SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube

I still don't understand a lot of youtube advertising. Like for me, if I'm being advertised something, I instinctively don't trust it, because they're having to pay people to say good things about it rather than people who have used it telling me it's a good thing. And there are still so many sponsorships from places like BetterHelp, which has been known to be a scam for a while now, and Raid Shadow Legends, which is just a crappy mobile game that is about as "mobile game" as you can get. The only reason I use onshape is because a friend recommended it to me, and I was very skeptical about it initially

I feel the same. The more I hear about a brand in youtube ads (or any ads, for that matter), the more "scammy" feeling I get about it. At this point I feel I won't even consider looking into NordVPN, Betterhelp, or SquareSpace, even though I understand how this feeling is unjustified.

The hardest thing about selling something is making people aware or it's existence. So it's not really a bad bad thing.

Said that, if i see that thing everywhere i can probably find a cheaper thing with the same quality because the marketing budget must be HUGE and these 10% discount codes give 10% to you and 10%the the creator so i can find a code 20% somewhere.

you're not the target. advertisements work. the people managing ads are very meticulous about their spend vs. return. if you are seeing an ad of something for any noticeable duration of time, that means it works. by that I mean they get positive return from showing the world their ad. if it generates negative returns, it will be pulled pretty quickly. they are humans just like you and me, we don't like losing money.

also one should always be skeptical about the extent they believe they are not influenced by ads. that runs pretty deep. you say you instinctively don't trust it. but when the time comes to buy something, you won't automatically steer yourself towards a product that you have never heard before just because you have not seen an ad for it. having some names in your mind, even them showing up when you do research creates influence.

I think you’d be surprised at how effective advertising is on you. An awful lot of it is brand familiarity. You mentioned some examples, but presumably you’ve seen more than three ads (not expecting you to list them).

Square space is one provider that commonly does these kinds of placements and I can confirm that it’s an excellent product (albeit expensive).

Where do you think your friend found out about onshape?

> I understand how this feeling is unjustified

Every company you listed is bad.

NordVPN wasn't caught yet, but it's to good to be true and ALWAYS having 73% off is illegal marketing.

Betterhelp sold data to facebook to retarget you with ads.

SquareSpace had a security issue were entering the email of an old, not yet migrated account, was instant account takeover... how does this slip through security reviews?

Everything that needs my favorite minecraft youtuber to advertise it, is scam. It wouldn't sell without influencer marketing.

Sure, it makes me aware of brands, and then I don't use their service because they have to pay people to say it's good. And I already have a web hosting solution, its the raspberry pi in my closet.

I've asked them but they may be asleep

The thing about nordVPN (and VPN services in general) is they always talk about how funneling all your traffic through them makes it more secure and it means that governments cant spy on you and whatever. But sending all your traffic through a single point of failure seems like a bad idea from a government protection view, and how is it any more secure than https? The only thing that I've seen it be good for is making it look like you're from somewhere else to watch different stuff on streaming services. I think Tom Scott put it well here https://youtu.be/WVDQEoe6ZWY

This makes you an outlier - and HN is the kind of place where you will find many such outliers.

The majority of people, however, are extremely responsive to advertising & marketing, or it would not exist.

My business used to be ecommerce platform development and consultancy, and I ended up seeing a lot of how the sausage is made - advertising is a bigger spend than product for most successful retailers, and it’s all about figuring out where to chop off the tail. You’ve got your core 15% who you can send an email to saying “buy this”, and they will, 95% of the time - then segments step down in terms of convertibility until you’re down to 0.01%, at which point you’re usually going to get more people irritated by the marketing than you will sales.

The marginal cost of most marketing is very low - that’s to say, to reach 10,000,000 eyeballs doesn’t cost much more than to reach 10,000 - unless you’re doing paper catalogues, which is a whole other thing, most of your cost is up front, artwork, direction, whatever - so it makes sense to shoot for a bigger basket and get some bycatch.

Me - I resolutely refused to do any marketing for our business. Mistake, bluntly, as I let my emotions get in the way of rationality. Had anyone other than a clique of medium-large UK merchants ever heard of us, the business might have gone somewhere - instead after a decade we were trundling along in a comfortable rut and I ejected.

So, you hate it, I hate it, it’s misleading, it’s annoying, it’s a negative signal to us - but it works on most people.

From my ad industry insights, that's only partly true. What you mentioned last is called brand advertising IIRC, which is not conversion oriented, but aimed at exposing you to a brand (like, a car manufacturer) so that at some point _later_ in your life, you contribute to a decision to buy from them.

Now, huge companies do run focus groups and such to ensure their brand advertising has the right (psychological) effects. But it is inherently difficult to measure. And I've seen many mid-sized companies not do that at all, they run these ads based on what they believe might work.

Mind you, this is experience from 4 years ago, but I did find the ad industry, as obsessed with tracking as it is, to be surprisingly gut-driven. For a lot of it, it's hard to tell if it works.

I do fully agree that for people who know what they're doing, advertising absolutely works, in ways that are sometimes unintuitive to consumers.

I don't trust them either. The inherent conflicts of interest makes any advertising suspicious. They are guaranteed to be overstating the pros and understating the cons.

"Sponsored segments" on youtube are nothing but normal advertising, they just permanently hardcoded the ads into the video instead. I don't like that they use the word "sponsors" for that. Sponsorships can be an ethical way to make money. Think Patreon, GitHub Sponsors.

> if you are seeing an ad of something for any noticeable duration of time, that means it works

It means my uBlock Origin failed. I will not be returning to that site as a result.

Ehh, if you go to buy a new car, will you buy a brand you've never heard of before? Or will you perhaps check out the brand you've seen ads for a hundred times in your life?

It's not a conscious decision, your mind is familiar with some of the brands more than others, for whatever reason, and that tricks you into trust. Sure, you still might look into reviews and stuff, but your mind has already been primed to some extent in what brands you even consider.

Advertisement obviously works. But the premise or mechanism is not as clean and simple as you laid out.

Marketing, whether they are external firms or internal teams, have their own incentives, just like anyone else.

But… Personally I like good marketing and I‘m drawn to services and products who do so.

For example tech and games sometimes do very good marketing by providing educational resources, transparency through blogs/vlogs etc.

Some products are focused on a high quality, sustainable niche, and they do very pronounced, sometimes humorous over the top ads.

I „mistrust“ marketing if it wants to sell cheap crap in a disingenuous way. But I‘m glad to see ads for interesting, quality products.

If I go to buy a new car, I'll look at the brands I have experience with, like what my friends and family drive. If I can actually see what its like and have people I trust endorse it, I'm more likely to support it

> An awful lot of it is brand familiarity.

Thus the ad industry term "impressions" ? One gets the impression (heh) that they're just trying to beat logos and catchphrases into your reptile brain.

"Familiarity breeds contempt"... but ubiquitous superficiality does not, I guess.

I only worked in ad tech briefly and many years ago, but what I saw there was a game being played between the people who make/distribute ads and the companies that buy them. The game is to convince the people buying ads that ads have value, even when they don't.

> From my ad industry insights, that's only partly true. What you mentioned last is called brand advertising IIRC, which is not conversion oriented, but aimed at exposing you to a brand (like, a car manufacturer) so that at some point _later_ in your life, you contribute to a decision to buy from them.

Top of funnel advertising is definitely conversion oriented, just on a longer timescale.

The same can be said for folks using Clouflare or Google DNS.

> how is it any more secure than https?

Using a VPN doesn't expose the domain names you're viewing (via SNI) or the IP addresses you're connecting to to your ISP. It also (therefore) doesn't expose to the ISP the volume of traffic you're sending to a particular site, when you connect to it, or how long you stay there.

Whether your ISP is part of the threat model you're interested in mitigating is up to you personally, but this is how, depending on that model, a VPN can be more secure than HTTPS.

Most of what people use personal VPNs for is to break some rules, sometimes the law. Circumventing geofencing or content blocking is most likely against some terms of service. VPN services can't really advertise for this, so they talk about evil hackers.

> The majority of people, however, are extremely responsive to advertising & marketing, or it would not exist.

This doesn't follow. Plenty of things are not effective for what they're claimed to do but still exist, have active communities of supporters, make lots of money for their practitioners, are a large part of popular culture, etc etc.

Fair, conversions are the ultimate goal. What I meant by conversion-oriented (possibly not the correct term) is ads where you measure their success based on sales, signups etc, as opposed to focusing on the number of impressions (views).

Instead it exposes them all to the VPN company instead. You've just moved the attack point to another company

They are very much not meticulous about ROI. The thing to understand about the ad industry is that it's incredibly adversarial. Companies need ads to raise brand awareness and make people aware of new products. So far, so well-aligned. From there on it goes downwards. A company's marketing department is in an adversarial relationship with the rest of the company, aiming to increase the ad budget at all costs. The ad agency often just gets a pot of money from the department, and instructions to spend it all, no matter how unproductive. Because if the marketing department doesn't spend their budget, it might shrink. ROI is often not a consideration at all. And if the marketing department actually do care about ROI, then the ad agency certainly doesn't. Then you have the websites themselves, with their clickfarms and general fraud, and the ad exchanges that empower them.

The whole business is teeming with waste and fraud, but it's a necessary evil so it stays.

It's to get people to remember the name.

What first comes to your mind when you are in need of a website builder? Squarespace. Want to make some PCBs? JLCPCB

My take on NordVPN is that it's surely some kind of honeypot, to catch extremely illegal uses (pedos, drugs), or high value targets (journalists, politics ?). Not sure who's running it.

But if you're using it for mildly illegal things like having the Netflix catalogue from another place it's probably good enough.

Just don't install their app, configure it yourself, don't use it full time, and don't expect protection from anything other than low level law enforcement from your country. Expect your connection to be monitored when you're using it, as much as can be (so not breaking encryption, but all the rest for sure).

I have absolutely no evidence whatsoever other than the fact that it's been a high visibility service for very long, which makes me think it would have already been taken down a while ago if it was actually effective at protecting high value targets

I am starting to think that these companies aim for saturation of mindshare. Like Coca-Cola, Pepsi and such. This bombarding is there for you to remember the name of the company. And then when you are ready to purchase either go for it or try to find some sponsored segment again for that discount. Individual conversions are less important than the long term mindshare.

You can always 'enter element picker mode'. With a little practice/knowledge you can block that element/frame/etc. forever. And/or add a layer with Privacy Badger and block altogether most of the sus domains.

Another 'trick' I employ (always with Firefox) is that I open links not to a "New Tab", but instead I use "Open in Reader View" add-on, so I "Open in Reader View" (it does exactly what it says on the tin), so I only get the clean text and the relevant images. That works for almost every website.

I saw a couple of VPN promos recently where the sponsored YouTube presenter talked about geoblocking circumvention as an important VPN use case. I don't know whether the sponsor thought that was desirable or not (and also don't know whether the sponsor requested it or not).

That rings with what Uber said, that they'd been scammed $100 million.

https://veracitytrustnetwork.com/blog/digital-marketing/uber...

It might be a noncentral example of sponsorship, but it's been a traditional usage since the early days of television: "and now, a word from our sponsor".

Edit: actually, I think that phrasing arose in the early days of radio!

But people are usually funnelling all their traffic through a single point of failure anyway: Their ISP. If your ISP is known to be bad, then it could be better to choose a good VPN service.

And you'd better hope its a good VPN service since now you're sending all your traffic through that single point instead

And people subconsciously trust people they interact with often, like content creators whose videos you watch. Most people think they're above being influenced by ads, but they're not.

I barely interact with content creators. They don't reply to my comments very much, and even if they did, they'd still say they 100% support the thing they're being paid to say nice things about. I cant have a genuine conversation with them about the thing, how good it is, what the downsides are etc. See Kyle hill's vaguely recent video about scientific misconduct where they also advertise BetterHelp. The comments section was overwhelmingly negative about it, and their response was essentially "cry about it."

apache2/html/css, and I'm a little sceptical about pcbway/jlcpcb because the shipping times are nuts. I know its because they're coming from china but it makes me want to etch my own PCBs instead

I now sort of want to see a video about PCB etching sponsored by either of those because it would make me laugh from the contradiction

I am convinced that the bulk of online advertising money spent is just wasted. All it does is steal clicks and attributions for conversions that would have happened anyway.

I’ve never realised the use of the word impression until now - makes a lot of sense

The easiest people to advertise to are HN knowitalls that consider themselves infallible, completely logical beings.

Advertising works on you. You’re just, at best, describing a scenario where you aren’t being advertised things that you currently find appealing.

You’re currently on a social network that’s basically just YC’s advertising board.

That's a quippy response I've heard here before, but it doesn't check out. You, without any knowledge of my personal experience, are asserting that everything I know about my experience is wrong and I am deceiving myself by thinking I know anything about myself. But in truth, this is nothing more than your attempt to deceive me, plain and simple gas-lighting.

> You’re currently on a social network that’s basically just YC’s advertising board.

If that's the sum of your proof, your thesis is a joke. I am not the customer of any YC company, nor have I ever applied for a job at one, nor have I ever or will I ever apply to YC itself. Your attempt to cold read me was pathetic.

I've been on the internet since before it was all about ads and clocks.

I've never intentionally clicked on an ad. It's either been an accidental drive by click or deception.

This is the same myths that everyone in advertising propagates.

Such a belief purports that the effect of all advertising is measurable. It clearly is not. For example, someone sees your ad and decides your company is reprehensible. They were not a customer and they decide to never interact with your company. It's not possible to measure this. Anyone claiming it is holds what amounts to a religious belief.

The "generates negative returns" is the next myth in this. Whether or not advertising generates positive returns is not relevant. You can't measure the return of advertising in the first place. Even if you could measure it, you should be comparing it to the opportunity cost of not doing something more productive with that money. Which you also can't measure. No one rationally proposes that someone spends a hundred dollars on advertising to generate $100.10 in revenue is somehow a good use of money.

pretty sure YouTube ads are directly trackable though -- if someone clicks it and funnels through to a checkout process and pays, they have a direct report of how much they spent on the ad versus how much they made directly from that ad.

YouTube in-video sponsorships are a different beast admittedly; however there is still some basic tracking through use of promo codes (Use code JOHN15 for 15% off). They can see a report of how much they spent on ads that mention JOHN15 and how many sales included that promo code -- if sales vs ad spend are significantly positive, it becomes simple math to determine how much more to spend on ads, or to discontinue them.

I suppose your point though was that it's not possible to track the negative sentiment generated by the ads (people who get annoyed and decide to avoid your company at all costs). That is true, but companies who rather go down the path of something trackable than an unknown shot in the dark.

You're spot on with "go down the path of something trackable". The next step is they assume everything they tracked represents all data for all possible outcomes. It can't.

My YouTube echo chamber directs me to pcbway. JLCPCB is clearly targeting a lower quality YouTube audience as I only watch sophisticated content creators whose stunning intellect make me feel comfortable in the products they endorse. I suggest you avoid JLCPCB on these grounds alone.

/s… at least I think :-)

The next project I build I want to try one of these services. The idea of a one-off PCB is pretty cool.

> Most people think they're above being influenced by ads, but they're not.

Exactly why they should be illegal!

Allowing people to spend money manipulating us into giving them money so they can spend more manipulating us into… is mad.

> For example, someone sees your ad and decides your company is reprehensible. They were not a customer and they decide to never interact with your company.

I can't immediately come up with a scenario in which all of the following is true:

1) The ad-viewer is repulsed by the ad

2) The ad is repulsive for reasons unrelated to your product/company's actual characteristics (otherwise they weren't a potential customer anyway)

3) This accounts for a significant portion of ad viewership (otherwise it's not relevant)

4) There is no social/media backlash (that would make the issue visible)

5) There is a significant positive ROI anyway (that's the only motive to continue that advertising campaign, which is required to sustain both negative and positive effects of the ad)

Is not the modern internet and widespread usage of ad blockers that exact scenario?

Take a person that hates being advertised at, a persona that is growing. This person meets all of your criteria. Multiply this person across the internet.

When this person sees an ad, regardless of company or content, they are repulsed because they hate ads. This person likely runs an adblocker so when an ad gets through, they are even more angry. If this person sees this product in the store, they will avoid it.

Take a common example of Coca-Cola. Their ads are everywhere. This person would instead buy the store brand cola even though it has not been advertised at them.

> Such a belief purports that the effect of all advertising is measurable. It clearly is not. For example, someone sees your ad and decides your company is reprehensible. They were not a customer and they decide to never interact with your company. It's not possible to measure this. Anyone claiming it is holds what amounts to a religious belief.

What on earth? You obviously haven't worked on anything related to sales. It's clearly measurable: An advertisement is shown one day on TV, for example, the sales the next day are higher. That's the case 99% of the time. You can say it's not, and you can call that "religious belief", if you want to.

Companies use ads because they work, obviously. Everybody thinks they are somehow "immune" to advertisements because they are "smarter than the rest", but the sale statistics are plain and simple.

> you won't automatically steer yourself towards a product that you have never heard before just because you have not seen an ad for it. having some names in your mind, even them showing up when you do research creates influence

This is 100% percent true. I thought about exactly this, and it's the first time I hear someone say it, I am glad. I try to keep away from advertisements, but it's just not really possible, you get influenced by even what your friends or family say.

> Everybody thinks they are somehow "immune" to advertisements because they are "smarter than the rest", but the sale statistics are plain and simple.

My guess is that those people are the most susceptible to their influence. Even when you know the tricks being employed to manipulate you, it doesn't always make the manipulation less effective. It's like an optical illusion where you know what you're seeing is wrong, but you still can't stop seeing it.

It's the same with people who don't care about their privacy because "no one cares about what I do" without realizing that companies wouldn't be spending massive amounts of time and money collecting, storing, and analyzing every intimate detail of our lives that they can get their hands on if it wasn't making them money hand over fist at our expense.

Ads are not about education or product awareness. Everyone already knows what Coca-Cola is, but they still spend 4 billion a year in advertising. They wouldn't be doing that if they weren't reasonably sure that it was paying off for them. As surveillance capitalism continues to creep deeper into our lives companies are getting better and better at being able to track the success of their advertising and what they've been seeing so far hasn't caused them to scale back their efforts at manipulating us. It's just making them better at it.

Advertising being so lucrative and Implicit endorsement being what it is (plus opportunity cost) means that any public person recommendation might as well be treated as advertisement, so you may only trust the advice of those you know directly

That's probably for the better, but it also means that you'll have blindsposts

Influencer marketing works so well on the younger generations that it's scary.

Just look at Prime. It's just a generic crappy sports drink and kids were literally paying 10-15€/bottle for it during the worst hype times because supplies were so short.

I hear you, but I still bought those Feastable chocolate bars...

It's as simple as "if ads didn't work, YouTube, Facebook, Google, et al wouldn't exist"

You should go and report that to whoever maintains your block list. The information on where to report ads is at the top of the file, and you can find the file itself in ublock origin's settings. Better yet, create a rule and submit it along with the issue, although people who maintain lists for long periods of time tend to be much better at it and might not find your attempt useful. I do it anyway to show some respect, they deserve it.

It's not wasted, it pays for the two out of three major web browsers we currently have, along with Go and many other things.

I prefer smaller channels (because they feel more "human" if you know what I mean), and their authors spend a lot of time engaging with the audience. Discussion is actually useful, you can learn something from YouTube comments. Yes, that YouTube.

Just step outside the highly commercialized part and you'll be surprised.

Good tip, I'll try and do that in the future.

Is there a best practice for developing rules that match randomized class names? There's a web app I use daily at work with obnoxious upselling banners that always come back if the page is refreshed and it's the only place I've run into this annoyance so far.

If ads would have actually worked as preached by the industry, ad blockers wouldn't exist. ;)

But it's Google's and Facebook's best interest to make people believe that they do, no matter the reality.

What they actually do is increase sales by some measurable margin (not always great, but not zero either), while causing all sorts of negative effects (spam, scam, misinformation, all those "influencers" and "engagement" farming causing mental fatigue) that are just waived away and/or swiped under the rug of ignorance by the industry adepts.

Scroll back ten years - even back then Google and Facebook made people believe in a literal myth that they're so Big Data they know people better than they do themselves (I kid you not, I heard this cliche way too many times), when in fact their best systems had extremely limited knowledge of both the audience (like very basic demographics that are not even always accurate) and advertised products (a few pieces of metadata at best). Heck, even modern LLMs have limited awareness so they struggle to make sensible recommendations a lot of time (and are extremely expensive for use in advertising at scale) and I'm talking about orders of magnitude simpler "targeting" systems back then.

Advertisement industry literally preaches advertisement, because their very well-being (aka market valuation) depends on it. I'm (a nobody internet weirdo) hold an opinion that it harms society more than it does it good by boosting the economy.

I suppose raises the question, is the spending of mega bucks on advertising (regardless of effectiveness) a net benefit for society?

As commenters have already raised, we'd have no Google, Facebook, Twitter (sorry 'X') or many other entities and the products they create without the money spent on advertising. Is this all just happening because people are too scared to look under the curtain and find that it's all just a sham?

We had advertising long before the internet came along, and from my personal memory most of the most aggressive advertising was for things that were either useless (magic snake oil remedies) or actually dangerous (tobacco products), not to mention all the "as seen on TV" junk that was "promoted" on morning television.

Is what we have now is more intrusive? It used to be that you could duck to the toilet during the adds on TV or flip the page in the newspaper or magazine, but now they are taking our cpu cycles, making web pages unreadable and that is not to mention the more intrusive ways of really getting in our heads.

I'd argue that we've always had (even if just the shop keeper recommending a product) and always will have advertising. There have always been products that are not needed or wanted by the majority, and advertising is the way that the producer of that product gets their product sold. I would be nice if there were not so much dodgy practice involved.

But you've heard of YC :P

much of it is measurable, and the measurable part gets acted on. that's part of why they give the sponsorship a special link or code with a discount, if people sign up with that link they track it, and probably attribute the revenue/profit from that sign up to that advertising campaign. If more profit is generated from that link than it costs the company for the sponsorship (including the cost for the time of the employees working in marketing), the company continues that advertising campaign. it doesn't measure everything though yes, but is enough to seem likely to me that online advertising campaigns do work

also i would propose that you should spend $100 on advertising (including cost of time reaching out to people etc) to generate $100.10 in profit(not revenue) if the return comes fast enough. you can estimate the opportunity cost of spending that money by seeing what interest rate somebody would loan you money for, if that .10% ROI is more than the interest rate on the money, then it's worth doing, even though it's only $0.10. then if you do need to do something else with the money you can take out that loan. I guess it might be harder to calculate opportunity cost of your employees time since it might take a while to hire more employees, but you can estimate that based on their hourly salary. also hard to calculate opportunity cost of your brand reputation from doing more advertising. and yeah hard to calculate opportunity cost of your own time but you can just estimate a hourly rate and good enough. most of the math is clear though and companies go on that. (disclaimer: i am not an expert on any of this)

If my friend/family is paid to say good things about a brand, I also wouldn't trust their praise of said brand. I mean, I've had a family member sucked into a product selling pyramid scheme, so I have experienced exactly this scenario.

That is not to say that it doesn't work. The fact that the family member got into the pyramid scheme in the first place is proof that some people are susceptible to it. But also, none of us (the family) gave in to her advertisement, so obviously that's proof that a lot of people also aren't susceptible to it.

>Ads are not about education or product awareness. Everyone already knows what Coca-Cola is, but they still spend 4 billion a year in advertising

This isn't true. Some ads really are about education and product awareness. If a new product comes to the market, how is anyone going to find out about it if there's zero advertising? Word-of-mouth can be useful at times, but that only works when someone's already bought and tried the thing, so how did they find out about it?

But yes, for many, many products and services (like Coca-Cola), everyone who hasn't been living under a rock already knows about it, so that advertising isn't strictly necessary. The point of Coca-Cola ads isn't to make you aware of it, it's to keep it in your brain, and to establish some kind of emotional connection in your brain when you hear or see Coca-Cola, to make you more likely to buy it when you have a choice. Basically, that type of advertising could accurately be called "brainwashing", or "psychological conditioning".

I think it's entire reasonable to be disgusted by the latter form of advertising, while not being completely opposed to the former. An ad that says "hey look! We just invented this handy new gadget that'll make it much easier to fix your bicycle when it breaks on a long ride! Click here to see how it works." isn't so objectionable to me, unlike most other ads.

The problem, however, is most ads are total BS, and there's really no practical way to filter out only the ones that 1) aren't brainwashing, 2) aren't for crap I don't need and would never need or want, 3) aren't for something that's really a scam, and 4) aren't plainly obnoxious and irritating, so I have to resort to using ad-blockers, which block all ads.

I really kinda miss the old Google search, where they used to put some small, text-only ads on the side, that were directly related to whatever you were searching for. Those were actually useful: search for "fix bike chain" and you might see an ad for a tool to fix bike chains, for instance. Sometimes you'd find something new and useful that way. And if you didn't, it was just some easily-ignored additional text on the side, not flashing colors, videos, pop-ups, or other attention-stealing BS.

If you're doing something possibly illegal, you're probably far safer trusting your traffic to some company in a far-away country than your own local ISP. Think about living in China, for instance: the local ISP obviously can't be trusted, but some company in Norway isn't going to care that you're posting anti-CCP stuff on social networks, and is far beyond the reach of China's law enforcement. (Of course, if VPN usage itself is illegal in your country, that could cause you problems regardless.)

If I’m sailing the high seas and my ISP gets irritated, that’s a problem. If my VPN provider does, next.

> you're not the target. advertisements work. the people managing ads are very meticulous about their spend vs. return. if you are seeing an ad of something for any noticeable duration of time, that means it works.

This sounds like reasoning from an assumption of supreme competence (e.g. "there's no bubble, because if there was all those saavy Wall Street traders would have popped it by now;" or more commonly "if Apple does a thing, that must be the best thing, because Apple only does the best things."

Advertisement does work to a degree, in aggregate, but "if you see an ad then it must be an ad that works," is going too far.

Have you actually ran any Google or Facebook ads? I have, for my target market, and I made more money in return than I spent on ads, so obviously it works, by definition of these companies existing, independent of whatever the companies say themselves.

Of course it does. Advertisements, as a general concept, have an effect of driving customers to sales (simply because it creates awareness about the product, when there was none) - I'm not arguing it doesn't.

But Google's approach is questionable. Yes, they make money, but that's not the only effect the have. They pushed this story about targeted ads, it literally became a heroic myth blown (stories of what's really some cost-shaving statistic optimizations got blown out of proportions and became preached like all this crazy Big Data hoarding is the only way to go), and that had quite severe negative effects on the whole world - so I'm not sure those revenue increases were worth it.

I think, I need to think it more through.

Why do you think so many things are not measurable?

It's very hard to poll or measure things to within a fraction of one percent with most audiences. But that's not what's needed for advertising. And in marketing you probably don't care about that - it's in the noise. You do care of "significant" changes and you can of course measure both positive and negative influence.

Even negative influence in people who aren't yet customers, or have never heard of your company, and (preferably) have never seen your ad. For example through a polling survey. Funny enough, such a poll is probably an effective ad campaign in itself in some cases! You can also measure opinion strength about advertising in general. It's more nuanced than you think. Which unfortunately leads marketing departments to commit atrocious injury to good taste. Agreed there.

> No one rationally proposes that someone spends a hundred dollars on advertising to generate $100.10 in revenue is somehow a good use of money.

Of course not, and yet they spend far more than that, to good (measured) effect.

> I (a nobody internet weirdo) hold an opinion that it harms society more than it does it good by boosting the economy.

I agree with that, but precisely because of how effective they are on manipulating people into consuming and wasting their time.