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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
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.
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.
And here I thought I was actually PAYING for cable. What WAS I thinking.
You're not thinking, that's the problem. Your cable bill is paying for ACCESS, not for the production of all the content. Do you think your ISP bill pays for production of all web sites on the Internet? Now, some channels can survive on the puny amount of money they're paid, but it certainly is not going to pay for everything.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
> Your cable bill is paying for ACCESS, not for the production of all the content.
Really? Then why does it cost more to get more channels? If your assertion is true, then it should cost the same no matter how many channels your cable box is authorized to decrypt.
Also, who pays for ACCESS to broadcast stations? There's the same quantity of ads on cable as there is on broadcast TV.
My other car is first.
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.
Access, as in access to the content. You want SciFi's content, you have to pay SciFi to access their content. That's why it costs more if you have more channels.
Actually, I believe cable operators have to pay the stations in order to broadcast their content. They can't just stick up their own antenna and funnel that to their subscribers.
Also, arguably, you're paying for the convenience of accessing broadcast stations over cable with great reception. Remember one of the complaints about satellite was/is that you can't get your "local stations" so you still need an antenna.
By the way, the reason there are ads on basic cable stations is that they wouldn't sell enough subscriptions at a price that would make it worthwhile. How much does HBO charge? $9.95/mo? $12.95/mo? Would enough people pay $9.95/mo for, say, commercial-free Sci-Fi channel to make it worthwhile?
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.
Because they're all different things. Apples to oranges. You have to pay for each movie in theatres, and sit through ads, but from what I've been noticing they've actually reduced those lately and most likely in response to declining ticket sales.
DVD's with unskippable commercials, do you think those are really subsidizing the industry?
The fact is, while a certain part subsidizes the industry, the rest is just pure greed and power trips on the part of the corps. They can force-feed you ads, and most people will choose to accept them, so they do so. Again the reference to decreased ad content in movies, because if people show they're fed up enough to drop the service entirely, it might actually get cleaned up for awhile.