No, ads are approximately never to your benefit, and if they are, it's entirely by accident. Their entire purpose is to corrupt your preferences or misinform you to the benefit of the advertiser. If you actually wanted to buy the thing, they wouldn't need to spend money on ads (and anyone competent would measure lift over a baseline, not just raw "did people buy the thing" for campaign effectiveness).

If you're to see any ads at all, it is vastly preferable that you see random ads for things that you would never be interested in and that register as pure noise to you. Things you could be convinced to buy, or propaganda that elicits some response (positive or negative) are the worst case to encounter.

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consensus1 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe you think so, but if Youtube offered a choice between targeted ads or 5x more untargeted I bet that > 90% of people would take the former.

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baggy_trough 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Quite a delusional point of view!

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ndriscoll an hour ago | parent [-]

So delusional that targeted advertising (a massively expensive thing to build) makes more money than random advertising, and advertisers are willing to pay a premium, leading to some of the biggest companies on the planet being in the business of targeting advertising! Almost like it's effective at manipulating people into making decisions they wouldn't otherwise make.

And then entirely unsurprisingly, professional propagandists also manage to convince people that the proper reaction to being manipulated is "thank you sir, may I have another?"

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baggy_trough an hour ago | parent [-]

It's not a mystery that targeted advertising works better than random advertising and therefore commands a premium. It's an unjustified leap from that to the scary sounding 'manipulation'.

	▲	ndriscoll 44 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Taking wikipedia's definition: > In psychology, manipulation is defined as an deliberate action that aims to influence or control another person in an underhanded or subtle manner which facilitates one's personal motives. Does that not describe pretty much all advertising? It's not like advertisers are going out and researching all other deals that are out there and making sure that theirs really is the best, and then paying to put theirs in front of you because they're just so great and want to help you out. No, they're putting themselves in front of you and hoping you don't notice that they're just another white label of some Alibaba special that costs 10% more than the other Alibaba white label. Or trying to pound into your head through constant repeated messaging that you want their thing when you don't, actually (oh and ignore that it will make you fat, give you cancer, lead to your financial ruin, etc. It's fun. And cool people do it. In fact only uncool people don't). Playing happy music when it's them. Playing stern music when it's their opponents. Look, if you gamble with us, you can be a BIG WINNER! LOOK HOW HAPPY AND RICH YOU COULD BE! etc. Then to make it extra effective, they spy on you to learn everything about your life, and intentionally feed your insecurities to make you into a softer target. Some kids might end up killing themselves when they take that a bit too far, but hey, what can you do? There is no ethical low to which that segment of society will not sink.