I’ve noticed that ads are absolutely everywhere, and wanted to post this to disillusion some of the places we see ads but don’t realize. It would be harder to make a list of places you don’t see ads.
Websites
The most common place to see ads is on nearly every website you visit. It’s usually the most intrusive, especially with popups.
Books
The very end page of books and back cover of books will often advertise books written by the same author.
Billboards
Billboards along busy streets and highways often display static or moving ads. A notable mention is its role in the book Fahrenheit 451, where it was theorized that as cars get faster ads would have to be stretched out so people can see them better at high speeds.
Operating systems
Some Android operating systems, as well as Windows, show ads in a non intrusive way.
Apps
Especially mobile games, ads will be displayed anywhere possible, and sometimes used as a reward system. Social media apps display ads while scrolling, and even messaging apps will have some sort of promotion like requesting donations.
Deemed “junk mail”, companies will collect and sell the address of residents in order to send useless advertisements to the residents. This can’t usually be opted out of. In my opinion, this should be illegal.
Phone calls
Especially when put on hold, businesses will interject occasional advertisements in between the low quality jazz music. Customer support will also often advertise products to you while you are being assisted.
Newspapers
Newspapers have entire pages filled with ads. Some of these are promotional coupons that can be used to get overpriced products for a regular price.
Magazines
Magazines are fundamentally only used to advertise products in a passive way. The chances you actually have a meaningful experience with a magazine are slim. They are often placed in waiting rooms as a form of entertainment for people who don’t want to use a phone at the time.
Music
Between songs in radio broadcasts, long ad breaks will be placed. Music streaming services will also inject ads between songs. Even the hosts of podcasts will have sponsorship segments.
Disk movies
DVD and Blueray disks will often come with ads baked in to advertise “upcoming” movies. That is, until 10 years passes and Peter Pan becomes a funny ad to see.
Movie theaters
Between movie showings, movie theaters will display long ad segments while you wait for the movie to begin. Some very long movies are even split in half, with an ad break in between for you to empty your wallet and refill your popcorn.
Bleachers
In sporting events, moving ads will be displayed under bleachers. Fun fact, these ads change depending on which channel you are watching the game from.
Commercials
Between live television, you will get 1-3 minutes of commercials and then watch the shortest segment of your actual show.
Baked into videos
Videos such as YouTube videos will have sponsorships and self-promotion baked in, causing the drastic rise of SponsorBlock.
Torrents
Some torrented files will also have text or image files attached advertising other torrenting services.
Vehicles
Buses, vans, cars, and others are often plastered with ads for different services. If you’re in a car wreck, call emergency services first, not an auto repair shop.
Social media
Social media is one of the go-to methods of marketing. Besides the ads you see while doom scrolling, many pictures and videos uploaded will simply be ads for products.
Gas stations
Plastered all over gas stations, and apparently displayed on some gas pump screens, ads are placed everywhere. Is that not more of a fire hazard than eight closely packed gasoline tanks?
Posters
Pasted inside schools, workplaces, plastered on power poles and sides of buildings, posters are cheap to make and placed everywhere.
Instruction manuals
When buying a product, besides impossibly small print, some instruction manuals will have ads pasted in certain sections. Some devices like mice, keyboards, and headphones advertise proprietary software required to get the full extent of your product.
Wearables
T-Shirts, pins, bracelets, hats, and all other kinds of merch will display company names for everyone to see. Ironically, companies see these kinds of clothing as inappropriate attire on the job.
Pens
Another kind of merch, nearly every free pen has the name and contact info of businesses on it.
Redirects to downloads
Some websites will redirect you to ad websites before beginning your download. Lots of these websites (such as the infamous AdFly) are malicious and will encourage you to download malicious software.
Grocery stores
Solicitors in store, ads during checkout, product placement all throughout the store, ads over the intercom, nearly every type of ad imaginable can be found in grocery stores.
Speakers on public transport
Some subways and buses will play ads over the speakers while you travel. No napping on the bus, we want you awake to hear our ads!
Emails
Spam emails are frequently sent to people, so commonly an entire folder is dedicated to housing them. Even places you legitimately gave your email to will send you spam.
Comments and chat messages
People will often self promote their accounts on various platforms. This is a common place for scams to arise.
Solicitors
Solicitors will come on your private property just to sell their products to you. Just when you thought ads could never come knocking on your doorstep, they did.
Lawns
Lawn signs for services such as lawn care or political messages will be placed on people’s property as a form of willing advertisement. Flowers look a lot better than rust and plastic.
Airplanes
Some airplanes will pull long banners with ads behind them. This is usually surrounding sporting events.
Brand names
Products produced by any company will have brand names on them. This makes it easy for advertising to flow through word-of-mouth. But seriously, where did you get that shirt from?
Search engines
Almost all search engines will display ad websites before legitimate search results
This post
Even this post had an advertisement in it that I bet most of you missed. I passively advertised “SponsorBlock” under “Baked into videos”. If you missed it, that’s ok. Advertising has become so common that people have become desensitized to it.
But you didn’t advertise Sponserblock? By that logic when an Amber Alert mentions a “black Honda civic” it would be an ad for Honda.
If you consider raising awareness about a brand name to be an advertisement, then it does. I do see your point, though.
I think you should differentiate between paid promotions or recommending a free service
When I was maybe five years old, I was with my parents at the grocery store, and there was an advertisement for Reba (a TV show starring Reba McEntire) on those little plastic sticks that you place on the conveyor belt to separate your items from the other person’s items.
I have absolutely no idea why I have remembered this fact for so long, or even why it stuck out to me as a five year old. But there was an INCH of space available, and someone had the business idea to slap an advertisement on it.
I remember those too haha, some were intentionally made to be a lot larger so you could put multiple ads on them
Shopping carts too. It’s insidious.
I strongly believe nuisance advertising should be fought separately from privacy concerns. Both are valid concerns but need a different approach. Advertising based on website visits that collect user data is privacy intrusive, but an ad baked into a YouTube video is probably not (regardless of whether it’s annoying or not).
I would argue that advertising is not just a privacy concern or a nuisance, it often also influences people to make decisions that are highly damaging to their health, the environment, democracy in their country,…
I agree with your point, but I also agree with the parent post as well. Advertising and tracking can be considered separate issues while also both being bad. I’d also say tracking is almost always bad, whereas there are advertisements that I think are perfectly fine.
People have been talking about how manipulative advertising can be long before targeting individuals was possible. (Like Joe Camel.)
But I also think that there is a whole new level of maliciousness to these highly-targeted ad services that can show you specific content based on a personality profile, formed about you by aggregating data across many different areas of your life. It’s related to advertising in general, but takes it to such an invasive extreme that it’s worth singling out on its own.
Yes. Advertising can be done in a way that it isn’t at all a violation if your privacy.
My fave is the giant unskippable ad for s1 stargate atlantis on DVD on the fucking season one stargate atlantis boxed set
Well, you know, just in case you haven’t heard of it
Absolutely everywhere sadly.
This comment is sponsored by displate.
I just found an ad in a fortune cookie with my take-out last week.
Fun fact: in India the barriers that police put up in the city (like a steel barrier to prevent people from going in an area with a politician or an uncovered manhole) have ads on them. Usually for banks.
This means the companies openly pay the police. To me, when I see those ads, my thoughts are: oh thats the evil company that owns the police and is responsible for their repression.
The progress bar screen during an AMD driver update. Cycles between ads for video games, ads for CPUs, and a “how are we doing” survey.
Advertising actively pisses me off. I went from IT is cool, to I need a break from these ads/techology on the weekend and I go hiking. I throw my phone in airplane mode and go. It’s liberating. I’m expecting ads here too.
Sad to see ads in so many places. I hate it. If an add is shown too much or its too invasive I’ll never get that product out of spite
Not just spite. How do I know if my purchase decision is my own, or has been influenced by ads?
Nowhere explicitly at least
I don’t consume much content, and when I see or hear an ad I get very frustrated and angry
No advertising on Craigslist, Government websites, Brennan Translations (https://brennantranslation.wordpress.com/).
It’s important to differentiate advertising from sharing information, generally. SponsorBlock is not a corporate product, so mentioning it is not an ad. If the idea is not to share information, then the entire internet should be avoided, but advertisements specifically are aimed at some party making money.
I do actively try and avoid ads wherever possible, mostly through the use of open-source approaches. I don’t have them on my phone because of heavy modification (except technically robocalls). I don’t have any on my desktop rigs because of a complete reliance on Linux. I get some on my work machine, which is a Mac, but I went with that because IT gave me two choices and Linux wasn’t one of them. I know I’d have more had I gone Windows.
I don’t watch traditional television, but there aren’t many ways to consume corporate content without also consuming ads. I think that is a thread that ties a lot of this together. Basically, if you want to consume corporate content, you have to concede to watching advertising in some capacity, and that is by design.
I would argue that we should be able to avoid it in life generally (e.g. billboards and such, which are a constant annoyance), but aside from that, I always see ads as a tradeoff that I have no option to avoid if I want to consume certain content.
Edit:
Basically, if you want to consume corporate content, you have to concede to watching advertising in some capacity
*if you want to consume corporate content legally
I get zero ads on my windows boxes. It’s not hard to do.
Windows 11?
I’ve seen them in the start menu, and in the bloat installed without consent, and in the emails to the mandatory Microsoft account.
Edit: not sure why the downvote, unless you have some evidence that MS doesn’t push ads via those channels.
They literally didn’t even design what the start menu looks like without the bloat. It’s still a giant blob, just empty.
Yeah. It seems obvious when looked at from a design standpoint. They have shifted the product into a different space.
That’s why starting with 10 and that massive push (I assume it still works) you could plug in literally any windows key and they’d go “Yea sure you have 10 now thnx”
I’m pretty sure I used an xp code for one of my rigs.
Lots of those are ads, but some are branding which is a requirement for legal purposes.
Apple is going to mark their products Apple, Dell is going to mark their products Dell, but if Apple marks their products Dell, fireworks happen.
Technically you aren’t required to mark your products at all for legal purpose, certainly not in a highly visible way unlike e.g. the small print that describes voltages and similar stuff on a usually hidden bit on the bottom of the product.
Pitcher’s mounds. When you watch a baseball game on TV, they often super-impose an ad on the damned dirt. Also graphics at the bottom of the screen will often have an ad box.
Every available inch of visible space must be covered in an ad. It makes me resent those brands.
In particular, I stew over insurance companies spending millions on celebrities in commercials and prime time slots. That’s money that could have gone to pay claims that were denied, or lowered their ridiculous premiums.
And I’ll never understand people who purchase expensive t-shirts or caps with some corporate brand’s logo splashed across it. They are paying more to be a human billboard. Are we supposed to be impressed with their taste in something millions of others have bought?
Basketball courts too, newly added in the last couple years. There’s one sponsor logo physically printed on the court, and one that’s digitally added for the TV broadcast (tailored to your location, of course).
I was watching a game a few weeks ago and the superimposed logo kept screwing up. It was moving with the camera instead of being fixed on the ground, and sometimes it wouldn’t be cropped around the players, it would just go on top of them. It was kind of amusing. They removed it after a few minutes.
