For SMC, my ad blocker is off to help generate some revenue beyond my annual dues. It can not only be time consuming to run a website, but people and bills have to be paid.

Most of our regular television programs are recorded to allow us to zip through commercials. Sadly, some commercials are better entertainment than some of the programing they support.

Occasionally there are ads that have interest to me. Currently one running here for Lee Valley caught my eye. For some reason the LV news letter stopped coming to my mailbox, so it was restarted.

There have been a lot of ads for home delivered mattresses on TV. Our mattress was rather old and getting lumpy. My wife did the research and was thinking of a particular mattress. She asked me about it and was wondering if it was right for us. My advice was to check the reviews. Oops! The online reviews were not too good. After digging around a bit she found one with rather good reviews for which we hadn't seen any ads on TV. That was the one we bought and it has been giving us a much better night's sleep since. So those ads got us to buy, just not the brand that was being advertised.

Fake products, fake news and other forms of fakery will exist as long as there are people who do not want to be troubled with taking the time to do a little research or alternate sourcing. One thing that garners my appreciation with a news program is when they come back at a later date to clarify something they didn't report correctly. Some news outlets will be all over something for days and then just let it quietly fade off when it is exposed that they got it wrong. When people can be scammed by fake news, the advertisers know they can be convinced to buy fake products. Sadly, because of the wide audience and how advertising time is purchased, legitimate products end up in the mix to add credence to the "bottom feeders."

This reminds me of a former coworker who was showing me an object that looked like a hand plane. When told it was a piece of junk he replied, "yes, but it was cheap." Buying things that will never work is actually rather expensive in my book.

jtk