• NeuronautML@lemmy.ml
      0·
      1 month ago

      My less tech savy younger family members have learned to completely ignore ads, wait for the skip button and effectively avoid all the false skip buttons on account of playing mobile games with ads since they were babies. Advertisers have perfected the human brain of people who rawdog the internet to be incapable of retaining any information from any ad they see and finding skip buttons wherever they may be.

      From my personal observational account, i think I’ve only seen boomers and some older millennials ever interacting with ads. A gen alpha’s brain wouldn’t even remember an ad they just saw. They have perfected filtering them.

      • helloworld55@lemm.ee
        0·
        1 month ago

        Ads work differently than that. At least good ones do.

        A good ad is almost imperceptible in presenting an idea to you. I have no doubt that people that are bombarded with ads that they say they “ignore” are still influenced over not having seen the ad at all

  • IninewCrow@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    1 month ago

    Basically how I browse the internet these days … if I have to click on a bunch of stuff, sign up, register, accept a bunch of notifications, cookies, blah, blah, blah … all because I want to read 200 words on your dumb site … I’m not even going to bother with your site, skip and find a different source that is easier.

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
    2·
    1 month ago

    It turns out the popular alternative is “force you to sign up (with a phone number) from critical mass/FOMO, track the snot out of you then slide ads in later.” Oh, and the stuff you want is siloed away until you join, and buried in a mountain of rambling and engagement optimization junk.

    Note that I’m largely talking about Discord, which is unfortunately where many of my interests have been shunted off to. People talk about Facebook, Google and OpenAI eating the internet, but I feel like Discord is the quiet trojan horse.

      • BlemboTheThird@lemmy.ca
        3·
        1 month ago

        Discord is 1000x worse because entire communities have taken to moving onto there. It’s like the one thing that’s worse than moving everything to Reddit: people using a fancy chat service like a forum. Everything from hardware to games seems to have most of the community on Discord; incredibly unhelpful if I’m trying to troubleshoot something.

  • EnderMB@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 month ago

    Many moons ago I worked briefly on an ad prototype that aimed to replace banner ads, particularly those that sit in content with a single bottom overlay that would “smartly” unobstruct the viewing experience of the page. I was able to reduce a full page of horrible ads into a single box at the bottom of the page that could be closed whenever.

    The idea fell completely flat for various reasons, but some off the top of my head:

    • We have x advertisers that NEED to be on this page - how can we possibly get x on the page with just one box?
    • I don’t care if people use ad blockers, let them do their thing and we’ll target those that are happy to see ads
    • If people can easily close them, the reflex to close will mean no ad is glanced.

    The sad stat that came out was that obtrusive ads, the kind that used popups or automatically opened apps to download were VERY effective. I could prove that my ads were several times more effective than “normal” banner ads and popups, but when you could sell 10x the ads it didn’t matter if they were 10x more effective.

    My brief stint in advertising made me feel that for many years people didn’t care about those that blocked ads because there was always more shit to optimise or grow into. That has stagnated, so now the likes of Google are targeting “market share” by getting those that block ads to look at ads again. It won’t work, at all, but it feels like they’ve now optimised themselves into a hole.