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Comment by erentz | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know anyone that clicks on ads. But apparently they’re still valuable somehow. It’s a mystery to me, but I guess even without clicks the chance to pollute someone’s mind with an ad in a website is still valuable to an advertiser in the same way that it is on a freeway billboard.

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Sometimes I click lots of ads deliberately to mess up the malgorithm, especially I click ads that are of no interest to me...What I never do is buy anything on the click through.

+1 for teaching me the neologism 'malgorithm'

Thanks to 'Private Eye' magazine

Presumably why sophisticated advertisers track purchase completions through the pixel and then run ads with a goal of conversion instead of clicks.

There's a Firefox extension I often used before installing Pi-Hole that would do exactly this on every page. It was called AdNausium. Not sure if it's still a thing, but it was pretty great at obfuscation.

By the end of using it I'm pretty sure Google thought I was a middle-aged woman with an obsession for patterned summer dresses. There were a few other ways I obfuscated data using this guide :- https://web.archive.org/web/20181107150700/https://iotdarwin...

I use ads to tell me which companies I should avoid.

Oh what's this now, an advert for Coca Cola? How obnoxious. Guess what I will never ever be buying.

Value might be in capturing how many second it stopped you from scrolling. That could be still acting without acting.

"I don't know a single person who voted for Trump"

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