@vfrmedia @enkiv2
*shrug* I use a lot of Google software & services, don't pay anything, & haven't seen an ad in ten years. For opsec reasons I chaff with phony traffic, which screws up their targeting.

@enkiv2 adblockers do work well against most Google services (at least on desktop, I don't use mobile web much due to small screens and getting older); but I was thinking about the perspective of a medium size business *buying* ads or wanting to use Google office suite with (paid) business grade support - which of course no one is going to do if this support is less than competitors *and* services keep disappearing. MS changing things is bad enough but they do at least warn you first..

@enkiv2 as for profiling, I managed to confuse Google enough with my *normal* traffic to the point they don't even trust their own data to work out what part of Northern Europe I am actually from, and deliver my search results in any combination of English, German and Dutch (the UI's switch languages randomly too!). And even funnier if I search for info on bagpipes (the music of which I genuinely enjoy) they think I am a bot 😆

@vfrmedia @enkiv2
Buying ads seems like just a generally bad idea. (As distinct from, say, eating the cost of a product or service to a few reviewers.) If there's anything that ad-tech has taught us, it's that ads don't really work & the whole industry is pretty much floating on plausible deniability & very occasional novelty-related spikes in effectiveness.

@enkiv2 I think the adtech companies pissed on their own chips about 15 years ago; I didn't even find the need to bother with adblockers back then and where ads existed they made sense - such as going to a UK/European hobby electronics website and you might see ads for Radiospares, Farnell/CPC etc alongside forum threads with honest discussions of what equipment/components from these places works well and what does not..