Why Commercial Ads are Annoying and Useful in Today's World

What Is Commercial Ads?

Commercial ads are a kind of promotion to publically tell about the goods and services by a company/franchise (from lawinsider). Nowadays, when people tend to spend their time on their gadgets and smartphones, companies who provide and develop ads adapt their system so that they can insert their ads in different platforms, social media, etc. There are different types of ads in today's world; video, pop up, messenger, stories, canvas ads. 

  People use their phone to interact, socialize, and communicate to other people. Smartphones have a platform called social media. Social media is a website, application that allows its user to create, share contents. The biggest social media apps in today's world, like YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, have been invaded by commercial ads (Google). In Instagram, there are ads in stories. In YouTube, they're applying 3 (THREE) ads before a video. And on Twitter they're throwing inappropriate ads in people's feeds. Things are getting out of hand.

  Commercial ads, in fact, have several positive benefits on its existence in social media. But the negatives are way more than the positives, that the positives reside by the negatives. According to the data from Isaac Hopkins, one of the authors of GWI blog, ads can be very distractive to their present (GWI BLOG : what people think about ads).

 So there is this question, have you ever got annoyed by ads in social media? Of course you are. Imagine when you are watching YouTube and suddenly an ad pops out of nowhere without your attention, that is so annoying right? And imagine that if (disclaimer this is just if, I'm not hoping any of these scenarios would happen in the future) your grandma is suffocating and you don't know how to do CPR, so you open YouTube and search for CPR videos, but suddenly, an ad pops out, that is a definition of crazy and dumb death. So, There are three reasons why commercial ads are annoying and unuseful: it wastes our time, it leads to scam/fraud, and it can corrupt and hurt a media/platform.

The reasons why commercial ads are annoying

  First, commercial ads constantly consume and waste our time. As I said before, there are different types of ads in social media, and the most time consuming is unskippable ads. Unskippable ads are types of ads that make the viewers unable to skip and go through the ad. With the system of unskippable ads, viewers are being harmly forced to watch the ads. You are lucky if the unskippable ad is a picture based ad, but you'll be damned if it's a video. Enough with the unskippable ads, now let's go on to the longevity of video ads. In social media, especially YouTube, There are video ads 30 seconds long, 50 seconds long, even 1 minute long. In addition, there are systems that put ads on top of each other, so when you're done with one, you'll get another one. Watch one ad, and watch others for free. False information is also one of the factors. Usually, long unskippable ads consist of false information. Fake news, or information disorder, makes the truth hard to find, and can also be one of the leading sources of danger to personal security (People's banknet).

   Secondly, commercial ads lead to scam and fraud. When it comes to the league of scams, ads are one of the best providers. A good ad is the one that spills out a great trustful useful piece of information, but usually, ads in social media in particular, spreads misinformation and scams. According to Statista, the approximate number of digital ad scams worldwide was 35 billion in 2018. There are many different implementations of ad frauds that you should know. First, domain spoofing, domain spoofing is when a publisher says in actual time bidding ad requests that an ad would run in a certain domain. But the ad runs in different domains. Second, clickbait ads. Clickbait ads that purposefully attract users to click certain content, but the content inside the ad, once it is clicked, is not the same as in the ad itself. Third, cookies. Cookies are often used by advertisers via their affiliate marketing program as a tracking tool. Cookie stuffing occurs when the scammer inserts multiple tracking cookies to a reader of a website simultaneously on the chance that the viewer then proceeds to move on to a site with an affiliate program in the future. So how do we handle the scamming ads? There are many ways actually, here are some of them. Ad blocker/ad shield is one of the most prolific solutions to handle ads, you can buy or maybe download ad blockers. Ad blocker can be implemented in YouTube, Instagram, etc. Another step is to use software programs to block scam. Scam-preventing software can detect potentially spiteful or suspicious activity while sabotaging bad traffic sources automatically.

  Lastly, ads can corrupt and hurt a platform/media. As it has been said before, social media is invaded with ads. Those platforms have different systems to show and expose their ads. Like Instagram, they show ads in stories and reels. In YouTube, they add the ads in videos and community tabs. And in twitter the ads are being shown in feeds. These ads are a great addition to those applications when it's being shown safer and fewer times. But nowadays, those social media applications are showing inappropriate ads, like in twitter they are throwing condom ads in the feeds, in YouTube they are showing inappropriate 18+ games in communities. Imagine your children are watching baby shark and scrolling down the community and then they find those ads. It's concerning really. Furthermore, ads in applications can hurt and lower the rating of the apps. Usually the users are fed up by the number of ads showing in those applications.

  In summary, ads have many uses, especially for media and applications in today's technology world. But, those ads have developed into something that is more annoying and unuseful.