Incredible. I can't imagine what it must be like to live inside their skulls. In all my life I have clicked maybe one or two ads on purpose, misclicked (either by honest mistake or through malicious design) probably five times, and never bought anything because of an online ad. The one ad that made think that I might use the service in question was a sponsor read for a PCB fabrication company.

I clicked and bought something via an online ad once. I needed a new jacket and the one in the ad was exactly what I was looking for. I overpaid because the jacket fell apart after a couple wears. The experience has definitely soured me on ads, even more than I was before. If marketers weren’t selling me overpriced junk I might have a more favorable view.

I have to say Instagram ads are incredibly well targeted to me. It's been like that for maybe a year, I think (I remember noticing it). I've clicked on a bunch of them, much more then elsewhere.

But have you bought anything?

Yea, not immediately, but yes. E.g. specialty coffee an chocolate. Other ones were interesting job offers, which usually check and make note if the place is interesting

Is it a nerd thing, then? I cannot for the life of me imagine clicking on ads, but maybe it’s just the filter bubble?

There's two kinds of things here, which I will call "push ads" and "pull ads".

Push ads we hate. I don't want your random ads shoved in my face. The harder and more intrusively you shove, the more I hate it. No, I'm not going to look at it to see if I'm interested; I just want it gone.

Pull ads are different. Let's say I'm on a business trip, and I get out of some meeting at 5 PM. Well, what is there to eat around here? What do I get in response to that? Ads! But in how they interact with me, it's completely different, because I actually want to eat.

Or let's say I'm going on a trip, and I search for "lodging in location X". Well, some of what comes back is ads. Say it's from hotel.com. I probably wouldn't have gone to hotel.com as one of my choices for investigating lodging in X, but they're going to give me kind of a one-stop overview of what's there, so maybe I'll click on their ad link anyway, because it's actually interesting information for what I'm trying to do right then.

But some random Temu junk that they insist on shoving in my face every time they can? No way. Just get it out of my life.

I think pull ads are hated too. They try to short circuit your brain into making a quick decision/have a preference without doing any research. It's all manipulation.

I've got the same feeling as you!

Do you enjoy going through your mail account and unsubscribe all useless newsletters? Use email aliases? are wary of all ads and brand claims you see on social media and prefer doing our own research? hate clicking on SEA results: usually the landing page is a weird, summed up version of the full website (we want the full thing)

But i guess that's a particularity of hackers and tinkerers :)

For many different reasons make people click and buy: discounted prices, FOMO, clever retargeting, funny ads, hidden ads (sponsored/influence/fake news),...

Yeah, I give a lot of newsletters a chance, but only with Firefox single relay emails addresses which I have over 300+ currently. I probably unsubscribes 95% of them, but I did give them at least a chance. I probably should have tracked the ones I did so I could delete them.

whats the breakdown of M vs F?

I can definitely see clicking on things in email - after all I have already prescreened your company/product and found it to be interesting/worthwhile.

As for ads, maybe it is just that marketers generally have to advertise crap (because good things tend to sell themselves?) and so I rarely if ever see ads for things worth purchasing?

Facebook's ads in particular are very well targeted, IMO. They know I'm into gaming, so I get gaming related ads (board/card games, conventions, arcades). Other sites like NYTimes, Amazon Prime Video, etc, all do a terrible job -- they think I'm a parent with a watch fetish who can't get enough prescription drugs.

If I were an ad buyer I'm not sure I'd bother with anything but Meta at this point.