Tell HN: I never bought anything from clicking on a paid ad

12 pointsposted 10 hours ago
by julienreszka

Item id: 48639228

9 Comments

al_borland

8 hours ago

Nor have I, I’ve never even willing clicked on an ad, but I see countless others do it when I watch over their shoulder.

I’ve also seen seemingly normal people argue in favor of user tracking and data harvesting so they could get ads that were more relevant to them. They claimed they genuinely found them useful.

dlcarrier

5 hours ago

I was helping a family member find something on Amazon, and she was extremely frustrated that I was fighting their their only semi-functional sorting, to find an actually good product, instead of just clicking on the ads and paying more to buy something worse, instead of spending 15 minutes finding something that would do what we need.

aristofun

an hour ago

Everyone outside our professional community.

Only people who make sausages don’t eat them. Only people who create news don’t trust them.

j5dgx76

10 hours ago

I have never performed a religioua ritual yet I see religion everywhere.

aristofun

an hour ago

That is a pretty stupid comment and a bad analogy, to be honest

lordkrandel

7 hours ago

I have bought advertised things, but never through the platform. Like, I discovered The Vegan Butcher, Ohuhu alcohol markers, and a Tatoo convention. All things I would have known also through Google. Is that enough to sustain a 24/7 economy based on ads? What's the real ROI? Who spends that much money buying stuff from socials?

throw310822

9 hours ago

Me neither. I'm also surprised at how basic they are: they either show me the last product category that I've searched for (for weeks even after I completed the purchase) or random stuff.

d--b

3 hours ago

yes it's a bit of a mystery to me as well, especially knowing that most of them are scams.

There are 2 things I don't understand.

1. Most online ads are illegal in EU, cause it's illegal to lie/mislead in an ad in the EU. The Tai Chi ads, the water pressure thing or the breezamax scams are all I see on Youtube, yet, they're obviously fake, and still running strong. How is it that they're not taken down?

2. The tai chi ad campaign must be costing millions of dollars. Everyone I know is seeing these fifteen times a day. Is anyone actually paying for that crap? Shouldn't Youtube increase the price of ads, so that they make more money and actually push scammers off the platform?

It doesn't make any sense

haute_cuisine

2 hours ago

Will expensive ads instead push out the honest products with fair prices? Only casinos/betting/high margin will be able to afford expensive ads.