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posted by azrael on Saturday August 23 2014, @12:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the some-pills-to-sell-you dept.

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."

 
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by zocalo on Saturday August 23 2014, @03:28PM

    by zocalo (302) on Saturday August 23 2014, @03:28PM (#84681)
    Pretty much my take. In true Internet style, I've been treating ads as damage and trying to route around them for years; long before AdBlock etc. became popular I was dev nulling advertising domains through DNS, and still do. If a site objects to my use of ad blocking tools and denies me access to their content, or insists on using some method of inserting ads that I can't easily block, then they have not just gained a bit of ad revenue from me, they have lost me as a viewer, and probably for good. The ad industry can claim it is funding the Internet all it likes, but anyone with a little sense can see this is bull; there is *always* an alternative site that offers less invasive ads, or none at all, and there are plenty of viable funding models that don't involve ads.
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