o1bigtenor via Dng <dng@???> wrote:

> Now if all that advertising was actually good for something except making rich
> people richer - - - -

Or simply paying for things that people want but don’t want to pay directly for ?
The problem isn’t the advertising pe se, it’s the lengths advertisers (and some of the sites/programs that use them) go to in order to make their ad stand out more than the other garish ones served either side of it. IFF they were plain and static so we could ignore them, and IFF the noxious cesspits that serve some fo them could be trusted not to serve up malware as well, and IFF … well then there’d be no problem. But it’s this race to make them ever more difficult to ignore, and the evidenced absence of any morals in some parts of the industry that makes then a problem.

As someone else pointed out, my magazines are full of ads, in part that’s how they are paid for - but those are static, they don’t jump out of the page and hit you in the face. Without them the magazine (or society subscription) would need to be higher and then less people would sign up. And yes, I have over the years seen ads that fit the “ah, I’ve been looking for something like that” category.

Simon