SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
posted by
martyb
on Monday May 28 2018, @04:07PM
from the all-his-books-are-banned-in-my-country dept.
from the all-his-books-are-banned-in-my-country dept.
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.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Annoying Online Ads Do Cost Business
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 45 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
I don't want a pickle,
I just wanna ride on my motorsickle.
And I don't want to die,
I just want to ride on my motorcy.
Cle.
-- Arlo Guthrie
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday May 28 2018, @09:02PM
and that's how I'm going to solicit my clients from now on. I Am Absolutely Serious.
From my very first day at Working Software it was plainly apparent that it was a direct mail company and not really a software company. They had a list of 40k _purchasers_: people who really do like opening junk mail, who really do like reading the offer letters, and who really do like sending money to an organization that claims to publish software.
When money occasionally got real tight I stopped coding and started stuffing envelopes by hand.
For just one particular offer - AFTER VERY CAREFUL TESTING VIA THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD - Working Software dropped a quarter million pieces of mail.
At its peak during my employment, I was the only full-time coder, the owner was maybe ten percent coding, eighty percent tracking the - very small - mail tests and refining the printing on the outside of the envelopes, the wording of the offer letters and the price of the product. His remaining ten was personnel management, which mostly consisted of him taking me out to coffee so I could discuss my concerns with my code.
During that peak my code and Dave's junk mail provided generous livelihoods to all twelve of us, with a gross revenue that year of three million dollars.
But the list I forgot about WSI's list. How could I forget about WSI's list?
Direct mail names are never sold, always rented. The price per name varies but in the early nineties was typically ten cents. If you tried to mail to the same list twice you'd be caught out by such "Trap Names" as WSI's James B. Stanken.
Recall how competitive the software industry has always been.
Given that many small direct mail software publishers are openly hostile to each other, why do you suppose it was that all us small direct mail software publishers were so happy to swap lists with each other?
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]