• Belly_Beanis [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    2 days ago

    People avoid clicking them

    This point also amazes me. Nobody wants to click on ads. Too many viruses and other horrifying shit exist as ads. Nobody wants to click something they weren’t looking for. Especially when it’s to spend money. Why would I risk having my computer destroyed for the opportunity to buy something I don’t need or want?

    They really want people to mindlessly click and consume whatever is in front of them, not realizing people don’t think that way.

    • BeamBrain [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      2 days ago

      If they’d actually supported some sort of legislative measures against malicious, fraudulent ads, people might have actually trusted ads enough to occasionally click on one. Capitalism done in by its own endless drive for deregulation.

    • i_drink_bleach [any, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      2 days ago

      This. Why I use ad and script blockers religiously. You host the ads on your own site, it doesn’t get blocked. But you won’t. You know damn well that most of that shit is malware. None of these motherfuckers are going to host it on their own machines, not only because of the liability, but also because of the massive security risk. They’re fine serving it to you though.

      No thanks.

      “But we rely on serving you malicious software to survive!”

      IDK. Get a better business model. Be a fucking communist. WTF do you want from me? I’m not letting you infect my hardware with your affiliate’s garbage. Not my problem.

        • i_drink_bleach [any, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          2 days ago

          Nah… Exemption only applies to corpo scum. “We didn’t directly host it, our affiliate’s serve the ads through their own servers. We can’t possibly be held responsible for our affiliate links! That would be unfair!”

    • SootySootySoot [any]@hexbear.net
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      2 days ago

      This just isn’t true, though. Obviously it’s true of more savvy users and old internet fogeys, but cost-per-click on ads just is not all that high.

      Billions of people do click ads. These clicks are worth in the realm of hundreds of billions of dollars. There’s a big demographic gap here where half of users happily click ads all day long, and half actively avoid them. A lot of advertising is sneaky, too, it’s not all a big banner with a legally required disclaimer, a lot of it the algorithm being ‘adjusted’. So we probably all click a lot more ads than we care to realise

      Just do any ad campaign on Facebook or Google, and with very little effort you can absolutely generate a lot of traffic.

      People demonstrably do think that way, young and old alike.