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Annoying Online Ads Do Cost Business

posted by martyb on Monday May 28 2018, @04:07PM   Printer-friendly
from the all-his-books-are-banned-in-my-country dept.

canopic jug suggested the following story:

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:

[...] 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.

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  • (Score: 2) by Subsentient on Monday May 28 2018, @07:21PM (7 children)

    by Subsentient (1111) on Monday May 28 2018, @07:21PM (#685277) Homepage Journal
    I wouldn't mind ads if they were some low-res, highly compressed JPGs (not huge 1280x1024 bandwidth gobbling PNGs) or just some text to the top of the page, but what I get is flashing GIFs, flash animations, autoplaying HTML5 videos, and worst of all, JavaScript clickjacking/tab spawning bullshit, oh god, the javascript bullshit, the horror...

    So yeah, I use an adblocker. Always. I don't turn it off except for a small list of trustworthy sites that I can count on one hand. I strongly advise you do the same.
    --
    "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by FatPhil on Monday May 28 2018, @07:58PM (4 children)

    by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Monday May 28 2018, @07:58PM (#685286) Homepage

    you do realise that the low res. highly compressed jpeg, weighing in at something like 10KB perhaps, will be placed on the page by 500KB of javascript libraries.

    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves

    • (Score: 5, Touché) by Wootery on Monday May 28 2018, @09:41PM (3 children)

      by Wootery (2341) on Monday May 28 2018, @09:41PM (#685318)

      If only there were a set of mature, standardised, declarative technologies for describing and positioning the elements of a web-page. If only!

      • (Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday May 29 2018, @05:40PM (2 children)

        by Pino P (4721) on Tuesday May 29 2018, @05:40PM (#685743) Journal

        you do realise that the low res. highly compressed jpeg, weighing in at something like 10KB perhaps, will be placed on the page by 500KB of javascript libraries.

        If only there were a set of mature, standardised, declarative technologies for describing and positioning the elements of a web-page. If only!

        What might that be, for art direction among different devices? The problem here isn't one of positioning the image as much as choosing which image to deliver in the first place to a particular combination of display size, pixel density, media cost (metered last mile or not), and browser image format support. The <picture> element [caniuse.com] is intended to accomplish this but won't work on IE, Opera Mini, and Android Browser in Android 4.x, which total one out of nine page views (global support: 88.78%).

        • (Score: 2) by Wootery on Wednesday May 30 2018, @09:15AM (1 child)

          by Wootery (2341) on Wednesday May 30 2018, @09:15AM (#686185)

          And this justifies hundreds of kilobytes of JavaScript? Super Mario Bros was 32KB!

          The modern web is a bloated monstrosity, let's not pretend otherwise.

          • (Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday May 30 2018, @12:04PM

            by Pino P (4721) on Wednesday May 30 2018, @12:04PM (#686225) Journal

            Super Mario Bros was 32KB!

            Actually 40 KiB; you forgot the CHR ROM.

            But Super Mario Bros. is not responsive to different screen sizes (fixed 256x240 plane) or input modalities (keys vs. touch screen), not internationalized (the ROM contains only a partial Basic Latin font and only English text), not persistent (no save support until All-Stars years later), and not accessible to users with disabilities. Modern websites are expected to be all five.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 29 2018, @08:04AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 29 2018, @08:04AM (#685484)

    That's why I use a NoScript with whitelist. Additionally, if the webpage acts like a bum asking everyone for a money for cheap wine, I double-check NoScript, usually some domain "leaks" so I block it. I'm not against advertising, but instead of asking to turn off Adblock to make users only "view ads", they should be forced (like with Cookies in EU) to not lie, the true thing to write is: To execute untrusted, bug-ridden and unoptimized code on computer, stealing data and sending them to unknown servers. Maybe EU should take care of it?
    And maybe, if publishers want to use ads as payment solution, we should ask: If I have not found what I wanted and seen ads, where is my refund?