In internet history, has anyone ever exchanged money at the request of a pop-up ad?

Factual Questions
1

OK, I understand how free websites like Google, You Tube, Facebook, etc. make money. They sell advertising. But how do the advertisers make money? After 10 plus years on the internet, I have never spent any money as a result of a gimmicky pop up ad, spam email, etc. So how do these advertisers continue to make Facebook, for example, worth multi billions of dollars? Or are most of the advertisers getting ripped off, quickly going out of business, and replaced by another hair brained scheme backed by a few advertising bucks?

I guess there are several types of ads, with different degrees of perceived (by me) effectiveness:

  1. Ads for “normal” products. This would be an ad for a jeep, a new movie, a hamburger at Carls Junior, that kind of thing. They don’t want you to click to buy something, just get you thinking about it. That might work, and these ads aren’t the subject of the OP.

  2. Ads for a well known internet product. Examples would be Orbitz, Netflicks, and Ebay. I guess these might work, but surely everybody in the country already knows about these products. They advertise on TV. Still not what I’m talking about.

  3. Gimmicky popups for shitty or fake internet products. This is what I’m talking about. Who gets a home mortgage, a lawyer, insurance, etc. from ads like this? I can’t think of a single person. And how does “Covering Hillary’s Face”, claiming my “Free XBOX 360”, or correctly “identifying Tom Cruise’s wife” translate into any real money changing hands, other than from the hands of the “company” to the outfit providing the ad? I’ve heard that a lot of this kind of stuff is just to get your email address. Fine, so you have my email address. Judging from my gmail Spam folder, lots of folks do. But who ever gives them any money? And how much?

I know I have to be wrong, as this whole “internet thing” seems to be here to stay, and I fear that the answer is most people are much, much dumber than I hope. It just seems to me the whole internet is built on advertising products that I’ve never heard of anyone actually buying.

Seriously, has any Doper ever spent a single cent as a direct or indirect result of one of the Google ads at the bottom of threads?

2

Here’s a thread from a few years back, where a guest claimed that popups were way more effective than one would guess.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=281192&highlight=popup

3

Not to long ago, a Doper paid for a spyware scam that totally messed up his machine.

I’m sure a lot of people accidentally pay for stuff like this because they don’t understand what the heck just popped up in front of them.

There’s been lots of reports of actual intelligent people falling for “Nigerian” scams. That is spam.

People who want to get illegal or shady prescription drugs and are too embarrassed to search for them might be inclined to buy their drugs from an email - because it found them, not the other way around.

As for Google ads - not all of them are crap, yaknow. I could post a thread asking where on the Internet I could buy Radio Flyer Wagons and would probably get a handful of relevant ads that might very well lead me to the wagon of my dreams. My company buys AdWords. My clients buy AdWords. None of us are trying to scam anyone.

If this stuff didn’t work and didn’t make a profit, it would not be here. But it does, so it stays.