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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: 2) by zafiro17 on Saturday August 23 2014, @10:35PM
Agree - anyone who runs their own site should be aware of the costs - including time/energy - that go into it. I run a personal site and a few others, mostly because I enjoy it and like the value I produce more than I care about the time/energy I put into it rather than doing something that would earn me money. But I spend a couple hundred bucks a year on it, and don't recoup those costs. And they're small, relatively unvisited sites (boo hoo). But start getting serious traffic and sucking up bandwidth, and you need to start spending more money. That's the WWW.
Usenet worked on a different model - you pay an annual fee to a news service provider like www.individual.net and they provide access to Usenet. Once you're in, the content is free. Usenet is distributed, so the costs are shared of transferring the culture. But that makes it hard to make a buck, too. You can make money by owning a popular website that gets traffic. But the costs are yours alone. How to make it up? Advertising. That's the way the cookie crumbles.
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey