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Comment by hunter2_ | Hacker News Reader

Do you ever make a purchase due to having seen an ad, ideally by clicking on the ad? If not, then in some sense you're still getting something without paying for it. (You're paying with your time, but that's not valuable to anyone unless it ultimately results in paying with money.) But better to screw the people pushing ads than the content creators!

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I would say not very often, but yes, very recently even. I've been researching new backpacking gear this summer, looking on sites that are known to me, so I've been seeing lots of ads for that type of stuff naturally.

One store kept popping up that I was not familiar with. So I clicked eventually, and did some online searching about the company to make sure they are legit.

Turns out they are a local independent store. I've made two purchases from them since, and price compared against them for other purchases. Their ads are more likely to catch my eye in the future now.

> I've been researching new backpacking gear this summer, looking on sites that are known to me, so I've been seeing lots of ads for that type of stuff naturally.

"naturally"

I personally have a long list of products not to buy. If you somehow repeat the same ad and I remember your product, I stop buying said product. If youre wasting your money on spamming ads, your product sure as shit isnt better than competitors', since they waste less on ads, more on product. I dont use ad blockers, they make it harder for me to find out who has the poorer product.

Wow, that sounds like a ton of work. I think a better idea is to use an ad-blocker, but run a program in the background that downloads the ads (or maybe just samples them, to save bandwidth and resources), processes them to find brand names, and then stores these brand names in a database so you can find their relative frequency and assign a score to each. Then you can just query the db when you want to buy something to find that brand's acceptability score.

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