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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.
Consumers have been fed up with ads evr since Cable TV was promising to make television "ad free". What consumer cares at all about ads? We don't, it's the sellers that care about ads not the buyers.
Say bad words about my book, in cold oatmeal, or I shall sue!
I dunno. For me, and I suspect many people, there's very little difference between spam and non-spam advertising.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
What I'd really be interested in is a study on how effective advertising is, and the trends over time, on several types of advertisements. I can't remember ever buying a product based on an advertisement. At the same time, I can recall many times when I've promised myself NOT to buy a product as a result of a terrible, or invasive/unwanted advertisement. As ads permeate our lives more and more, I imagine I'm not alone. Personally, when I'm looking for a product, I pointedly search for reviews on it, and descriptions of features. Generally I look at the company website and, if available, third-party ratings and tests. With the Internet coming into more and more prevalent use in our daily lives, perhaps the old paradigm of "push it till they are sick of it, and will remember it" should trend towards "give them a place to find it, and information on it, if they want it."
A better quote from the article would have been:
"Broadband households have become even harder to reach: some 81% of those with high-speed Internet access employ pop-up blockers and spam filters."
It's not surprising, either. At one point, it was commonly recognized that computers belonged to the people that owned them, and that it was the responsibility of people writing software to make sure that the software was well-behaved and did what the user told the software to do-- except for deliberately malicious software. While I do not claim that all forms of advertising are malicious, it's becoming the case that websites using lots of pop-up or pop-under ads, or software like games using Massive's technology or other in-game ad-delivery mechanisms operate under the assumption that they are free to do things with the user's computer and consume networking resources to fetch and display content that the user didn't ask for and does not want.
I can tolerate ad-bars appearing on the right-hand side of a page, so long as most of the screen real-estate shows the actual content I want, but some sites do obnoxious and deceptive things like displaying an interstital ad first. My response to that is to copy the ad link into an email, and send a complaint off to both the webmaster of the site I was on, and the site holding the advertising, indicating that their ad was so annoying that I won't be returning to the offending site for at least one week, and that obviously they will be losing my eyeballs and ad impression revenue for that period of time.
It seems to have an effect, too. At least two of the newspapers I visit (the Boston Globe & the LA Times) have toyed with interstitial ads and have dropped them soon afterwards....
"The human race's favorite method for being in control of the facts is to ignore them." -Celia Green
And here I thought I was actually PAYING for cable. What WAS I thinking.
Oh -- not enough millions of dollars that way. I have to pay AND watch ads. I'm SOO sad for the Comcast &c CEOs.
I used to think that if I visited sites with advertising then I shouldn't interfere with the ads. After all I didn't have to look at them.
Then fancier moving ads came out (maybe some with bugs) and I found some used up most of my CPU cycles in firefox.
Eventually I had to install AdBlock+ so I could be sure that I could have 40 tabs open without cripling the browser.
Sure a fancy ad may only add a little overhead, but when you multiply that by 40 it adds up.
Movie theaters piss me off, which is why I stopped going there more then once a year. I love paying $9 per ticket, $20 for a drink and popcorn, sit in a theater with some jackass laughing with his friends the entire time, some baby crying, the guy in front of me who takes his shoes off, getting my sit back kicked non-stop ... then to top it all off, seeing a totally crappy movie.
... only to have more commericals come at me.
.... deep breath ...
I have ranted about this many times. I will deal with ads on TV, websites, etc. But, I can not stand sitting through 5 car commericals, 4 perfume commericals and 6 soft drink commericals
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"The study would have been more meaningful if it hadn't conflated spam blocking with ad blocking."
Then why post this here?
I think the original poster is wrong about this study losing meaning because it conflates adblocking with spam blocking. Both online ads and spam are unwelcome intrusions into our daily lives, and both are delivered via the internet. Both can be blocked with readily available technology and both are widely ignored by users, even when they get through the protection.
I think you're making the mistake of granting online ads some special significance because they were paid for by mainstream operations, but really, when it comes right down to it, Microsoft Dynamics are not that different from the guy selling penis enlargement pills. An stupid flash commercial for Blackberry has much in common with the spam touting FREE PRON.
I happily deny both of them space in my head.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I love paying $9 per ticket, $20 for a drink and popcorn, sit in a theater with some jackass laughing with his friends the entire time, some baby crying, the guy in front of me who takes his shoes off, getting my sit back kicked non-stop ...
This is why I only ever see movies in gold class unless I'm taking the kids. In gold class you don't get any kids because everybody has to be old enough to legally drink alcohol, you don't get noisy chatter among a group of friends since it's priced out of range for the sort of people that do that, you won't get the feet in the back of your seat unless the person behind you is at about 12 feet tall since the seats are spaced far enough apart that this can't happen.
I too am disturbed with websites that produce too little content and too many ads, but there's a conundrum attached right next to it.
Most webbies of today are free of charge, whereas the visitor has the right to objectively decide whether he or she wants to read it for free or not. I feel that if I browse a site and return to it as well, I also need to give the author something in return. It's all about loyalty and morale. You get something for free and should therefore give something back.
Some can argue that there are too many ads on the sites they visit. If this is true, there is likely a good alternative to that site, too. What better way to show that you're displeased than stop visiting the site?
Full Tilt
The other day I noticed Family Guy was on TBS, a channel I don't normally watch, but I needed something to tide me over for 10 minutes. Anyway, during the 2 minutes I could stand watching it, they showed ad after ad DURING THE SHOW for other shows. First they had a little popup in the bottom right corner, then some large text scrolled by, then a larger popup taking the entire bottom half of the screen, then more scrolling text, ad nauseum. One after another. Why in the hell would anyone want to watch anything at all on that channel?
Ahem. They used to be. Nowadays in about 50% of my visits to the main page I get a big square ad in the top right corner that overlays part of the text in the center column, simply making it impossible to RTFI (I=Intro). Talk about (un)obtrusive...
Linux user since early January 1992.
Having two DVR's, on from Dish and one from Sony for OTA HDTV, I time shift, as my tv time and theirs will never agree. Skipping commercials is recapturing time. I now record just about anything I'm interested in, watch it on my own schedule, and reliably zap every commmercial. (being able to freeze scenes from Star Trek : TOS in HD is just a bonus) Sorry Guys, but that's the way it is-and anyone who says differently is not being truthful.
No, I generally take 2 minutes to tear out the annoying ones before I read the magazine.
I realized after I posted, however, that I should have also noted that I am only *really* bothered by annoying or super-frequent ads. Popup blockers and ad blockers were developed AFTER the audience was over-inundated with advertisement. If they had just kept things at a reasonable level, we'd still be watching the ads instead of blocking them. But they get more and more greedy and have to fit "just one more" ad in.
If I were an advertiser I'd be interested in how to get my ads to the consumer most effectively. Paying to know how often my ad is blocked seems reasonable.
It depends on what you plan on doing with the information as to whether or not the data is valuable. Sadly, most advertisers seem to focus way too much on how, and way to little on why, people block ads.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Are they not both advertisements customers don't wish to receive? And it's hard to argue website flash ads aren't as intrusive as advertising in my Inbox. As are the ads on TV shows that come over the speakers at twice the volume as the actual program.
Spam originated on Usenet, so to say that spam has to be sent solely via email is absurd.
As for TV, I'm just waiting until the last two or three of my favorite shows are available on the iTunes Store so I can cancel my DirecTV subscription.
We do sort of the same thing with Netflix. We're ready to drop HBO from our cable lineup. You might have an even better idea there. Download your shows and watch what you want, put an antenna up for local stations. DirecTV always manages to find a reason to raise our rates every year, Dish is worse.
But I'm wondering if the download shows won't start including ads before long? The more people doing something...anything...the more advertisers will pay to be included. Pretty soon it will become a new revenue stream and everyone will be doing it. Instead of a death spiral I might say it's more like an arms race between advertisers and consumers. We're willing to pay more for an ad free medium and they're willing to pay more to get on that medium. Ads aren't really the problem. 20 minutes of ads in a 60 minute program...that's the problem.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Well I'd say that's even better than baseball. They can cut to commercial any time nothing exciting is actually happening, and if a crash happens they replay it a billion times anyway, so no big deal.
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, though I'm not yet sure about the universe. - A Einstein