I block all ads. Life's too short to waste on them.

There is a ton of ad fraud. Zuck denies it.

Spending might just be "because the other guy does it". I noticed on sports talk radio (where I hold the clicker constantly, or have my thumb on the mute button in the auto) that one "solve all your tax problems" firm showed up after another bought half the ad time ... the guy is nonstop, and ERC is a matter older and deader than Caesar's will. It's as if the guy spends a fortune just to listen to himself, but I don't have numbers. And the same for "sell your home today" (lowballers) and "fix your droopy wang" clinics.

About the only ad I willingly read or posted was in the days of singles flyers. I did advertise myself and won a wife. But competition was limited by space. (Who remembers paper ads?) Later, we visited a bookstore/cafe and found a newspaper with an ad for a sysadmin, which landed me a long term (for the tech industry) job. And that's it.

I really don't mind ads for new products. I'm an infovore, and that's why I frequent Hacker News. Its just that ads are deliberately out of context, discouraging fair comparison, and I often go to (hopefully) unbiased comparison sites. And I suffered through a lot of Consumer Reports mags at the library where I totally disagreed with their criteria for ranking products.

As far as tailoring ads (surveillance capitalism) goes, it seems to be either.

A. This is so damn irrelevant, but that's a feature, not a bug, or

B. This is too damn relevant. I feel like there's a camera on me 24 by 7. or

C. This is a bad joke. I search for a used camera lens and DDG tells me about a nearby (geolocated) brew pub. I don't always use a VPN.

Clicks and "quantity over quality" are in fact what destroyed the internet, IMO.

Ads were the cause.

And for someone else's well-worded opinion:

Advertising is a poison that demeans even love – and we're hooked on it, by George Monbiot (2011) [0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/24/advert...

P.S. Way before that, I read about "ad men".(from Vance Packard), I vaguely recall. Saw ads on TV for Geritol, and watched the (rigged) $64,000 question. If memory serves.