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"I find it so weird idea that people really click on ads. I don't know if I've ever done so (intentionally)."

In the very beginning - say, circa 1995 when I was building my first websites - I would click on almost every banner ad I saw.

I wanted to send a signal to advertisers, and to the market in general, that there really were people out there.

I was trying to do my part to care for, and feed, the infant industry I was taking part in.



Yup. I remember those sites that would say "please click on the ads and support us!"

There was also that one in the early 2000s that claimed to donate a cup of rice for every ad clicked, and maybe another one that planted seeds or something. I think I clicked on those a bunch for a while. Doubt they ever did any good, and I should probably have just donated the $2 I probably "earned" for those charities with my clicks.


I once used a hosting provider whose business model was to give you "credits" every time you clicked on an ad. Enough credits got you a month of hosting. So of course I wrote up a little HTML page with some javascript that had a dozen iframes to load each click into a different frame, then refresh the ads list. Host told me to knock it off a couple days later :(

He did end up hiring me for a tiny bit of website work after that, paid like $200. My first ever paid tech gig.




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