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, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 28 2018, @08:37PM (2 children)
Too long winded and whingy. You lost me at "commie fruitcups". Is your comment an advertisement for good ol' american capitalism or what?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by sonamchauhan on Tuesday May 29 2018, @01:43PM (1 child)
I loved it. "Commie fruitcups"?... that's just comical exaggeration. He's on the ball with this post. Customers who can't figure out if they're there for the ads or the content... Love it. Coz I remember that feeling. The feeling of possibilities, that the publication is working for you, not the advertiser. Google.com comes closest.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday May 30 2018, @05:11AM
Yup, it wasn't just Computer Shopper. They were just the best example. Every old 8bit computer had one or more magazines dedicated to it and whichever one you had you probably subscribed to one or more of them and maybe a general mag like Byte. And almost everyone spent as much time poring over the ads as reading the articles. Most hobbies were like that, whether it was model railroads or D&D there were magazines dedicated to it and the ads were an important part of the experience, not an annoyance. Remember when newspapers had ads everyone read? When the local supermarket depended almost entirely on the weekly circular in the paper, when the readers actually read that ad? When ordinary people clipped coupons, not just a few super couponers like now?
On the Internet it doesn't matter. Go to a political site, a model railroading blog, a programming site, all the same crap ads you need to block in self preservation because they are not just noxious, many are downright malware. The same noxious malware on every site, because the same ad networks are embedded on almost every site. The only variation is they are poorly targeted at you based on what other sites you have visited recently.