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.

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

I have purposely clicked on ads for some video games. It isn’t worth the click even then since you end up on some marketing railroad that doesn’t lead directly to the steam page.

I once saw an ad for a cool hoodie on Instagram. I bought it. It was from China. Hoodie was trash, material was made from what you expect from a Halloween costume. Never again.

Does it count if it was for a shitty company and I just wanted to drive up their ad costs? If so, yes. Otherwise, no. lol

Yeah, I click them Steam sale ads all the time.

One time, I was shopping for a specific item. I couldn’t find it on ebay, Amazon, walmart or etsy. Then I went to some smaller retail site (they also didn’t have it), and an Amazon ad for that item popped up. I clicked the ad, and it took me to the item page.

Amazon search (at least at the time) was so ineffective that I couldn’t find it, while their ad data gathering was so complete they knew that I wanted that specific thing.

Once.

It was in gmail (I think gmail used to have text ads?), for a local job, in my field, right when I was about to quit.

I got the job.

Sure, because it was my friend’s computer and I thought it would be funny if he got more pop-ups for boner pills and also I was 12.

Nope, I’ll even specifically avoid companies that I see or hear excessive ads for. When I needed to change car insurance a while back and had a list of options going, I immediately removed all the ones I could remember seeing advertising for.

Two reasons:

1. I have an unhealthy hatred of advertising.

2. They’re spending an absurd amount of money on digital spam as opposed to making their product/service better or cheaper. Some percentage of what you pay for in the product is to cover their advertising campaigns, and I prefer that percentage be as small as possible.

Sorry can’t hear you over the size of my GIGANTIC PENIS

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.

If you’re talking about ads that look like ads, it’s happened maybe twice since the mid 90s. But who knows how many ads disguised as content that any of us has ever clicked on?

I’ve clicked on ads “plenty of times” on purpose.

Probably a half dozen a year at one point.

There was a period of time where some sites I visited hit the sweet spot of only using advertisers that were moderately relevant to the content or to similar interests that people who would be perusing that content might have.

If the ads are for things I might be interested in, I’ll click.

It’s utterly shocking that with as much as most service providers and companies actually know about the average person that we’ve so thoroughly failed to target ads at people.

Couple that with ads being an occasional attack vector because nobody properly vets shit anymore and it’s not worth it to whitelist most sites in my adblocker unless I’m REALLY interested in supporting them.

I avoid YouTube and that sort of stuff like the plague unless I need to repair an appliance or a car or something, so outside of text ads, the only ads I regularly see anymore are the occasional totally irrelevant commercial on a streaming service.

Once upon a time Hulu let you PICK what kind of ads you wanted to see, which was the tiniest of baby steps in the right direction.

We had the potential to drill down, do the hard work, and provide relevant, interesting, and specific ads, and the corporate fuckis at the top chose greed.

I almost feel bad for people who work in advertising.

A few of them.

Maybe.

I clicked an ad for roblox in 2012 when i was a child. Probably the only ad i don’t regret clicking on, accidentally or not.

I think I also might have clicked an ad on kongregate around that same time period.

Now I use an adblocker, so I can’t really click on ads even if i wanted to