Remember when ads were simple GIF banners? - Discuss the heat death of the Internet advertising universe

[Gargamel]

Once upon a time the world wide web was usable without adblock. Ads were static images, animated GIFs, or at worst, the ones that looked like a shaking Windows dialog box warning you that you've won eleventy billion dollars.

People dumb enough to install Comet Cursor were rewarded with random Internet Explorer windows filled with ads coming out of nowhere, even when IE was closed.

Many a Bonzai Buddy user got their information sold without their knowledge or understanding.

Perhaps the worst of it were those which tried to trick you into installing malicious ActiveX controls or adware toolbars. Remember when every search site had a toolbar?

People actually clicked these ads, and installed these apps. They worked, for a time.

That isn't really all that bad, considering the advertising hellscape we have today. Many websites are rendered unusable by ads. Audio and video start playing out of nowhere. Driveby malware attacks even on supposedly safe sites like Facebook. Multi minute video ads interrupting video playback on sites like YouTube. Straight up scams being listed at the top of Google search results. Every Internet company trying to datamine you so they can serve you even more ads you don't want, and also sell your data to other companies to do who knows what. Megabytes of Javascript taking up your bandwidth and CPU time. And so many sites trying to block you, the user, from accessing them because you dared to rid your browsing experience of all this ad bullshit.

This can't go on forever. There must come a point where they've tried everything and ads simply don't fucking work anymore, or normie use of adblock is so common that nobody sees ads anymore.

 

[Road Work Ahead]

If Internet ads had stayed as simple static banner ads I probably never would have installed an ad blocker.

 

[rareblacklobster]

I'd just like to remind everyone the creator of the pop-up ad is Jewish.

 

[Eric T Duckman]

I can remember when there were services that you could sign up for and run an additional advertising window thing and as long as you interacted with it occasionally it would pay out via a check. It was like a banner ad so nothing major and brings to mind how unoffensive that was which relates to original discussion of simpler times before we needed to block multilayered auto playing elements now.

Now that I'm dusting off memories there was some type of service you could sign up for to view ads and they gave rewards out of a catalog style system and I recall getting a game system from it. It is kind of funny to think that there were some legitimate advertising systems in the early days of the internet compared to the craziness we live with now.

 

[Twinkletard]

member geocities?

 

[std::string]

I can remember when there were services that you could sign up for and run an additional advertising window thing and as long as you interacted with it occasionally it would pay out via a check.

Also free dialup ISPs like NetZero that served you ads in a window that you had to have open while using it.

 

[sweater_supremacy]

yes i also remember when ads didnt affect my chepo laptop's performance to the point i had to use adblock out of pure necessity, also youtube shouldnt have the ability to put midrolls ona creator's video without their consent.

 

[Inside your walls]

RETVRN TO TRADITION

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Advertising today is way more insidious than in the past but the 2000's were pretty fucking bad with malware and annoying gifs with full volume ads. Hopefully someone will an AI tool to basically nuke ads forever. Basically run a pipeline on every link seeing if it relates to a product ane if it is then deleting everything connected to it.

 

[Gender: Xenomorph]

Advertising today is way more insidious than in the past but the 2000's were pretty fucking bad with malware and annoying gifs with full volume ads. Hopefully someone will an AI tool to basically nuke ads forever. Basically run a pipeline on every link seeing if it relates to a product ane if it is then deleting everything connected to it.

Yea at least ads now autoplay muted and out of bounds.

 

[User names must be unique]

I'd just like to remind everyone the creator of the pop-up ad is Jewish.

Runescape was the site that drove me to learn how to block ads. Back when it ran in a webclient they always had obnoxious gif banner ads.

 

[PFM]

I can remember when there were services that you could sign up for and run an additional advertising window thing and as long as you interacted with it occasionally it would pay out via a check. It was like a banner ad so nothing major and brings to mind how unoffensive that was which relates to original discussion of simpler times before we needed to block multilayered auto playing elements now.

Now that I'm dusting off memories there was some type of service you could sign up for to view ads and they gave rewards out of a catalog style system and I recall getting a game system from it. It is kind of funny to think that there were some legitimate advertising systems in the early days of the internet compared to the craziness we live with now.

There was an ad company that displayed ads on your desktop and you'd get a check every month for viewing them. I remember installing some program that moved my mouse every couple minutes so it wouldn't time out and stop paying me. That was probably around 98-2000ish

 

[Gargamel]

I can remember when there were services that you could sign up for and run an additional advertising window thing and as long as you interacted with it occasionally it would pay out via a check. It was like a banner ad so nothing major and brings to mind how unoffensive that was which relates to original discussion of simpler times before we needed to block multilayered auto playing elements now.

Now that I'm dusting off memories there was some type of service you could sign up for to view ads and they gave rewards out of a catalog style system and I recall getting a game system from it. It is kind of funny to think that there were some legitimate advertising systems in the early days of the internet compared to the craziness we live with now.

There was an ad company that displayed ads on your desktop and you'd get a check every month for viewing them. I remember installing some program that moved my mouse every couple minutes so it wouldn't time out and stop paying me. That was probably around 98-2000ish

Those were the days where you could literally try anything and have a nonzero chance of success. Well, right up until the dot-com bust anyway.

For a time you could even get a FREE eMachines desktop with good-enough specs in exchange for allowing the adware to run. I think it was like a Celeron 400 with 64MB of memory or something.

 

[Megaton Punch]

annoying gifs with full volume ads

SAY SOMETHIN'

WHAAAAAT?

 

[Brabbit Narp]

SAY SOMETHIN'

WHAAAAAT?

You just brought back an ancient memory of those damned smilies, along with the offer of being the 1,000,000 visitor to the website and winning a free Ipad, Ipod, NDS, or some shit of that matter.

Even as a wee tyke teenager, I never clicked on those. Seemed too good to be true, and it seems my intuition was very much correct.
Still didn't stop me from doing other dumbass things that landed a hot one on my PC, but at least I managed to purge those given enough time.

In any case, have a video on the topic explaining the obvious.

Tl;dr, it seems it lasted far longer than I suspected it would have. At least it is dead after all this time.

---

Replying to the thread proper, I can't predict where it will go with the advent of AI.

If I had to make a guess, I can only say it will become more insidious, perhaps of some more innate, integral social engineering in a way that you won't know an ad is a ad, at least if you aren't savvy to such things in the first place.

Or they can do like Microsoft and embed ads directly onto your machine, with no getting away from it. It's one of the reasons why I made the jump to Linux, among other reasons.

But given enough time, methinks "they", whoever that might be in question, will force you to watch whatever their shit is anyway.

Or perhaps I am just being paranoid. There's no profit in advertising to someone who is deliberating trying to avoid your shit in the first place.

I am a tad hopeful that in the end, we'll eventually leave behind this ad ridden hellhole of an internet, but I can't think of what will replace it in the years to come.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

SAY SOMETHIN'

WHAAAAAT?

That shit burned into my memory. I remember it primarily on newgrounds, which had every week a better game than 99.999% of what the Google/Apple store has to offer.

 

[AmpleApricots]

Replying to the thread proper, I can't predict where it will go with the advent of AI.

My guess is it will be an arms race to the point where you need to have your own AI to filter the shit of hostile AIs. Using the internet "directly" as you and me do right now will be a thing of the past. (It kinda is already for me, I don't bother reading a lot of stuff directly anymore but let an LLM called Mixtral summarize it for me) If you think fake news and bots of authoritarian countries on twitter sabotaging the political discourse in the west is bad now, you ain't seen nothing yet. This will be a two way street btw., your Microsoft Defender AI will protect you from that crap but will also tell you to sleep in the pod and eat the bugs. You'll probably not be able to say some things online as your OS plain won't let you. This will be possible as more and more big tech companies try to change the thinking about software and hardware from something you own to something they let you use for a fee but ultimately belongs to them. Free Software is gonna have to save the day once again.

Of course that is all pure speculation. What isn't is that current day ads are fucking dangerous and you're not even safe on the big websites from malicious code and zero day exploits. Running random code from random servers all over the world on your computer might have security implications, who knew.

 

[Gargamel]

You just brought back an ancient memory of those damned smilies, along with the offer of being the 1,000,000 visitor to the website and winning a free Ipad, Ipod, NDS, or some shit of that matter.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=DO6taeNZE5o
Even as a wee tyke teenager, I never clicked on those. Seemed too good to be true, and it seems my intuition was very much correct.
Still didn't stop me from doing other dumbass things that landed a hot one on my PC, but at least I managed to purge those given enough time.

In any case, have a video on the topic explaining the obvious.

Tl;dr, it seems it lasted far longer than I suspected it would have. At least it is dead after all this time.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=dzYGPdSC6Ms:101

Horrifying.

Replying to the thread proper, I can't predict where it will go with the advent of AI.

If I had to make a guess, I can only say it will become more insidious, perhaps of some more innate, integral social engineering in a way that you won't know an ad is a ad, at least if you aren't savvy to such things in the first place.

We're already there with hidden sponsorships and deceptive product placement in YouTube videos.

Or they can do like Microsoft and embed ads directly onto your machine, with no getting away from it. It's one of the reasons why I made the jump to Linux, among other reasons.

One of the many reasons why I both skipped Win 10 completely and finally made the permanent jump to Linux in 2018.

But given enough time, methinks "they", whoever that might be in question, will force you to watch whatever their shit is anyway.

Or perhaps I am just being paranoid. There's no profit in advertising to someone who is deliberating trying to avoid your shit in the first place.

I am a tad hopeful that in the end, we'll eventually leave behind this ad ridden hellhole of an internet, but I can't think of what will replace it in the years to come.

The people will only take so much.

 

[dick brain]

Remember when every single human being on the face of the planet in the first and only instance of total global harmony unanimously agreed that popups shouldn't exist, and then legitimate webdevs turned around and reimplemented the exact same fucking thing with their javascript JOIN OUR MAILING LIST bullshits?

 

[Gargamel]

Remember when every single human being on the face of the planet in the first and only instance of total global harmony unanimously agreed that popups shouldn't exist, and then legitimate webdevs turned around and reimplemented the exact same fucking thing with their javascript JOIN OUR MAILING LIST bullshits?

Javascript should be illegal.

I never consented to anyone running arbitrary code on my machine.