TLDR; disgusting ads make money that’s why you keep seeing them.
Have you ever wonder WHY IN THE WORLD do you keep seeing those disgusting ads on websites that just make your skin crawl? Well, I do, and I’m going to tell you all about it.
Those grid-like ads composing of disgusting, repulsive images are coined by theawe.com way back in 2015 as “chumbox ads.” What is a chum box, you ask? Here’s what they wrote:
“A Chum is decomposing fish matter that elicits a purely neurological brain stem response in its target consumer: larger fish, like sharks. It signals that they should let go, deploy their nictitating membranes, and chomp down blindly on a morsel of fragrant, life-giving sustenance. Perhaps in a frenzied manner.”
I’m not going to show you these ads because we’ve all seen it. Those “hair growth” banner ads or “small balls pressed on fingers or knees” (sorry to give you those image — nightmares). But the question is, WHY? It’s rather simple, really.
First of all, it’s business. Websites that offer these ads get paid by the network. The network collects money from these so-called “Advertisers” by impressions or clicks. These “advertisers” gets money when people visit their page from chumbox ads. It’s now a whole loop. You can’t leave. Everything is connected.
One thing that makes this business practice even more disgusting is that most of these ads are benefiting off of people with trypophobia, commonly known as the fear of holes. According to the Phobias: The Psychology of Irrational Fear, scientists hypothesized that trypophobia “has an evolutionary basis and serves to alert humans of dangerous organisms.” The phobia has also been linked to anxiety disorders in multiple researches. It is, according to the Psychological Science, affecting 16% of the world’s population, and I am unfortunately one of them. The majority of these ads prey on those affected by this aversion. It is appalling.
Still, the question remains, why would anyone click on these ads? Turns out, humans are weird. Going back to the chum box analogy, a lot of us are drawn to these disgusting ads because we can’t look away. We can’t figure our why it irks us, so we just keep looking. Remember, they also make money off of ad impressions — so by just you looking at it already counts.
Even worse — we click on the ads to find out what the heck is going on, only to find even more disgusting ads. This is intentional. Behind the scenes there are a lot of intelligence involved. These ads are automatically and constantly being optimized to serve you with more disgusting ads since it has been proven to work (impressions recorded or clicked on). The internet is a strange place, and now you’re sucked into the infinite loop of bumps and holes.
In summary, these ads are, unfortunately, working. They are making money, paying a lot, and we all know money talks. They are disgusting and immoral to the core, but just like the war we’re waging on clickbaits, it’s not going to be an easy feat.
Find out more:
Warning: the sources here include lots of examples so don’t click if you don’t want to be triggered.
- Google “Trypophobia” at your own risk
- A Complete Taxonomy of Internet Chum
- Phobias: The Psychology of Irrational Fear by Irena Milosevic Ph.D., Randi E. McCabe Ph.D.
- Trypophobia: What Do We Know So Far? A Case Report and Comprehensive Review of the Literature
