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Comment by Calvin02 | Hacker News Reader

Apple hiring a former Facebook ad products product manager, expanding its ads product suite, and expanding ads slots says more about how they see Facebook than the privacy changes they've made.

Ads is a services market that is growing fast and as the phone market saturates, services will become more important for Apple. This will also help reduce the margin pressure on iPhone hardware.

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How can anything ad related still be growing if most people either trained their brain to ignore/close ads instantly or use adblockers?

Because good advertising still impacts you even if you “know to ignore it”, and there’s lots of ways to advertise to people that aren’t ads in the classic sense.

I suspect that adblocker usage is also a lot lower than you expect, with a quick Google showing less than half of people worldwide using adblockers on desktop and adoption below 20% for mobile devices in the US. So there’s still a broad market to target.

I discovered recently that eventually they catch you through persistence. Like YouTube ads, I was busy in another window and couldn't skip the add without interrupting something I was doing which couldn't be interrupted. So I wound up inadvertently listening to the ad, and they said some interesting stuff that make me pan back to the ad and watch it. Eventually ads catch you at an inopportune time, which is inopportune for you, but opportune for them.

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