I think as a child I got viruses from one of the ads, you know, the ones would put on the side of the site. We had to call in a guy, to clean parents’ computer. I felt really guilty and never touched those ads again.

So Google’s and Meta’s main business are ads. And recently I felt confused. Do people click on ads? Don’t these ads feel phishy to them?

  • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
    16·
    9 months ago

    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.

    • lhamil64@programming.dev
      2·
      9 months ago

      I’m confused by this. Your company had to pay when employees clicked ads in Gmail? I assume this the enterprise version? But then that implies that Google puts ads in the enterprise Gmail which sounds both unsurprising and crazy to me.