You mean like... oh purpose!?

There was a time long ago I did that to help them with their business. I've learned a lot since then and now I don't do that anymore.

On the rare occasion, I find myself on a mobile website or an app, and I know what I want to tap, what I need to tap, so I move to tap it, and the damn ad loads slower (I swear as intended) which shifts everything on my screen causing me to inadvertently tap it.

I don't believe I've ever clicked on an ad without having been tricked into it by an overlay.

I also believe that the ad-bubble market is the biggest scam in Internet history. A whole ecosystem keeps the illusion alive that it actually does something other than exiting.

I have a slight amount of knowledge about it, having been heavily involved in watching ad campaigns' performance from the advertiser's side from time to time.

Personally I believe that there's a ton of internet advertising that does effectively nothing except take money from companies with too much of it, and subsidize internet services so they can keep providing things to users for free (which, honestly, isn't the worst thing in the world.)

My specific observations which came with a decent amount of data behind them, are:

• Google search ads, and similar ads that are being shown to people right at the instant they are looking for the thing the ad is for, people click on and sometimes buy the thing.
• Ads that are randomly shown to people, even tracking-pixel ads for people who have already visited your web site or whatever, do basically nothing in terms of directly driving conversions. They may have some positive impact on brand recognition and building legitimacy of the brand, but personally I'm a little skeptical that it's worth it.
• Pretty much the only clicks you get from randomly-displayed ads -- especially from dopamine-machine networks like Facebook -- are people accidentally clicking on them who immediately navigate back away. Like, 99% for random web site ads, and 99.9% for dopamine-machine ads.
• Genuine social media presence is free and is effective.

Accidentally so many times.

goes to press download button HELLO CONTENT LAYOUT SHIFT clicks ad

When I try to click the microscopic X to close and it flings me to the app store.

I was there in the late 90s, when hitting the wrong website (or a good one on a bad day) would spawn oodles of pop-ups and pop-unders. And any attempt to close even one of these windows would spawn 10 more. Rinse and repeat until these ads brought not only your browser to a grinding halt, but also your entire operating system, forcing a hard restart of your entire computer.

The moment an adblocking add-in was made for Phoenix (later Firefox), I installed it and never looked back.

I feel for those websites who rely on ad revenue to exist, but that well was thoroughly poisoned for me long before you (likely) ever existed. I will never permit a browser to exist on any of my systems without an ad-blocker of some kind, and I will configure all of my clients to have the same protections in place.

Accidentally? Because a lot of ads are designed to trick you into clicking on them.

I have a pihole that blocks most of them from loading, but sometimes I accidentally click on one.

The last time I intentionally clicked on an ad, when I was fired from my job and I kept seeing google ads because we used gmail for everything back then, and I knew it drove the CEO crazy that he was paying per clickthrough. So I would click on it and bounce around the website all the way to the cart, and then abandon the cart with thousands of dollars of stuff in it.

I'm pretty sure he could see my google account associated with the activity.

Can't even remember the last time I've even seen an ad lol

Banner ads, not for a long long time, at least not intentionally.

Last week I needed parts for my snowblower, and Amazon was not helpful finding what I needed, so I googled the info I had. A competitor’s ad appeared as the first result. I was skeptical as hell as I clicked on it - my experience has always been similar to yours - but they had a comprehensive, easy-to-use database of parts, with diagrams, part numbers, in-stock notes, and cost all on the same page. No hacky website, just the right information presented well. Wound up giving them the business.

I guess not everyone is a rabid, cheating, lying SOB. Just many people. Lol

I don't even see ads lol

I'd say maybe the once 90s?

The first and last time I clicked an ad was roughly 20 years ago. I was a child, playing RuneScape and orgazing a clan, and I wanted to post our clan events on a website.

An ad for one.com (a web host, called b-one back then) was shown above the RuneScape client. I thought about it and decided to click it. I landed on the website and made an account, played around a bit, and asked my mom if she'd pay for it. In that moment, not only did I become a paying customer, I became a web developer. The latter of which I still am to this day.

Being exposed to such life-altering artifacts on the daily seems like a terrible idea, so I've blocked ads ever since.

System-wide ad blocking on all devices that support it.

Every time I search a company website on Google and I don't like the company and want them loose money. If I like the company I click the normal search result.

It was when I wanted to click a link I was interested in but an ad that had delayed loading covered the link the moment I clicked.

On my devices I don't see ads because PiHole and uBlock... But this week while using someone else's device, and I saw an Ad, I tried to click the 'x' button, but accidentally clicked the ad because they make the button tiny.

Screw ads.

Does accidentally clicking a mobile ad because the x was too small count?

I rarely click on them. If I like what I see I'll manually Google the product since I don't trust the link they give me.

What’s an ad?

Oh yeah, all the time. Not for anything I need though. Just for private jets, million dollar pieces of industrial mining equipment, and centrifuges.

Ubiquitous surveillance means constant opportunities to provide wrong data.

Sometimes I hate click on ads from organizations I don't like so they have to pay a couple of cents. 😬

I don't even see ads.

I've clicked retargeting ads a few times, if they're offering me an abandoned cart coupon ("finish your order at our store and save 10%"). I've worked in ad tech in the past, and retargeting ads (ads that show products you've previously viewed or expressed an interest in) have extremely high clickthrough rates.

I saw an ad in Instagram reels around a week ago for a Chinese company that makes big LED signs like you see at the front of stores like Safeway or Best Buy or whatever. Not interested in the product, but I was intrigued because the guy in the ad was Chinese but had a Texan accent. Turns out he uses a different accent in each of his ad videos. That was amusing. I did click the ad to see the quality of the product.

I barely ever encounter ads on desktop.

On mobile I've clicked on ads for (legitimate looking) games before. Half the time it's an immediate uninstall, but once in a while I find something good

Ublock origin.

I have ads unblocked on a site that I like to support, and that serves relevant ads that are generally clean.
Generally, they're ads for equipment from manufacturers I'm actually interested in, so I will occasionally click on them.

Intentionally? Maybe 10 years ago.

True story, it was a "get a free iPad" ad, and I kid you not, I ended up getting an ipad (with some effort and a few emails). It was an ad in an app.

Never

I don’t think I’ve ever intentionally clicked an ad, with the very very infrequent exception of product results that come up in searches. It’s literally never been to buy the product, though. It’s to see if I’m interested in doing more shopping around. Ads are never for the best priced or highest quality product, but if it’s something you’ve never looked into before they can be informative, and it’s easy to access.

But since I started running a pihole years ago, I don’t even do that, because it gets blocked when I click it. Rightly so, it was a bad strategy anyway.

I don't recall ever doing so.

There was a warez site that politely asked to click their ads to support them, which I did. This was around the year 2000, adblocking nor user tracking were really a thing.

Google's and Meta's main business are ads?? I do doubt this! Their main business is hoarding data about you and everybody and selling that data to anyone willing to buy it.

I go out of my way not to do so. Whenever I search for some specific items and see "Sponsored," I'll scroll down until I get the same listing without the ad link.

Maybe about a year ago. It was an actual offer from a site I knew already and was too lazy to go and check it manually. Never making that mistake again as for months afterwards every ad I got was from this site. I now use adblock on my phone as well so I don't see anything but I bet I'd still get ads from that site if I didn't.

Probably one of the “throw the shoe at GWB” or “snipe OBL” sidebar ads in the early 00’s

It's not about clicks, it's about attribution. That is also why they all want to track you. It's not just about targeting ads. If you buy something in a webshop and the advertiser can show that you saw a (related) ad for that somewhere in the last X days/weeks then the sale is attributed to the advertiser and they get paid a fee. That is why they want to track anything and everything. The more data they collect, the higher the chance they can show attribution. No clicks required.

Last year I clicked on an ad for a video game. The process was so clunky that I was better off Googling it and taking the link to its Steam page.