Jakob Nielsen and his group have long documented that advertising in online media carries a cost in terms of usability. A recent longitudinal study quantifies the effect.
Summary: Increased advertising caused a 2.8% drop in use of an Internet service. The full magnitude of the lost business was only clear after a full year.
We have long documented that advertising in online media carries a user-experience cost:
- Users find many online advertising techniques highly annoying — that attitude has remained constant since we first reported it in 2004.
- Because online ads are so irritating, users have evolved banner blindness as a defense mechanism to reduce this annoyance. (Also a finding that has remained true for decades, meaning that it's not likely to change anytime soon.)
- Even worse (from a web-design perspective), ads poison the well for honest designers seeking to boost the visual design of useful page elements: anything with an overly fancy look may be unjustly taken for an ad and also ignored by users.
[...] Reference
Jason Huang, David H. Reiley, and Nickolai M. Riabov (April 21, 2018): Measuring Consumer Sensitivity to Audio Advertising: A Field Experiment on Pandora Internet Radio. Available at https://davidreiley.com/papers/PandoraListenerDemandCurve.pdf (warning: PDF file).
From: Annoying Online Ads Do Cost Business.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday May 28 2018, @05:48PM
A twenty page article on a current, controversial topic with just TWO ad units
I tested this very carefully over a period of months
And for two solid years I really did Quit My Job Cor Adsense
After that revenue dwindled because the record industry stopped claiming that all downloads were unlawful
I removed both ad units so as not to discourage organic links
http://www.warplife.com/tips/law/copyright/music/legal-downloads.html [warplife.com]
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]