I love each and every one of you. I did absolutely not expect the reception to my previous post.
However, in order to show you content from your favorite anime, we need to show ads.

Thank you for creating content!

The point of that particular advertisement, and in reality most of them today, is to track you. Essentially the advertiser, or more accurately, the advertising platform, keeps a record of what you're seeing on the screen when the ad is loaded. Once you start scrolling, it tracks that too.

Ultimately the aim is to create more engagement, since that's where the "value" lies for advertisers.

If you've ever turned on debug mode on your web browser and looked at sheer volume of network connections that it makes while you look at a web page, you'll get some sense of just how massive this effort is.

In my experience, it's not unusual to see 500+ different connections. News sites are particularly obnoxious.

You are correct.
But, what is the point of this advertisement?

LOOK

(at Funhole)

haha made you look!

Oh, so you can start that toilet seat cover collection. Also noticed you baught a pizza cutter and a pizza stone. Clearly you are starting a collection of those as well and need to see advertisements for pizza slicers and stones for the next three weeks.

Didja look at it?

In a word: Engagement

Advertising used to be about brand recognition and that's what many people still expect.

This advertisement wants you to either click on it and get more data from you, failing that, it wants you to not recognise it as an advertisement and ignore it, allowing it to keep track of what you're doing.

I don’t know what the point is, is this aichmophobia content?

Thank you for the ad! I really love ads because I don't know what to do with my money and my life without it!

This one is pretty cool! I'll definitely look at it for several minutes!