Blogads. What Blogads?

Why don't I have advertising on my blog? It's not that I have anything in principle against advertising, or anything in principle about begging readers for money. It is that I base my perception of the utility of ads on my own use of ads which is....zero.

If you give me a newspaper or a magazine and I read it from cover to cover and then you ask me to tell you the name of one product that is advertised within I could not tell you.

I do not ignore ads: that would mean that I see them and choose not to read them or act on them. The fact is, I do not even see them. The ads are not part of my "search image". My brain entirely blocks every single ad that is on the page in front of my eyes. It works the same for flyers, street posters, any printed matter. It works the same for blogads and any other online advertising. It works the same for radio ads - I do not hear them: my thoughts wander away during the commerical break and get back once music or news start again.

It works almost the same way with TV commercials, though if an ad is really creative, different, shocking, funny or ridiculous, I may notice and remember it (not that I would always remember what the product was). Who does not remember "I have fallen and cannot get up"? I still remember the TV commercial for the Black Bull (Crni Bik) laundry detergent from 35 years ago.

I do not recall ever buying anything that I first saw advertised. Word of mouth, seeing it in the store, reading something long and thoughtfull (e.g., a book review) about it is different. But advertising never made one bit of difference on my choices what to buy.

Since I am this way, I naturally assume that everyone is this way and often wonder how come advertising appears to work (or otherwise nobody would invest money into it). I guess many people are not like me. Perhaps I should put some ads here after all. I may not notice them on the sidebar, but my readers may, and my PayPal account may surprise me. What do you think?