That doesn't seem obvious to me. I'd be more inclined to think anyone willing to pay to avoid ads likely isn't very receptive to advertising in the first place. If someone is so annoyed by ads, they're probably not going to be clicking on them, right?
I would never click on an ad, even if it's for something I actually want. Clicking on an ad sends a strong signal (and exposes too much data) to the ad-slingers, and the less data that I give the ad-slingers, the better off I am.
Our belief is that if someone doesn’t like them, and they won’t click on them, any impressions served to them will only annoy them-- plus, serving ads to people who won’t click on them harms campaign performance.
and you know what, it's not the ad so much that bothers me, it's the 27 trackers added to the page by three ads in adsense and all their roundtrips and javascript lag
I wish we could bring back the days of text ads that were interesting.
I mean that if you click on an ad, you tend to get more of that kind of ad. And since ads routinely have misleading UI, I wouldn't expect clicking on an ad to let me turn it off / make it less annoying.
I also hate ads in general, my livelihood certainly does not depend on them. But there are sometimes ads that are useful. This must almost be the case as ads (excluding punch the monkey-like ads) try to be useful.
Well, according to the numbers SF people do click ads from time to time. I just can't imagine all ad clicks to be by accident and so by definition not all ads are useless. So maybe HN-ers that never click ads and always ignore them, do miss out.
I work in Ad Tech. This is on target. [..] People DO NOT click on ads
Was there ever a serious belief that people clicked on ads willingly and intentionally?
I mean a real serious "people want to click ads", and not a "of course people click on ads which are relevant and helpful - as all adverts always are, nudge nudge wink wink"?
That also strikes me as insightful. Even if I were forced to view ads, I would never click on them. Or even hover. If it's something that interests me, I might search in a different window. Basically, I just don't trust ads.
Web conversations like this are terrible. Clicks are a very small part of what advertisers are buying, even if that's how it's measured. Just like sometimes when you're at a cafe you buy a cup of coffee, but actually what you want is the nice space to work and an internet connection for a couple hours.
(Some) advertisers are actually smart. They do extensive, scientific research around attribution and effectiveness. Even if you don't click on ads, you're influenced by them (yes, you, too). They can track that, and it's a large part of what they're paying for. Just like TV ads.
They just show you ads for people who are going for exposure rather than clicks, because you count as an impression even if you can't be used to generate clicks.
I'd imagine that most of the time people would only consider clicking on ads they found "not annoying" in the first place.
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