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Annoying Online Ads Do Cost Business

posted by martyb on Monday May 28 2018, @04:07PM   
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:

• 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.

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Original Submission

• Re:ads suck Re:ads suck (Score: 2) by frojack on Monday May 28 2018, @08:13PM (1 child)

  by frojack (1554) on Monday May 28 2018, @08:13PM (#685289) Journal

  I am a paying Pandora user, so no ads.

  Oddly, then, you, YES YOU, are the subject of this whole article.

  Annoyed by ads, you decide to PAY THEM MONEY, and so they learn that Ads work, and they shovel in more ads hoping to get more subscriptions.
  Thank you for your service. You've been such a big help. There's a special place in hell for useful idiots.

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  No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.

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• I Get My Music The Old-Fashioned Way. (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday May 28 2018, @08:47PM

  by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Monday May 28 2018, @08:47PM (#685303) Homepage Journal

  At a used CD store.

  I do plan to hurl some tips to the actual artists but I'll be damned if I ever buy a brand-new CD.

  I find all my new music through Radio Paradise [radioparadise.com]. At first with their web player and now with RP's iOS App, whenever I hear a song I particularly like I enter the artists and album into a Notes page.

  For each paycheck I budget usually $50 for CDs of these favorite artists.

  And yes I'm taking an awful risk to buy the whole album. But I am comforted by the fact that to get played on RP, artists have to have the scruples required to not record filller material.

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  Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]

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