General Forum

Maybe i have not been paying attention or maybe because i still have ads on my TCDB webpage (i need to get around to paying for an ad free membership), but i saw a Topps ad pop up on the webpage.  Have they finally discovered our bastion of greatness? Have they been reading the forums about the definition of monopoly with regards to MLB licensing?  Is it Big Brother watchin?

my guess based on the adds i see are based off your browsing history.  

I would dispute that, based on the ads I see, to an extent. 

might want to have a conversation with the mrs. about safe browsing habits

Some ads here ARE based on your search history. But others are seemingly random, but not really. They all come from Google Ad Services. I was seeing nothing but ads for cars until about a week ago. But I was doing lots of searches on local car dealers sites. Now that I've had my new car for over a month, I don't see car ads on any sites I visit (where I don't use my ad-blocker).

Isn't it a bit creepy though? Search for something on the internet and get innundated with ads?

Creepy... No. Invasive... probably. Since most people use the same few browsers to search the internet (mostly made by Google and Microsoft or whatever MacIntosh/Apple are doing), all searches are going to come back to those companies. Then their ads campaigns kick into every site you visit. There are steps you can take to eliminate the majority of them but some of those cost money or require extra technical skills. For free sites like this one, I let the ads do their thing to help pay the bills for the site I'm using. For paid sites, I use Ad-Blocker Pro and let it block all that crap from showing up on my screen.

I use Mozilla Firefox as my browser and bing.com as my homepage. I don't get any ads when I open my browser. But if I click any "trending" links from the homepage, I get ads AND the links for that story are not the most popular links. The links to any story are usually the same dozen sites or so and they all want my money too. None of them get any of it.

Learn to treat the internet sites the same way you treat the TV. "I don't give a damn about that commercial or the product, so I refuse to buy it". If you don't care about the product or service they want to sell to you, don't care to see the movie or TV show they are promoting, don't care to visit the location that's being promoted... skip it! You don't have to watch the commercial or read the advertisement. Advertising is how everything makes money now. Most sports wouldn't survive without it now and TV certainly wouldn't. Most internet sites wouldn't exist if there was no advertisements either. What brought on the massive influx of ads are multi-level. Radio and TV were the real start of getting ads without actually buying anything. Fast-forward a bunch to TiVo and then DVR's where you can skip the commercials. The ONLY times I don't skip commercial breaks in sports events now is when I'm actually watching it live. Advertising is still everywhere around you at all times though! Every sports stadium is an advertisement for whatever company put their name on the building or event now. It's not going to stop any time soon. Ads run the world and they'll continue to do so for a long time now.

Just pay the MAN, be ad-free! 

Why do we have so many "cheapo's" here? LOL !

Big Brother is watching? A lot of my facebook ads are car related. No surprise there. Occasionally an ad from Panini or Topps, but I'm not sure if they are paid ads or just regular stuff because I follow both of them. 

I used to get a lot of "find a girl on facebook ads", for years. When I didn't click on them, they tried sending me "find a guy on facebook" and I didn't click on them either. Then they gave up and I have not seen any sort of ads like that in about 3 years now.