I don't.
I usually block any account that turns up on my feed unsolicited. If the company is relevant in some way to me, I would just silence them.
I find that they show me zero relevant ads at the end of the day. That's probably because I don't like ads and even a tweet about a product I would like just seems unappealing with the promoted tag there.
Kinda the same with Youtube ads. If you want me to consider your product, interrupting my life, repeatedly, with the same annoying content is not a great way of achieving it.
I know this strategy focuses on brand recognition instead of selling that particular product but still I can't believe it is worth it.
I'm no marketer and I'm probably missing some points here, but I wanted to share this thought and hear what you have to say about it. So, please answer the poll and comment!
I don't... click on any ads, popups, newsletter subscriptions etc.,
I wish your poll had a negative number. They're so annoying that every business has them and makes internet a very bad experience. The more I turn these ads/popups/anything down the more they scream. They add flashes, clutter full websites with "subscribe me", "share me", colourful GIFs... I understand this is where their revenue comes in but it should at least be less distracting and ideally shouldn't send the audience away.
To the revenue part is where my article was heading... thanks for bringing it to attention!
My reasoning is...
Of course, brands that focus on delighting customers and brands that reduce their weekly ad impressions to less than 5 exist, but they're just becoming less in number.
I love this... :/ As a builder of a business without marketing/advertising there are limited opportunities to get your product out there. Take this poll for instance. People will undoubtedly say they HATE advertising. I get it, I am not fond of advertisements either, but how else is a company supposed to get the message out? As a builder of business, I did the things that don't scale, going into groups finding users speaking to them individually. I play the part of finding the right moment to mention the value my product brings. But, I am always on the razor's edge of being accused of spamming, I can be one bad comment away from being accused of self promotion and spam. I can do SEO, that's fine, that costs money and comes into a situation where I turn my advertisement into a carefully worded blog post. There is always organic growth of course, but it's not easy to get the word out to 1000 people without ads. I realize I am complaining, and I don't mean to seem sour. I understand the tropes, build a great product and you wont need to advertise... I get it, that is true as well, but that's not really a strategy for scale and profitability. It just seems that advertisements although distasteful and annoying are actually the only way an indie hacker or bootstrapping entrepreneur can attempt to compete. How are bootstrapping entrepreneurs supposed to reach scale without ads (twitter, facebook, insta, snapchat, snapmob, pinterest, google ads, etc.?
In order to clarify a bit: I wasn't trying to judge people paying for advertising.
It's just that FOR ME this kind of advertising works against the product being advertised and I wanted to know of this is the case for anyone else. I think this poll states very clearly that advertising a product to some (very particular) groups of people could be counterproductive.
To clarify even further, I personally don't even think advertising is wrong or not effective. I listed in the initial post specific advertising strategies that are not even decided by the advertiser but by the platform that I find very annoying.
Hope this makes sense. Thank you for your reply, Manuel.
It was not you at all. That was mr on a soapbox. I understand what your are trying to do and am definitely interested.
Just block them.
I downvote Reddit ads too.
You might find this this video from Ahrefs interesting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cR_2jCJLfCQ
Summary: They got way more clicks on Twitter ads when promoting through the CMO's account (as a person) as opposed to the brand.
I think developers are just really "ad adverse" but it probably depends who your users actually are. If they're developers, they may hate ads. But if they're in another segment (like marketers), they will either understand that ads are "normal" these days.
In fact, I read a study where ads on a website INCREASED opt-in rate for a mailing list. The hypothesis is that users are so used to ads, they see it as marking a website as "legit".
A few thoughts! :)
Yeah I was aware that a poll on IH would be very biased from the begining, but its interesting anyhow!
I agree developers tend to be more "ad adverse" than other segments of users.
A link to that study would be great because I think that's a very interesting point. That reflects how important it is to know very well your audience.
It was a YouTube video but here you go :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Vxl_If9hOU
IIRC the results are just from one site, but it does kind of fly in the face of the idea that "ads are distracting" and detract from a person clicking a CTA.