Yes, because I was wondering what kind of scam it is, and because the advertiser had to pay money for my click.

Yes. It was on Sync for Lemmy.

It had a picture of John Lithgow and was mentioning art.

It turns out it was for his show on PBS about taking art classes in LA.

It was delightful.

I've never clicked an ad, but that doesn't mean they were entirely ineffective. There have been a few times where I've seen an ad then went and searched for the product to find reviews and things.

Not a single time. I've only ever clicked them on shitty sites that shift things around while it loads.

Never, but clicks aren't their only goal. They're planting info in your mind. "Who should I call about auto repair? Well, I've heard a million ads for Leif's, guess I'll try them..."

I remember seeing an ad a few years back that said "Lower your phone bill with this genius device" or something equally inane and had a picture of a really old school 2 port USB hub that looked strange enough that nobody would recognize it as such. I'd long been curious about what these things actually advertised, so I clicked, just to find out where it went.

I was taken to a landing page about Cisco VoIP.

I'm not sure I envy the people trying to sell (or worse, be tech support for) VoIP phones to the sort of people who click on ad headlines that end with "With This One Weird Trick"

No. Ads are essentially scams.

Probably. I'd like to think of myself as a person who haven't but having spent over 20 years on internet I feel like such a statement would almost certainly be wrong.

I saw an ad on Facebook years ago for a Distant World's concert happening in my area. I clicked and bought tickets. This was the only time I've knowingly clicked an ad.

The old spice commercials with Terry Crews were absurdly hilarious.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Hq2SlCja3zo&pp=ygUVdGVycnkgY3Jld3Mgb2xkIHNwaWNl

Yeah once or twice. Usuallly to buy some cheap knickknacks that are shiny or that I think are cool.

i.e. I bought some Pokémon badges off a Facebook ad years ago.

My wife likes to click on ads she sees on instagram for products for presents and things. Stuff like a sunflower necklace that opens and says “you are my sunshine” on the inside of it.

She seems to actually like targeted ads because she is always looking for presents and things for people. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

A couple of times. Basically one in a million. A whiskey event near me. A metal store selling steel bar stock.

There used to be ads that took the form of games. I remember I'd be randomly browsing something like Marapets or some other Neopets knockoff and they'd show ads you can play, like I remember one where you could play as someone on a fourth story balcony dropping water balloons onto passerbies, and I'd think "wait, is this one of the site's games? Will I get myself points from this game to pay off Jhudora with?"

Now ads are just boring. Heck, where did all the i-frame veterans go?

Like a random intrusive ad? No, but when I Google something simply to go to their website and their ad is the top result I often decide if I like them more or less than Google before deciding to click the ad link vs the regular search link (I assume they pay Google a little extra for ad clicks). Amazon gets the ad click most others do not.

An honest estimate, in the 25+ years I've been using the internet, I've probably clicked on things easily recognizable as ads on purpose less than 50 times. A lot of that was while shopping.

I have. Rarely, I see an ad for something I'm interested in and I wanted more information. There have also been a few times that the ad was so ridiculous that I would click it just to see who paid for it and why. I do realize that's the whole point of those ads, but I have a very intrusive curiosity.

Yes, many times.

I once clicked an ad for syrinscape because it intrigued me. I ended up using it. Loyal customer ever since.

site-native ads, yes.

other ones that aren't even closely relevant then no.

Occasionally, if it is something I am interested in.

Yup! The ones I clicked with genuine motives were all Project Wonderful ads. Project Wonderful was an ad service that catered specifically to creative projects, mainly webcomics. People running webcomics would host a Project Wonderful ad widget on their site to make a little extra money, and when they had some money to burn they'd pay to have ads for their own comic run on other people's sites. I often discovered fun new comics this way. It's the only ad service I've ever actually appreciated. I was sad when they shut down.

I've also clicked some other ads in an un-genuine manner. These were all advertisements for dresses, swimsuits, skirts, etc. The purpose here was to convince the advertising agencies to stop plastering random shit all over the internet and instead decorate it with a bunch of pretty clothes and sometimes pretty models wearing those clothes. Worked pretty well, as long as I remembered to click an ad or two every few months.

I haven't done this in a while though. I wound up house-sitting for family members a lot in the last couple years, meaning I'd end up stuck using my laptop for a few days or a week instead of my real computer. The laptop has a lot less ram and runs into problems browsing the web sometimes due to ad company programmers being incompetent fuckwits who write leaky code. I finally got fed up with this and installed uBlock Origin on my laptop to make it more usable while away from home.

That was all I'd intended to do; I was fine coexisting with most ads on my desktop and just using custom scripting to nuke individual specific ad slots that were being nuisances (e.g. jerking the page around on wikis I frequented). But since I have Firefox set up to synchronize between my laptop and desktop, I incidentally wound up with uBlock Origin on my desktop as well. I'm not sure if there's a way to have that be asymmetric while still having all the other browser extensions continue to synchronize (because I would prefer if websites kept getting paid for my traffic when I browse on PC, especially webcomics), but for now I've just happily enjoyed not having ads anymore. The internet is so much more peaceful this way. Though I do sometimes miss all the pretty dresses.

Not clicked but the most effective advertisement I've ever seen was a billboard on a highway from Georgia to Ohio. It was a dark color with obnoxiously bright pink lettering in a huge, bold, sans serif font that just said PEACHES Exit 318 and that was it. I was driving with my mother and we were ready for a snack so we stopped. It was a little farm stand with various produce and we bought a box of picked-that-day, sun ripe Georgia summer peaches and they were one the best goddamn things I've ever eaten. We almost turned around just to get more haha.

My own ads, just to make sure they still work (for the 40% who still don't block ads)

Instagram gets me every so often. I’m only on there for cannabis related stuff and they’ll hit me with cute pokemon figures or some shit. 💀

Yes.

A starlink one for a cheap installation kit many months ago. (but since moved to 5G)

Several others over the years, mostly via Facebook.

I'm sure I have once or twice over the years. I block ads as much as possible now, though, using multiple methods.

Twice that I can think of.

Mealbars while on Slate Star Codex, and when I was a young weeb I clicked on a web store that sold Japanese items to Americans.

There are ads I deliberately searched for like the fun viral music videos by Berlin public transit authorities. There's even adds I physically ordered per mail. My home state in Germany had an ad-campaign where they printed stickers with "Nice here! But were you ever in Bade -Wurrtemberg?" that you could get per mail. Vandalism got these stickers everywhere and there was even a subreddit about spotting these in weird and faraway places. I also did paste a few in interesting places.

Nope. Never.

Years ago when I use to go Anime News Network daily I would click on some ads because they only allowed relevant ads and found some great sites to buy anime stuff from. Yesterday I clicked on an ad for a Kickstarter because I was curious. I've clicked on ads and rarely I end up buying stuff, but have bought after I verified it was a legit site, but mostly I clicked on ads out of curiosity because it a cool design or idea. Ads are not inherently bad. The pervasiveness, intrusiveness, and scams are the problems. When ads were a banner at the top of a page and were relevant to the site they were ok. I miss those. I won't purposely click on pop up or over ads or in between paragraphs ads, but I do sometimes click on obviously ads that are not aggressive that are interesting.

Beginning of COVID, wanting some way to spend time outdoors, I saw an ad for a small wood-fired pizza oven. Clicked it, liked it, ordered it on a whim even though it was $$$. It took my pizza game up a mile, looks cool, and has held up great. Legitimately one of my favorite possessions. 100% would click again.