not the norm. Not that I like this, but here we are.
I'm no longer convinced by this line of reasoning. They wouldn't waste money on meetings if they didn't break even. They wouldn't waste money on physical offices if they didn't break even. They wouldn't use chat bots if they didn't break even.
What we have isn't an efficient rational market. It's just a bunch of superstitions from business school.
They just raise prices to compensate for the advertising budget. Sounds easy to justify when you make the assumption that reaching more people would generate more return. Perversely customers wind up paying more for the very thing that pays for the ads that get shoved in their faces.
Somewhere along the path from the boardroom to the consumer's eyes, advertising still works. If they stop advertising, they sell less, that's a metric they can measure and I'm sure they do, or at least have. Exactly how it works may be more art than science and not as well understood as they like to claim, but the numbers don't lie.
There are three kinds of lies
Actually, data suggests that over 50% of internet users are using some kind of adblockers. Looking at ads is absolutely “not the norm.” Using adblock software just makes one part of the largest consumer boycott in history.
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
Fortnine actually made a video explaining how Google's ads are a scam.
In a nutshell, they don't convince people to buy things. They predict that someone is about to buy something, shows ads for it and then take credit for the purchase.
For a second there I was wondering why Fortnite of all things was making a video on this
Right, when they can host concerts then why can't they do courses on privacy or ads?
A coworker scrolling mentioned double stuffed Oreos, something she hadn’t had in a while. Boom, next ad: double stuffed Oreos. “They” really are listening.
That isn't how it works, listening to conversations would need too much bandwidth or processing power to be useful.
More likely that whatever prompted your coworker to think about those cookies also triggered the ad.
Or they have been getting those ads without thinking twice about them until they noticed when they were thinking about them.
Or it is just plain coincidence.
Nope. I worked as a marketing director before I remembered that I have a soul. A radio advertising rep tried to sell me passive listening ads.
According to that rep selling this service, it worked like this: All of these devices, including your phone, passively listen for keywords that get repeated frequently enough in a short enough window. They feed those words back to the mothership. An ad is then delivered across all ID associated devices targeted toward that keyword. This process is delivering an ad within 45 minutes.
For example, you talk about needing a new tent, you're gonna say tent and camping a few times in that convo. Camping/tent get beamed up. Within 45 minutes, you're seeing tent/camping ads in your apps and on websites across all of your devices because of your advertising ID.
It is not coincidence. They are literally selling this feature to their clients.
Yep. Guy I know cut off his finger using a table saw. They were able to sew it back on, and he was fine. But while he was recovering in the ER, his phone was served up ads for Sawstops (for those who aren’t into woodworking, these are table saws with advanced safety features that would have prevented this injury).
At that point he hadn’t even typed in on his phone yet what happened, but obviously people (himself, doctors, nurses, intake folks, etc) had been discussing the accident around him for hours at that point. It was pretty obvious that on some level his phone was listening to what was talked about. This was in 2012…
I had a phone call with a friend of mine, who told me that a person we both knew had lupus. We talked about it for a minute or two, because I’d only heard about it on house and didn’t know what it involved. Starting that afternoon, I got ads for lupus for about two weeks. I know I hadn’t received those ads before because I play a word game for which “lupus” is a really useful word, and I had not seen its spelling before then.
This was about 15 years ago. It could be a coincidence (but I’m not the age or race most predisposed to lupus), but I’ve been a believer in phones listening to you since.
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You have to remember that the people in charge of advertising spend are c-suite executives, and c-suite executives are the absolutely dumbest rung of society. Invasive advertising makes them feel important, and nothing else in the world matters more than their feelings.
My dad asked me the other day if I had seen some commercial for something and I was like "I block ads on the net and don't watch regular TV. How would I have seen it?"
I've had similar exchanges with people where they'll start with "have you seen the ad where..." and before I've even heard the details I say "I don't watch ads," but they'll follow up with "No you've definitely seen this one, it's unavoidable," and then they proceed to describe something I've never seen because I don't watch ads. Not only do I have ad blocking on every device that I use, I actively choose my entertainment based on what doesn't have ads or can be adblocked. If the only way for me to use a given platform is to tolerate ads, I just don't use it.
I'm happy to not be able to relate to someone wanting to talk about an ad. Especially if the focus of the conversation isn't on how annoying ads are. I get that they can sometimes be funny or clever or whatever but that just isn't a facet of humanity that I care to celebrate.
I had a teacher in middle school that told our class how he liked to watch the Super Bowl "for the ads." I thought that was silly then, and I still think that's silly now.
I know - companies throw money at the ads they'll air at that time, and I suppose some people consider the results to be acceptable entertainment. But to me, ads are still ads. Fuck 'em all, even the fancy, expensive ones.
Watching the superbowl for the ads is so much more embarrassing than reading playboy for the articles lmao
I don't even see the ads I see. If an email or text message looks like an ad then I'm probably not reading it either. Nonstop ~~spam~~ ads caused me to be this way. I sure as sh*t am never clicking on an ad to buy anything. I don't think I have ever clicked on an ad and bought something through the ad.
It sucks to miss movie trailers. Its ironic, I subbed to a youtube channel to catch trailers, the only ads I wanted and it spammed shite edits of trailers and I gave up.
The actual truth is the people paying for ads are rubes.
When it came out that Facebook’s “pivot to video” numbers were all fake nobody batted an eye. Marketing departments have failed to apply any statistical rigour for decades and all fall prey to the the idea that if you target ads well enough they work.
If you even have a marketing department they exist to spend money, so as long as they have charts and graphs they’ll ignore the users and keep asking for budget.
From what I remember, this pivot to video thing fucked a number of companies. Including cracked and college humor.
Read a great article by a guy who was questioned as to why the company's advertising spend wasn't resulting in sales. He had the IT chops to dig in, found 77% of "clicks" were bots. He laid out his testing and results very nicely.
I am amazed that companies keep throwing money at internet advertising.
I believe it. I've worked with this data for a long time, it's mostly bots. If you think Google and Meta somehow have a magic wand to remove them you're wrong
Yup. It's human storage in pointless jobs doing feckless shit to justify those jobs. They'll pump the numbers (and/or blame other teams on any flagging sales) in an endless cycle of bullshit. Marketing works strongest internally at most companies.
I play this single player mobile football game that has pop up ads. I just turn off the wifi when play instead of paying 5 bucks to remove ads.
Just use a DNS adblock?
Sometimes this is ineffective. If you use the youtube app, it has googles ip address built in. So even if you.use a pihole, you will still see youtube ads
I agree, but for this use case (mobile games) DNS adblock is usually pretty effective.
When did advertising become so evil? It's always been there, but today it's ridiculous. Even the targeted ads are useless.
Imagine if all these companies spending billions on vast networks of advertising actually used that money and energy on something, anything, useful. This meme is on point.
Like tracking and imprisoning dissidents? Because that's the usefulness we are going to get.
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I do those Google survey things for Google Play money.
Google, the biggest spyware company ever to exist.
99/100 of the things it sends are "Have you been to any of these places recently", and none of them are even in my state.
I don't understand. You have my location. Why are you asking me about shit in Texas?
In the end I get a dime for my time and sometimes I spend it on some game.
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When your generation isn't advertised to anymore, it's a strange feeling. My uncle who is in the boomer range, they stopped advertising to them and he and my aunt really took it hard. Like I said, it's a weird thing to go through.
When they stopped advertising to my generation when I was early 20s, I watched them start trying again around the late 20s. I was kind of in the fuck you phase at that point.
My point is, if you're in a booming type generation, you probably don't know what it's like to have no advertising towards you anywhere. Some generations, no one cares what you think.
Note: Not a bad thing to be not advertised to, but it's a shock when it happens. You realize how much of it is out there.
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