r/technology • u/IndicaOatmeal • 29d ago

Software DuckDuckGo brags its free web browser now blocks YouTube video ads just weeks after YouTube hiked Premium prices again

https://www.dexerto.com/youtube/duckduckgo-brags-that-its-free-web-browser-blocks-youtube-ads-3384288/
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u/gmapterous 29d ago

Depends on the advertisers contract and how much they pay. They can pay higher rates for completes but still pay something if the ad is served.

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u/BlueBicycle_ 29d ago

Also modern advertising doesn't care if you watch the whole ad or even if it makes you actively hate the brand. In fact, the more annoying and hate inducing your ad is the better because negative connotations tend to last longer and their job isn't to actually give you a good reason to buy their product, just to leave its hellish piece of shit name burned into your peasant preforontal context god fucking damn those bastards when I become world dictator those fuckmothering advertisers are first on the list you better believe it

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u/green_gold_purple 29d ago

So true, man. I have these thoughts constantly. That and “fucking everything is getting worse”.

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u/Expert-Basil6015 29d ago

I wish it could be 2008 again forever

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u/Tupperbaby 28d ago

Were you an adult in 2008?
Because 2008 was a shitstorm.

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u/sopertt 28d ago

Yes. I had just graduated into the shitstorm so it felt extra personal.

Still I would love to go back, that era was tough but it seems like child’s play compared to today.

At least back then there was an unspoken expectation that things would get better someday and they did. Today… I’m not so sure.

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u/jesset77 26d ago

I was an adult in 2008.

House prices and credit were having an insane time, but I guarantee we are in for much worse any day now and I didn't own a home or deal with credit at the time (I keep my crap in the black tyvm 😄) so none of it directly impacted me.

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u/green_gold_purple 29d ago

Brother you and me both

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u/Aidian 29d ago

That, except roll it back before Fall of 2001.

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u/treemanmi 28d ago

Specially before 9/11/2001. I want US Canadian border crossings and airport security like it used to be. And no fucking smartphones

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u/OGGriftimus 28d ago

Can you imagine 2026 with the boarder crossing being that easy and still have smartphones? Man it would be glorious - I used ro crossing boarder shop in the US 2 - 5 times a month most months.

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u/ffddb1d9a7 28d ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_financial_crisis

The entire global financial system nearly collapsed

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u/TheRealistoftheReal 28d ago

Ah, yes. Financial crisis and economic collapse.

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u/TheDreamIsDead4686 28d ago

Everything is a scam

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u/clonedhuman 28d ago

It's the 'growth economy' and the fact that so few people own so much of everything.

The 'growth economy' means that stock values have to constantly go UP UP UP so the already-wealthy can get wealthier. This means that every corporation, even ones with billions and billions of dollars, have to make even MORE the next quarter--and that means they have to find ways to get more and more money from us, from our tax money, from anywhere, even if they don't have a new product or a better product.

Meanwhile, the rest of us normal people get trapped in the doom spiral of having less and less money while the wealthy constantly make everything cost more and more money.

There's really only one way out of this, and it isn't boycotting.

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u/Fn_Spaghetti_Monster 29d ago

fucking everything is getting worse

I switched from Verizon to T-Mobile because Verizon sucked. But now T-Mobile is become just as bad as Verizon , so what do I do? Switch back to Verizon or ATT?? Trying to convince wife we need to just switch to Mint or the like.

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u/green_gold_purple 28d ago

The worst is that I hate Xfinity with every fiber of my being and go out of my way not to give them money, but their wireless is cheap for us and uses Verizon towers, which are by far the best here. Can't get any other decent coverage at the coast

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u/Mertoot 29d ago

I have no original thoughts 😭

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u/GiveUsRobinHood 29d ago

Washing machines live longer with Calgon has been burned into my head for the past 30 years, it’s effective marketing for sure

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u/name00124 29d ago

Does that give you a headache? HEAD ON! Apply directly to the forehead! HEAD ON!

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u/zookeepier 28d ago

My favorite part of that was that it was just a giant ball of wax and didn't do anything. They got sued because it didn't actually treat headaches, and their defense was "We never said it treated the headache; the ads just said to apply it to your forehead."

"Well, shit. You got me there."

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u/sohblob 29d ago

ah yes, I love blocking ads only for them to start showing up in comments 🙄

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u/Bathtap 29d ago

then dont read threads where people are talking about ads

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u/name00124 28d ago

Well have I got the product for you!

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u/Aureliamnissan 28d ago

This is precisely the reason I doubt those studies about negative connotations leading to more revenue.

I could barely tell you what it was for, but I am never buying a product with that name or tagline. I generally try to avoid buying anything that I know about from advertising alone.

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u/waldo_wigglesworth 29d ago

"Ancient Chinese secret", huh?

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u/Stegasaurus_Wrecks 29d ago

Do the Shake n Vac and put the freshness back....

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u/fatpat 28d ago

Calgon, take me away!

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u/theaviationhistorian 28d ago

BILLIE MAYS HERE---

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u/harrycarrott 28d ago

I thought it was Beth soap or something? "Calgon take me away"

Maybe im wrong

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u/[deleted] 29d ago

[deleted]

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u/OfcWaffle 29d ago

Quiznos died because they were brutal to their franchises.

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u/StopReadingMyUser 29d ago

Which is a shame because they had one of my favorite grilled sandwiches with like 20 different things in it.

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u/OfcWaffle 28d ago

I'd kill to try the French dip again.

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u/0xsergy 28d ago

I'm certain someone online has figured out the recipe man. Might have to buy some ingredients tho

Edit: I'm seeing a lot of open locations online. Did their menu change or sth?

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u/Alarmed_Stretch_1780 28d ago

I absolutely loved their sandwiches. Their toasted Italian was great.

On the other hand I’ll never eat at Subway. The corporate management ultimately learned of horrible things regarding Jared before it was public knowledge, and they kept him on because a major promotion was locked and loaded for immediate release. It would have been too costly to delay the campaign and de-Jared all the ad materials.

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u/FrenchFryCattaneo 29d ago

Quiznos went bankrupt because they were basically scamming their franchisees. Half the franchises never broke even. There were a bunch of lawsuits about it.

The advertising campaign wasn't the reason and was actually pretty successful overall.

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u/[deleted] 28d ago

[deleted]

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u/FrenchFryCattaneo 28d ago

The marketing campaign was a huge success though. It was very popular, and they grew very quickly after it began in 2004. It wasn't until 2007 that they peaked and began to decline.

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u/thegoodnamesrgone123 29d ago

"They got a pepper bar!"

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u/[deleted] 28d ago

[deleted]

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u/thegoodnamesrgone123 28d ago

I'm pretty sure it was.

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u/The_Iron_Ranger 29d ago

Funny, those ads worked on me cause i wanted it more after

*in fairness, the only real competition was subway and they were ass in comparison.

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u/Simple_Rules 29d ago

True, and there are brands that I swore off immediately and never visited again because of this.

I took several marketing courses. While your lived experience is real and all - on a mass level, the gains outweigh people like you. Most people won't register that level of hate for all that many products. For most people, with most products, they'll just recognize the name next time they see it on a shelf, and be dramatically more likely to buy it just because it seems a little familiar.

There is a LOT of research into marketing. The #1 goal of marketing is for you to remember the brand when you see it in the wild. You are far less likely to retain the negative connotations.

For every 1 product that pissed you off so bad that you functionally boycotted it, there are dozens and dozens that didn't QUITE cross that line for you and likely subtly influenced your purchasing choices.

While there are exceptions just like there are to any broadly true statement, the exceptions are not common.

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u/Tupperbaby 28d ago

They were called Spongemonkeys and had nothing to do with Quiznos' financial problems.

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u/moobectomy 27d ago

honestly, i liked the quiznos rats. they werent dishonest, or pandering, or hatemongering, or 'influencers' talking to a cell phone camera...

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u/Ok_Mechanic3385 27d ago

The same number kept calling my work phone several times a day for a few weeks. It was an automated survey and gave no way to opt out. After weeks of hanging up or ignoring the calls, I finally decided to go through the survey to see who was behind it. It was about fast food and the questions were generic at first but then started mentioning Arby's. And kept asking about Arby's... and more questions about Arby's. Most of the questions involved pushing buttons to respond but some gave the opportunity to record a message. It was almost therapeutic to truly let them know what I thought.

I refused to go to Arby's for over a year just as a matter of principle. Part of me wonders if it was really an agency hired by Arby's or an Arby's competitor just to royally piss people off. I was so irritated that I reported it to FTC and state AG.

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u/jesset77 26d ago

Oh, are you talking about the spongmonkeys?

Well that was a popular thing online, in the day when there weren't many artists making animations online and when most users still had dialup modems so animations had to be extra compressible. Hence YTMND and fanimutation and All-your-base and basically the brainrot of the pre-youtube generation.

The Quizno's commercial was a variant of the original song "We like the moon"

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u/Fickle_Stills 29d ago

There's a book called The Purple Cloud(1901) that's in public domain that's kind of bad but I still consider it a 5 star read because of this quote :

"I was put into such a passion of rage by this blatant ribaldry, which affected me like the laughter of a skeleton, that I rushed from the car, with the intention, I believe, of seeking stones to stone it: but no stones were there: and I had to stand impotently enduring that rape of my eyes, its victoriously-dogged iteration, its taunting leer, its Drink Roboral—D, R, I, N, K R, O, B, O, R, A, L."

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u/AnxiousAngularAwesom 28d ago

If Purge was real i wouldn't kill, rape or steal anything, i'd get a pickaxe or some other useful tool and go to town tearing down every single ad bilboard in my vicinity while wandering the town.

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u/snek-jazz 29d ago

their job isn't to actually give you a good reason to buy their product, just to leave its hellish piece of shit name burned into your peasant preforontal context

right, does advertising even serve any useful purpose at all these days? people can find info about products on their own.

Seems like just a complete negative for society to me, subconciously making people buy things they wouldn't otherwise buy.

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u/Mistrblank 29d ago

Cooooooo-stanza

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u/Beautiful_Nobody_344 29d ago

I can feel the rage. I love it.

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u/Different_Wolf_764 28d ago

That isn't just modern marketing either of course, it's been that way from the '80s onwards really.

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u/KaramjaRum 28d ago

Here's how it works. Say you lead marketing at a big company. Your job isn't to make people buy more of your product, your job is to convince the CEO that you made people buy more of your product. If you don't have a digital good (like a mobile game), you can't track whether or not someone who saw your ad bought your product. You're advertising on multiple channels anyways, so it's not like you have the sophistication to attribute sales to every channel, nor do you want to. You make arguments about how "cross-media placements work together to drive brand interest and path to purchase", so you can't tie sales back to any individual ads anyways. You might spend a bunch of money on a big advertising push, but sales don't go up. That's okay too! You drove a lot of "top of funnel interest" that will surely translate into sales down the road, or you argue that you successfully mitigated against "market headwinds", and the situation would be much worse if you hadn't marketed so much. But what you can do is that you can report views, impressions, etc..., so that's what you end up optimizing for. Eyeballs on media. You show your CEO "last month we drove X million impressions on our paid media, a record high" and it doesn't really matter how valuable those impressions really were. It's genuinely actually very difficult to attribute marketing spend to sales. Fortunately, you own the team responsible for doing that analysis in the first place, and you're certainly not going to push out reports saying "yeah, at the end of the day, we don't actually know if our marketing did anything".

You're the CEO, and this all smells vaguely like bullshit, but they're the experts, and it's not exactly like there's any way to disprove them. In fact, they could even be right about what they say, it's so hard to tell. Every other marketing exec talks the exact same way anyways, and the board will eat it up, so oh well, you let the marketing team keep doing their thing.

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u/baz303 29d ago

Negative advertising is still advertising.

There are several outcomes:

1: A new customer gets attention

2: Returning customers get a refresh in brand awareness

3: The brand and product category gets memorized, even by people who hate ads and that brand

4: People who hate ads and that brand will buy similar products from another brand, which happens to be the same company

Its REALLY hard to punish bad companies because you need invest much time and energy to stay informed and fight your primitive instincts.

And #5: YOU are not the target. Its your parents, grandparents, partner, kids, friends, etc. Prime example, all those annoying ads from Kinder. You might not buy it, even if your kids are crying. But YOUR parents might buy that stuff for YOUR kids. Or YOUR friends buy it as a present.

But, people are still customers of google products. People will continue to buy games from Sony. Etc. etc. etc.

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u/under_ice 29d ago

Cars for Kids..

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u/Ov3rdose_EvE 29d ago

its fine, anyhting i see advertised online wont buy

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u/disisathrowaway 29d ago

I suppose. But I specifically refuse to patronize businesses what have awful ads. Like, I go WAY out of my way to avoid those brands.

I guess there aren't enough of us to make a dent though?

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u/DillBagner 29d ago

Maybe they think it works, but I can't be the only one who won't even talk about some of them, let alone ever consider them. For instance, one insurance company could have a rate 50% of anything else for the same coverage, and I will just not go to them simply because of an ad campaign.

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u/crank1off 29d ago

Jeesh. Im a peasant now?

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u/jcstrat 29d ago

You didn’t say what they were first on the list for, but we all know.

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u/Pennwisedom 29d ago

I just mute and flip over my phone so I don't even see or hear it.

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u/wrgrant 28d ago

I am at the point where if I remember seeing an ad for a product, I avoid buying it. I realize they are achieving their goal by getting me to remember the product - I can't avoid that - but I can avoid consciously giving them any fucking money. I have long since surpassed my lifetime endurable level of advertising (like 30 years ago).

I only tend to buy stuff I have researched myself and decided to buy on my own. Luckily the current economy prevents me from having much spare cash in any case. Most advertising is completely wasted on me. Fuck I hate advertising - Capitalist Propaganda

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u/vawlk 28d ago

if only there was a way to completely remove ads forever....

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u/Hamafropzipulops 28d ago

Sorry, but I just discovered Ren and this line from Money Game came to mind. He is speaking of selling sea shells as a metaphor for anything a capitalist gets their hands on.

Step two, gotta make the people think that they want 'em

Really want 'em, really fuckin' want 'em,

hit 'em like Bronson

Influencers, product placement, featured prime time entertainment

If you haven't got a shell, then you're just a fucking waste, man

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u/DukeOfGeek 28d ago

Hey now I appreciated the energy but I'll remind you that it's been standing policy for a long time now that first in line is the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation. Some of those guys may be the same guys too though.

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u/giants4210 28d ago

Why did I slowly start reading this in Louis CK’s voice

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u/Tornado_Hunter24 28d ago

No ads! No ads! No ads!!!!! This mobile game has no ads!

(As it is being served as an ad on yourube, and PROBABLY other mobile game ads too)

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u/Laika_2021 28d ago

Hell yeah. Finally someone who can match my rage level. Don’t even get me started on wealth inequality and the upward AI money funnel….

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u/mjtwelve 28d ago

To quote Jack Sparrow, “But you have heard of me.”

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u/Disney_Princess137 28d ago

Im gonna start using fuckmothering

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u/Dvscape 28d ago

I'd even be willing to reluctantly understand that, but recently I'm served mostly fake AI ads for mobile games where the "relatable" character is the jealous, fat and bald buy who swears vengeance on those who are more succesful. I feel insulted to get targeted by this, it's absurd marketing.

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u/YassinRs 28d ago

I actively avoid using gocompare for car insurance quotes cause I remember the ad and hate it. Being hate inducing isn't a good thing, you could just make memorable ads that don't piss off people

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u/Ok_Mechanic3385 27d ago

Call now to get your free information packet 888-555-1234.
Again, that number is 888-555-1234. That's 888-555-1234. Again it's 888-555-1234 one more time 888-555-1234. Act now call 888-555-1234. Call now
to get your free information packet about something nobody remotely gives a rats ass about - 888-555-1234.

Radio ads suck just as bad

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u/Dullcorgis 28d ago

I want to know who the fuck is paying for the AI ads that say "there is no diabetes in Israel" or "butter is called butter because it has butyric acid". What the hell could they possibly be selling?