So logging in just now, I’m pretty sure the advert was a scam…
It was trying to get the viewer to register for a website and “follow the instructions exactly” claimed you could make £59,000 in three days, withdrawable from your bank account.
Website was “idouku…com” or something very similar (no I’m not googling it.)
What an utter scam and trying to get people to hand over their bank details???
Oh absolutely. Scams are all over the place, online and over the phone. It’s a whole bunch of fishing hooks looking to catch your personal info, your banking info, your money, all types of things that can be exchanged or sold.
There’s a really good documentary about it, profiling the people behind these scams and the way it works:
This one is in the actual advertisements on this app tho
Advertising in online platforms - including Discourse (the platform used for Talking Sober) - is usually done by third parties (for example, in Discourse, the ads that are shown are those from Google Adsense, Google Ad Manager, Amazon Affiliates, Carbon Ads, and AdButler: Advertising | Discourse - Civilized Discussion)
Those third parties (Google / “Alphabet” ads, Facebook ads, Amazon ads, etc) make huge, huge, huge amounts of money from advertising. It is where the vast majority of their earnings come from. Their search and results algorithms are designed to publish ads that work for the majority of the audience that’s viewing that site / that platform on the internet. (It’s all automated.)
Moderating ads - paying people to review ads before they get published - costs these companies money, and generates them no income at all. As a result, the ad moderation teams at Facebook, for example, are under-staffed and under-funded: it’s simply not possible for them to catch all the problematic ads. It’s barely possible for them to catch a small fraction of the problematic ads (and remember, “problematic” is a matter of perspective: if your single mission is to make dollars, the answer is simple of what types of ads to show) - and since ad publication is automated, the ads, for the most part, get displayed.
More detail on this here:
Amazingly - unsurprisingly - the code / the algorithms that track users and behaviour on online platforms are very accurate in determining what types of things people are actually clicking. (This is explained in the article above.) While it may seem distasteful and borderline illegal, the simple fact is if these types of ads didn’t generate revenue for this type of audience, they wouldn’t be shown.
It is a cold hard reality, the dirty underbelly of the exploitative, objectifying world we live in today. Our materialistic culture leads inevitably to these types of ads, this type of behaviour: prizing money above all else (including decency and common sense).
Unfortunately there isn’t much that can be done about it, because a good scam ad is deceptive: it appears legitimate, it’s got words that sound sort of legit; you don’t really notice it unless you’ve been prepared to notice it. Scam ads are designed to sound legit enough to get past automated ad screening programs, and because scams (including conspiracies and other deceptive and manipulative huckster messages) are a multi-billion dollar industry, and these companies need to make multi-billion dollar revenues, there’s no incentive for them to do anything significant to tackle them.
To change the ads, we need to change the audience. The more we work our sobriety, the more the audience changes, and the more the audience changes, the better our online world will be 
That’s not actually true. There is a lot that can be done about it, immediately, in the same way we do things about other things that bother us in life: we work our sobriety, one day at a time
One place I worked, we published mobile games and inserted ads via a 3rd party ad network. We had control over what ads NOT to show, like ads from our competitors or ad from alcohol brands. Other than that, the ads would get pushed to our games when the end user launched them. If someone paid for an ad to be displayed, it would be displayed. Some ad networks were a little more careless of the content it was allowing than others.
TS is funded by a few things, people making a one time purchase of an ad free version 10 dollars I think, as well as monthly patrons and well Ads,
It’s not for profit it’s mainly to help keep the lights on, server space, and website maintenance of course aren’t free.
When it comes to ads I know Robin made it clear to not post ads regarding gambling, alcohol, or other drugs, but you always get the ones that slip through, Ad companies make money by well posting ads, usually it’s a ad targeted at your history and preferences, like if you google I don’t know, winter jackets and end up on the north face site looking, well Google Ad sense will be hitting you with ads regarding winter jackets, based on that recent history, and in hopes you see one you like you click and buy they get a percentage of that sale, the algorithm isn’t perfect as with your experience.
If you let it eat you up it will, so you can buy a one time ad free version of TS, ignore the ads, or if your like me and use your computer alot ad blockers are free. They even work for YouTube I love it
Also, I know with iPhone you can ask for apps not to track you, which I do all the time, they don’t need to know, but with sites like this which use ad revenue well then you just end up with a random ad in a poke and hope situation