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Sophie Curtis reports at the Telegraph that an ad-free internet would cost each user about £140 ($230) a year – a sum that the vast majority of UK web users say they would never pay. Ebuzzing calculated the average ‘value’ of each web user by dividing the amount of money spent on digital advertising in the UK in 2013 (£6.4 billion) by the number of UK web users (45 million).
However in a survey of more than 1,400 UK consumers, 98 per cent said they would not be willing to pay this amount to browse the internet without advertisements and although most consumers regard ads as a necessary trade-off to keep the internet free, they will go to great lengths to avoid advertising they do not wish to see.
"It’s clear the ad industry has a major role to play in keeping web content free, but we have to respond to what consumers are telling us," says Jeremy Arditi. "We need to get better at engaging, not better at interrupting. That means introducing new formats which consumers find less invasive, more creative ads that are better placed, and giving consumers a degree of choice and control."
The study also looked specifically at the mobile app sector and found that 77 per cent of consumers never upgrade to paid for versions of free mobile apps. "Publishers of mobile apps will remain heavily reliant on in-app advertising to fund their content creation," says Arditi. "That means the same rules apply – they must give consumers ads that offer choice, relevance, entertainment and brevity."
(Score: 5, Interesting) by halcyon1234 on Saturday August 23 2014, @02:52PM
First time on SN I'm cursing not having mod points. =)
This article spiked my BS meter so hard it sprained it. I need to avoid BS for the rest of the week while I keep it elevated and on ice.
Their argument stems from trying to calculate the value of a self-justifying service. I can make anything seem expensive if I spend a bunch of money on it. "My business spends $100 per customer on doilies. If I took away the doilies, all my customers would have to give me $100 per year". Wat? Why would my cost to use your service go up in relation to the reduction of your costs (as opposed to the increase of a cost, or reduction of a revenue).
And then there's the fact that EVEN IF their adverdoilies were a kromulant cost, they're overvaluing them. Money spent on advertising != the amount of money each user is worth. It's the same as if Starbucks gave me a free drink, and claimed it just cost them $7. No, it saved ME $7. It only cost you maybe $0.75 in material and labor. If you want to inflate your losses, just claim that drink costs $34,000 instead. Numbers, who needs them to make sense?
And finally, there's the rest of the calculation they leave out. Not too long ago, I gave up doing IT for friends and family. Long story, too much abuse of services, etc, etc. BUT even with this stance, if I'm at someone's house trying to use their computer, and there's a virus/malware on it-- well, shit, Hippocratic oath and all, I'm going to clean it up. If Conduit's there, I must murder it. It must die. So, even as someone who does the minimal amount of work cleaning up a computer, I drop MAYBE 8-16 hours per year on it. All those malwares comes from infected ads (or infected ad networks serving up infections, etc). 100%, all the time. My time as a technician is worth money. Say $75 / hour-- friends and family rate. I'm cleaning up their mess, so I'm effectively a 3rd party contractor for the ad networks to do warranty work. (Hey, if they can make up "social contracts", so can I!). So my going rate is $600-$1200 per year that the websites owe me from this advertising revenue stream. That's over 5 users (my wife, her parents, my parents)-- so $120 - $240 per user. OH SHIT THAT'S MORE THAN $230! Ads are actually making the companies LOSE $10 per person.
So websites, remember, you're all billed twice a month, with 30 day payment terms. Again, since we're all making up numbers, there's a credit-card worthy 29.97% interest rate for overdue payments. I've been cleaning up your shit for 15 years now, and haven't seen a single dime. By my calculations, you owe me about $200k-- just from the amount outstanding from the first year.
Original Submission [thedailywtf.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 23 2014, @04:50PM
and what about my time it takes for adds to load on my computer. That's using up my bandwidth and everyone's bandwidth which increases bandwidth costs for the ISP's. Lets say adds take up half of all bandwidth on the Internet. These adds force ISP's to upgrade their infrastructure and so the ISP's must charge more to deliver a worse service (they need to provide twice the total bandwidth to provide the same amount of useful bandwidth and now they are delivering it with adds which makes the service worse). Plus adds use up my computer's processing power slowing down my computer's ability to deliver useful content and taking up electricity as well. Adds make everything more expensive.
As far as cable and radio are concerned I make a deliberate effort not to listen to adds. Whenever there are adds I usually either change the channel or, if they all have adds, I mute the volume and leave the room for a while. We pay enough for cable to not have adds and the whole point of cable, at one time, was that it didn't have adds. As far a radio is concerned the radio companies are not entitled to have broadcasting monopolies, restricting my natural right to broadcast on those spectra, for their own personal commercial benefit. So whenever there are adds on the radio I either change the channel or, if they all have adds at the same time, I mute the volume for a couple minutes until the adds are all gone. Or I have a USB stick with stuff to listen to that I refer to. I do this deliberately because I do not want to contribute to adds that shouldn't be there. They're a waste of everyone's time and they're a waste of resources. If I want something it generally needs to be something I am soliciting not something that people solicit me for (well, there are exceptions. In some cases people soliciting me indicates that they want my business and I would prefer to go to someone that wants my business over someone that doesn't care).