I dislike ads in general. Specially Youtube ads. They are hysterical and for some god knows reason advertisers think its a good idea to repeat ad nauseum the same ad multiple times even on the same video. I end up hating the brand more than having some interest in the product.
(Paid) reviews on the other hand like unboxing, configuring and testing a product that I'm interested in are totally another thing. This applies to furnitures, house appliances, computers and so on. A good example is that I did not knew how much I wanted to build a fully silent computer before watching so many build videos of a certain fanless case that looks like a metal cube.
At least if I get an advertisement I immediately understand the biases behind whoever served it to me, with stuff like reddit or blogs I can never be sure how astroturfed it is, or whether the people reviewing things even know what they are talking about.
I'm not a proponent of advertising in the modern sense, but it's probably the least dishonest way that companies pay to promote their product. Professional reviewers are a good medium but it takes time to find those in a new space where you're not sure if their standards and preferences match yours
I think online advertising is mostly a hoax, with very few exceptions. I usually dismiss anything that remotely resembles an ad and just shut it off, even if it was really interesting. So I tend to think that the companies that pay for ads online are the ones paying for the cost of browsing the Internet for free, so I hate ads a bit less after that :)
I don't hate ads. What I hate is when ads track everything I do and everywhere I go and then keep a running dossier of all that and sell that information to third parties. It's a complete breakdown of trust between a seller and a buyer.
I feel the same. Oddly enough my wife is in marketing and looks at every billboard we pass. She sometimes mentions it and I'm like what billboard because I hardly notice them.
When it comes to online ads, if I get a very annoying ad or a pop up on stores website, I'm out and taking my money elsewhere. I also generally try to seek real world reviews but it is hard. So many youtube videos, bloggers and even comments are just paid advertisement, it sucks.
I remember early days of the internet when the information was decent before the MBAs figured out how much money could be made from it.
That's surprising to me. I hate ads. If I see one poping I usually blacklist the product. When I want to buy something I do technical comparison and try to find genuine reviews.
I don't think you really hate advertising as much as you say.
You get to use tons and tons of great sites without paying money, because the good people of ADVERT_CO paid for your attention.
Advertising gives you something you want, so you pay attention to something you don't want. But unless you want to pay a subscription fee to every site you use, it's not a bad deal at all.
If I'm in the market for a product, if a company makes a decent product chances are I'll find out about it by reading reviews, etc. I don't need ads for that.
Ads exist to make me spend money that I wouldn't otherwise spend.
I don't mind the ads, they are clearly labeled "sponsored".
What I hate is all the fake reviews influencing my choice. You buy something highly reviewed then receive some giftcard/offer or something in the packaging saying to leave a review and get something in return.
Now I have to "reddit productX" and read there before making a choice.
In practice there is a direct correlation between adspend and sucky products and I don't use ads to find interesting things. I use tech tubers and reviewers for that.
I agree with OP and disagree with you. People are different. I hate ads and I rarely buy products via ads. More often I use friend recommendation or product reviews/comparisons. I don't want to see ads when I am not planning to buy something.
The dislike of advertising isn't so much that ads pay for free content on the internet. It has to do more with the slippery slope of qualities and techniques that advertisers have and use to be successful.
To be a really good advertiser, you normally need to do some of the following loathsome things (and others not listed):
1. Outright spam.
2. Force opt-out over opt-in notions of content distribution.
3. Collect information on people that normally violates user notions of privacy.
4. Abuse otherwise useful UI features like pop-up windows in order to force ads into user view.
5. Be obnoxious to get your message heard, ie make the ad big, make the colors outlandish, add sound.
Engineers dislike advertising because we know details of how our privacy is being violated. We don't have the bliss of ignorance.
Not only are they useless, they cost me money as a customer. Every company paying for ads, needs to earn a greater margin to cover the cost of ads. If the entire ad market collapsed and products instead needed to compete on price, quality and overall value delivered to the customer, we would all be better off. Advertising allows firms to compete in a vector which provides me no benefits.
I would love it if we had a law that said once a product achieves more than something like 10% market share, it could no longer be advertised. Advertising for new unknown products makes sense. Once I know about a product, advertising just serves to divert resources from making the product better and to generate noise that dilutes the message from new products of which I might not be aware.
One of the biggest problems in this country and all countries are people who live their live accepting what they are told, instead of seeking out an answer to their questions and doubts on their own. People accept information from Fox, CNN, NY Times, NY Post, radio, advertisements, etc. at face value. Culturally, we would all be better off with an attitude like those who read and write the reviews for products on Amazon. I and every other customer get 1000x the value from Amazon reviews than I get from advertising. It has saved me from buying many many dud products and helped me discover the products that provide the best value. Plus, there is only so much any manufacturer can do to game those reviews since it is eventually self-correcting (i.e. pay for good reviews increases sales among the misled, who later show up and post most honest reviews that will be less favorable or downright negative)
I dislike them just as much. I dislike advertisements because I don't enjoy people trying to make me act irrationally. Wikipedia advertisements are just as manipulative as normal ads, if not more so.
For me it is the advertising I hate. I really don't want/need adverts in my life. If I want to find about new products or see reviews, I can search them out or read about them in publications I like or ask my friends.
Problem with ads is that we don't want to buy from them, we want to search and evaluate products instead. I never buy anything online unless I test both the seller and the product for bad reviews. Ads are just too risky to buy from. I need to trust before I buy, and it's silly to keep watching ads when I know I am not going to buy anything from them.
But it's the advertising that drives all of the stuff you do hate.
When a business is ad-driven, human attention is the raw crude that it harvests to turn into a product (ad impressions) that it then generates revenue from. The more attention it can siphon up, the more ad impressions it can deliver and the more money the business makes.
Does your coffee maker chime every twenty minutes to helpfully suggest you might want another coffee? No, of course not. Because the people who made that coffee maker already got as much money from you as they're gonna get when you bought it. As long as you're happy enough with it to not switch to the competition, they don't care how much you use it. They get no additional revenue from your additional use.
With ad-driven businesses, every user is a potentially inexhaustible source of future attention, which is what drives all of these toxic user experience choices.
Which is why I hate ads, and most online reviews.
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