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from the ad-viewing-quota-enforcement dept.
The University of Warwick's Andrew Oswald and his team compared survey data on the life satisfaction of more than 900,000 citizens of 27 European countries from 1980 to 2011 with data on annual advertising spending in those nations over the same period. The researchers found an inverse connection between the two. The higher a country's ad spend was in one year, the less satisfied its citizens were a year or two later. Their conclusion: Advertising makes us unhappy.
Oswald: We did find a significant negative relationship. When you look at changes in national happiness each year and changes in ad spending that year or a few years earlier—and you hold other factors like GDP and unemployment constant—there is a link. This suggests that when advertisers pour money into a country, the result is diminished well-being for the people living there.
HBR: What prompted you to investigate this?
[ . . . ] I can't help noticing the increasing amount of ads we're bombarded with. For me, it was natural to wonder whether it might create dissatisfaction in our culture [ . . . ] In a sense they're trying to generate dissatisfaction—stirring up your desires so that you spend more
[ . . . . ] exposing people to a lot of advertising raises their aspirations—and makes them feel that their own lives, achievements, belongings, and experiences are inadequate.
[ . . . . ] we controlled for lots of other influences on happiness. Second, we looked at increases or drops in advertising in a given year and showed that they successfully predicted a rise or fall in national happiness in ensuing years.
So always take two ad blockers before bedtime.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday January 16 2020, @03:24PM (2 children)
I doubt so.
So you actually see the ad, you just don't hear it. Anyway, you could do better; adblockers can completely remove the ads from YouTube.
So you at least hear the beginning of the ad. Well, I only listen to radio stations that don't have ads to begin with (unless you count the program previews). Of course those might not be available in your country.
I generally only watch TV stations that don't show ads, or watch them only at times when they don't show ads. The only time when I might catch some TV ad is right before the main news (but usually I switch on right on time for those, so I don't see the ads anyway). Again, availability may be a problem in your country.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Rich26189 on Thursday January 16 2020, @04:20PM (1 child)
My primary browser is Safari which to my knowledge doesn't have an effective AdBlocker though I haven't looked very hard. What I do have is a host file with about 20K entries - don't remember what I got it. When watching YT videos most, but not all, of the ads appearing at the bottom of the screen appear to me as just a white outline of the box plus the "x" to close it. I don't know how to determine the IP's of those ads that do get through.
When the in-video ads interrupt the video I just hit the mute button and watch the count-down timer. Again, I don't know how to determine the IP of those ads.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday January 16 2020, @04:25PM
Then stop using the corporate slop browser.
Use some firefox derivative.