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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 23 2014, @04:33PM
$230/yr is a bargain, I'm paying $45/mo now, or $540/yr at the moment, and that's the cheapest highspeed internet I can get.
But seriously, running website isn't expensive, and if all the ad-supported web went dark tomorrow, what's left would be plenty useful. Wikipedia, BBC news, government services, banking, etc etc etc. Ad-supported sites are the forth of the web that we could do without if it came to it.
(Score: 2) by Tramii on Saturday August 23 2014, @05:38PM
$10 a month and I don't have to worry about Facebook/Google/etc tracking my every move and selling me out to the highest bidder? Indeed, I'd say that would be well worth it!
(Score: 1) by MickLinux on Sunday August 24 2014, @12:16PM
What they were really meaning was that an ad-free internet would cost each user an *additional* 230 a year. except that's not true. You pay the *additional* 230, get everyone to pay the additional 230 , and the first words out of the ad-server's mouth would be 'but if you put my ads on your site, youecan have a boat too.'
Forget that.
An ad-free internet would cost everyone an additional
230+215+210+205+200+... per year.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Sunday August 24 2014, @04:14PM
So if it really worked that way, ad-free for $19.17 per month -- I'd jump at the chance. That's less than 4 lattes (if you tip), less than 4 combos at McDonalds -- it's a trivial amount of money, barely 5 gallons of gas.
(Score: 2) by cykros on Sunday August 24 2014, @10:13PM
And hey, if you're spending money that otherwise would have been spent on McDonald's anyway, it's a VERY economical choice in the long run (or not...I guess massive heart attacks that are fatal the first time tend not to actually incur all that many medical expenses overall).
Also, given that you're looking at it through pretty solidly western eyes, it might be worth considering how much money that is to people in less developed countries that can afford Internet access right now, but aren't really throwing $5 around like it's nothing either. Having the option to pay your share instead of get advertisements might be reasonable, but shifting entirely to a pay your own way model would essentially cut off large swaths of the human population from the web.
Payment vs. Advertising debates are all well and good on a site by site basis. Making the entire web choose one or the other would come with huge losses either way.