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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: 4, Interesting) by gallondr00nk on Saturday August 23 2014, @04:28PM
I can sort of see the conundrum - people want to make a living online. Knowing a few artists and people who do stuff for content aggregators, I can appreciate this. As bad as the ads are, I can appreciate that someone would like to get paid for something they're good at or enjoy.
The trouble is the model is absolutely broken. There's a good little paper called Peak Advertising and the Future of the Web [peakads.org] that gives a few reasons. Ads aren't effective, they get blocked, there's enormous amounts of fraud, and revenues are declining. Even worse, the trend towards targeting, which ad pushers think will solve the problem, is compounding the problem and turning people to ad blockers.
I know the argument that the Internet was a better place before this mass commercialisation took place, and in many respects I agree with it. Then again, there seems to be so few avenues for people to make a living now that taking a share of ad revenue seems as valid a choice as any.
A few of the small filmmakers, speedrunners and podcasters I follow have been turning to Patreon as a solution, as in all cases they've said the revenue they've been getting from Google has dropped significantly. Yet this strikes me as an all or nothing solution - you'll either raise thousands a month, or nothing.
(Score: 2) by cykros on Sunday August 24 2014, @10:00PM
Facebook is a different story, because if you use facebook (or even don't go out of your way enough to adequately block their tracking), you already DO pay for it...with what some people value more than whatever reasonable subscription cost they would charge.
If it weren't for my ability to block their tracking, I'd considering paying to make them go away and stop tracking my web use, but definitely not for their "innovative service" (ie, wrapping the basic Internet services of email, xmpp, RSS, web hosting (images and such), and online calendar services into a walled garden and acting like it's an improvement...nevermind that it's basically just what AOL offered back in the 90s).