wackyteen posted...
I want to know who the fuck is clicking ads.
Even when I wasn't using an adblocker, I wasn't clicking ads.
I can't think of any online ad I ever looked at and thought "i want to click this". Any ads I have clicked have been by accident or out of sheer curiosity of price point. I definitely haven't spent money on a product i saw in an online ad banner/pop-up ad/whatever. Maybe down the road when I saw it in a store, but definitely not by clicking the ad itself.
I have bought a couple of those youtube sponsorship things, but that is at least tied to supporting the creator.
These dumbasses have always existed. A large percentage of them are the typical types who fall for scams or possess the combined traits of being terminally curious, possessing poor judgment (or decent judgment that said terminal curiosity overrides), and being easily distracted by shiny things. However, these were never the type of people who used message boards since these types of people often do not like to type more than a few words. One of their manifestations in the internet 2/3.0 era is the people who post youtube videos of conspiracies or misinformation overflowing with cringe-level logical fallacies as an argument in a debates while typing few if any words. This type of behavior was far less prevalent prior to youtube because many of them also didn't like to read very much. We saw the prototype version of this on a much smaller scale back in the late 90's/early 2000's with that stupid Fox channel moon landing hoax miniseries.
My dad (who was of the "inept boomer/greatest generation" demographic that typified the internet 1.0 era rather than the aforementioned types) was dumb enough to download the Bonzibuddy thing, Comet Cursor, and click on those "punch the monkey" (he was a gamer), and other "free" serivces, despite being exactly the type of person who should know better since he owned a family business, so he had extensive experience in dealing with spam mail and telemarketing. Of course, he never fell for email scams and spam due to its obvious similarity to mail spam/telemarketing.