People themselves have turned into ads since ads themselves don't do their job.
Look at influencers.
Instagram used to be fun for someone to share their journey, now it's ad...influencer...double ad...Triple influencer...Another ad...a real person sharing their journey...55 more influencer ads mixed with 29 actual ads.
Oh and the occasional OF girl who managed to flash some puss without it getting taken down.
I love when i bought something...(i assume) google thinks it's a great idea to advertise that exact combination of products from the exact webshop on the next website i visit.
How much did tiktok ruin google's brain to make them think that is going to be effective marketing?
Even if nobody used ads, ads just don't work anymore. Kids can't even percieve them anymore, old people who click on everything are a shrinking market segment, and most people in the middle seek to learn about market offerings from influencers they've chosen to trust.
Asked how likely big companies would be to abuse their data, Americans were most wary of TikTok (59 percent), followed by: Meta (56 percent), X/Twitter (49 percent), OpenAI (48 percent), Google (44 percent), Apple (41 percent), Amazon (40 percent), Microsoft (38 percent), Comscore (32 percent), and Adobe (31 percent).
I'm surprised people trust Microsoft and Amazon more than Apple; Amazon needs all the data they can get on you to build "better" profiles on what to sell you, ties your Alexa requests to feed advertising (you can opt out) and Microsoft, especially with Edge (post advertising and services team takeover) has been trying to send everything to Microsoft to feed both ads and their AI. FFS, even Outlook warns you now that they'll share your data with >800 "partners".
Apple is no saint, far from it, but people trust a conglomerate over it?
They don't need adv, users are locked inside their platform - so they protect their users from the outside while they use them from the inside (in the end not much different from the others)
with Microsoft though its less of a problem for users because that would require you to daily use those applications. not many people that I know of personally use outlook, so they would be unavfevted ny outlook ads when compared to the other platforms, which they physically spend more time in.
I've been blocking ads since 1998, thanks to WebWasher. That acted as a local proxy that blocked all known ad urls. No heuristics, no algorithms, no nothing. Back in the good old days that was plenty.
More than half of Americans are using ad blocking software, and among advertising, programming, and security professionals that fraction is more like two-thirds to three-quarters.
More striking are the figures cited for technically savvy users who have worked at least five years in their respective fields – veteran advertisers, programmers, and cybersecurity experts.
"People who know how the internet works – because they work as developers or in security or in advertising – they've all over the years decided that it was a good idea to use a tracker blocker or content blocker or adblocker, whatever you call it," said Jean-Paul Schmetz, CEO of Ghostery, in an interview with The Register.
"It's pretty unanimous that people who work in this industry and know how these things function want to protect themselves."
Schmetz said one surprising finding had to do with the extent to which people trust various companies that collect online data.
But truly the best way to support The Register is to sign up for a free account, comment on stories, share our links, and spread the word of our honest independent IT journalism.
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The numbers were already up there, but I imagine YouTube's recent campaign only drove them higher. More people than before are now aware that adblockers exist and they love using them.
