Consumer Ad Blocking Doubles

Dotnaught writes to tell us about an InformationWeek article reporting that, according to a Forrester Research report, consumers are fed up with ads. From the article: "In the past two years, the number of consumers using pop-up blockers and spam filters has more than doubled.. More than half of all American households now report using these ad blocking technologies to block unwanted pitches... Today, 15% of consumers acknowledge using their digital video recorders to skip ads, more than three times as many as in 2004." The study would have been more meaningful if it hadn't conflated spam blocking with ad blocking.

Comments

What?

[RAMMS EIN]

``according to a Forrester Research report, consumers are fed up with ads.''

And I'm fed up with hearing about it and not knowing what it means. What _are_ these "ads" people are talking about?

Re:spam or not, it's all bad

[Sunburnt]

"Though I do welcome them every once in a while, when they enable me to take a leak without missing a bit of a lengthy movie."

You need to upgrade to DVR, friend. It enables you to take a shit without missing any of the film.

Re:What really baffles me is

[teslar]

I am currently looking for fundings for a report on wether or not the percentage of people who think that water is wet increased last year or not.

You clearly do not work in academia, so read and learn:

Your project will be called "Description of belief distribution dynamics over large time frames as a function of population dynamics: Is water wet?"

Your angle is the general question of how does the percentage of people holding a given general belief, obvious as it may seem, vary over time? Answering this very important question allows valuable insights both into likely distributions during significant historical events, for instance when Columbus set sail on the medium that some people may have believed to be wet and the likely distribution at any point in the future. In the specific case of "is water wet?", this information can be used comercially, for instance, by umbrella manufactures in order to better understand the dynamics of their market over time - if the percentage of people believing that water is wet is at a low point, this may reflect in a decline of umbrella sale.

The answer is to your question not obvious. At a minimum, to find it, you will need to:
1 Identify the number of people one year ago who did believe that water was wet
2 Identify how many of those have since died
3 Investigate whether babies are born with an innate belief about the state of water and if not, do they acquire this in their first year?
4 Identify the number of babies born in one year
5 Identify the number of people who have changed believe in the last year and optionally investigate why
6 Estimate the new number of people now believing water is wet based on 2-5 above
7 Calculate the percentage based on the current total world population

Once you have answered this basic question, you can go on to build a general predictive model of the evolution of this percentage over time, tie it in with commercial market research as described above and look for correlations with other trends in the population.

This is a significant workload - you will easily be able to argue for and get enough funding for yourself, 3 PhDs and a Post Doc if you spin this right. Remember, your project is interdisciplinary - it involves Sociology, Infant Psychology, Dynamical Systems and Marketing at a minimum. Interdisciplinary stuff is becoming quite trendy, so write Interdisciplinary Research Proposal in big letters onto your funding application - it can only help.

Re:adblocking ~= spam blocking

[Ididerus]

Well, personally, I'd rather watch free porn over a blackberry, unless it was vine-ripe and full of juice.