Well, that's just not true. When I don't have an ad blocker, I click on ads just by accident once in a while, since many are so intrusive. Also, ads are often tremendously misleading, and will try their hardest to fool you into imagining that they are useful without actually being useful; that's how they make money.
Lets say for the sake of argument that people only clicked on ads by accident. Then no clicks would convert, advertisers would pull the ads, or drastically reduce payouts.
Advertisers only pay, when advertising works - eg converts to a sale/signup/etc
It really is my strong suspicion that the majority of conversions are due to misleading users, though. Let's divide ads into two categories:
- "Punch the monkey for herbal supplements." There are a lot of ads for gimmick products or products that simply don't work well at all. (Some are pure scams, and some just advertise terrible things, but we might as well lump them all together.) People still buy them, because people are credulous.
- Targeted ads for useful products. On Stack Overflow right now I see an ad for some tool that analyzes log files and spits out metrics and data. That sounds pretty useful, but the ad is not helping me make an informed decision. If I decided right now to buy that product, even if it worked for me, the ad would not have served me well. The better way to buy things is to decide what you need, make an independent survey of the products available to you, and figure out which one is best via reviews, experts, comments, specs. Successful ads encourage you to short-circuit this process and just pick something, which I don't think is a positive thing.
You seem to have ignored a key part of the parent's argument: ads often mislead people. So the fact that they make a sale doesn't show that they are 'useful' for a reasonable definition of useful.
Our worldviews seem so completely different that we're probably talking past each other.
Case in point: I don't know how to respond to someone who requests data to establish that advertising is based on manipulation. You may as well be speaking Martian to me. (My immediate response - after sputtering - is, more or less, "It's advertising. Look at some.")
Let me stress, I'm not saying this as a put-down or any kind of argument in proof of anything. I'm simply trying to express in words my jaw dropping when I read your response.
Advertising is just "information". :/ and information 'manipulates' people who consume it. But I'm not sure why you consider that a bad thing.
Probably about half the posts on HN are 'adverts'. They are posts that have a message, urging us, the readers, to consider this information and possibly act on it. That's an advert.
Your previous point "Ads often mislead people"...
News often misleads people. People often mislead other people. It's not unique to advertising by any means.
