70% of Google's revenue is from their ads, so a lot of people click on them. The HN audience is a very small minority :)

https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-reven...

A lot of entities click on them. How many of them are people is debatable.

Unless the armies of bots out there started spending real cash for products after those ad clicks, I'm going to stick with "a lot of of people click on ads".

It's the top result for pretty much any search. And it often is relevant. Why go down to the actual results if you can just click the first link and get what you want? And most users don't use ad blockers.

From my small sample size POV, it might be related to people who like browsing/window shopping.

Personally I don't like these things because I know what I want before I buy it and I research almost everything I buy, and I probably have some anti-consumer bent deep down in my belly that stigmatizes shopping for the sake of shopping.

But not everyone is like this. I've heard people say they like ads before, and AFAIK it's usually clothing ads.

Now that facebook has embedded ads that get past OOTB ad-blocker and are super targeted to me, I've actually clicked on a couple ads that have intrigued me, knowing I'd not buy it but interested in what their pitch was. Most of those were kickstarter projects or some kind of "adventure gear".

I know people who click on the first "result" of google search most of the time just because it is convenient. The psychological profile would be something like "Not interested in boring details like is something a paid ad or an actual search result. Just want to get to the site they want as easy as possible."

This is consistent with user-tests I've done recently.

I've always been so interested in this as well, I also have never once (intentionally that is) clicked on an ad in my entire life. I can actually see myself doing so if the product was something I was interested in, but it almost never is. I've found I actually tend to think less of a company if I'm seeing a lot of their ads. I don't know if I've ever met anyone who has told me that they clicked on ads. I have no idea who these people are. Most of my friends even non-technical ones now, use ad-blockers by default.

Sometimes this will turn into anger toward a brand even, like when I'm visiting family over the holidays and I momentarily remember just how bad cable television ads are. I just start to legitimately hate a company because of their ads. I wonder how many companies calculate value lost from an ad because of annoyed people.

You don't have to click on ads to be influenced by them.

Well, to be honest, one of the main reasons I don't click on ads is because I don't see them. I run multiple ad blockers and use DDG as my search engine.

You probably click on thousands of ads on HN :)

The difference between ads on HN and ads elsewhere is relevance. You self select for useful ads by going to HN. Because I regularly search for things that I actually need on Google and youtube, I end up clicking on lots of ads on those platforms too.

I mostly click on them by accident.

> I've never clicked on an ad

Impressive