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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!
Consumers have always been fed up with ads - they just never had a way to avoid them before.
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."
``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?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
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."
It probably won't be long before some clever ad makers create a secondary level ad within an ad that seems static at normal speeds and becomes a more active/interesting animation as people fast forward with their DVRs.
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
Advertisers and networks are getting clever at sneaking ads past us DVR users. So far, I've seen:
/.er in the broadcast industry knows more?
1. Ads styled to resemble the program they interrupt: this is common during the Daily Show, especially during the last commercial break.
2. Experienced DVR users note that the blank-screen pause length between shows and commercials is generally longer than that between two commercials. I've observed other people responding both consciously and unconsciously to this, unpausing shows quickly during that period of blackness. Who doesn't like being precise with the remote and avoiding the post-commercial rewind? I've noticed that some networks, for the greater part of this past year, put a longer pause between the second-to-last and last commercial. Usually, some of the ad's audio is played before the FF function is rapidly restored; sometimes, people will just sit through the ad. The fact that I've only seen this with this particular timing (it wouldn't make sense to do this between two early commercials, because the viewer's brain isn't cued up to unpause the DVR) is what leads me to suspect it as a deliberate ploy; perhaps some
Anyone noticed any more of these little tricks? If I was an advertiser in a market with a high proportion of people likely to use DVR, I'd try a 15-second, unchanging, large-text ad with voice-over to at least propagate the brand and slogan for a few seconds of FF time.
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
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
ok
until (succeed) try { again(); }
"The study would have been more meaningful if it hadn't conflated spam blocking with ad blocking."
Then why post this here?
"Weren't these people just using the fast forward button on their VCR before?"
I don't know what the data would suggest, but my anecdotal experience indicates otherwise. Everyone I hang out with uses DVR to avoid ads; none of these people were previously using their VCR for the same function. It probably is a matter of convenience; although I don't know anyone (I hope) who is befuddled by VCR programming, it is undeniably easier to use a DVR, connected as it is to the technology which lets the viewer find shows in the first place.
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
It isn't like people just get DVRs just to skip ads. And people don't download the Google toolbar just because it blocks popups (actually, I bet more do this than buy DVRs to skip ads--before switching to Opera, I used to use the Google toolbar to block popups, but I would not actually show the toolbar, so I was actually only using it for its popup blocking ability, not for its search features. But I bet the majority of users download it for the search function).
The article could more correctly say that "people are fed up with ads" if it were showing that people are going out of their way to block them. Instead they're showing that a lot of people downloaded the Google toolbar and discovered that it also blocks ads, and a lot of people bought DVRs so they could watch shows whenever they want, and discovered they can also fast forward through commercials.
A better measure of people's "fed-upness" with ads would be keeping track of the increase in use of products like ad-block in Firefox, or see if there's a major increase in the use of products that block ads that cost money (far fewer people would use such a product, but a dramatic increase in usership could likely be extrapolated to the general attitude of a population).
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.
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.
What can you expect when ads are intrusive and frequently block themselves over using Javascript over the text you are trying to read.
I got so fed up after yet another wired blog was covered over by their own paid advertising I started to block them, if they would have be un-obtrusive (for example google who I think do a good job in balancing the ads to be there but not in your face!) I wouldnt have bothered.
Until companies like Wired stomp on this practice rather than encouraging it they are going to be seen as just as much as (well not quite this bad) a pariah as companies such as zango.
Darren
Well, personally, I'd rather watch free porn over a blackberry, unless it was vine-ripe and full of juice.
I'm fighting The War on Drugs!
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 lack of interesting content on TV is a related problem that is just as important. I, for once, just stopped watching TV altogether 7 years ago and haven't had any kind of service since. My decision was 70% motivated by luck of content I was interested in and 30% by annoyance of commercials.
Please explain, what is this gold class? Never seen that here in NY.
It's a smaller cinema with 4 rows each with 6 seats arranged in pairs. The seats are much larger, more comfortable, and include recliners, footrests and a small table in the middle of each pair. They are arranged such that your view of the screen cannot be blocked by a tall person with big hair in the front, and you still have a good view in the back. They serve food and drinks (including alcohol) inside the cinema (you order before you go in and they bring it to you), and there are foods they serve in gold class they don't serve in the candy bar.
But in reality? You pay MORE for your movies?
Yep. Like I said, it's priced out of range of the annoying younger people who like to spoil movies.
Save that money and buy yourself a decent home theater setup.
This is not so effective for things not yet on DVD.
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.
Especially when there is bittorrent to download the little bit of content that you do want to watch. I canceled my cable service* 2 years ago and my MythTV box turned into a downloader. I feel no guilt about downloading content that was otherwise broadcast. I was really only paying the cable company for delivery of content (not the content itself) and I would have MythTV'd the ads anyway... so what is the difference?
It is interesting how using MythTV actually got me watching LESS TV. I would have thought it woudl increase the amount of time spent watching content, but by the time you remove all the ads and distill the content down to just the stuff you're really interested in, there isn't much left. There's maybe 4 series that take all of 3 hours per week to watch. Lost, Heroes, Grey's Anatomy, and The Office. Oh, and Family Guy. 5 shows. 4 hours, tops.
-matthew
* If the cable company would actually let me select the few channels that I like and only charge me for those, I probably wouldn't have canceled my service.
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
No, but then I don't have to read them either. I can flip by them at will and only read what I want. I subscribe to Vanity Fair, and it is really ad-heavy, but I don't have to read any of them. (I do 'cause there's some really nice eye candy there.)
Exactly. I too get Vanity Fair - and the only ads I tear out are most of the perfume ones (cause it stinks up my room with so many).
But most of the ads are quite informative, not too disruptive, and sometimes better than the rest of the magazine (especially some of the front fold-out ones.
If advertisers want to spawn ads when I visit a website - they need to stop doing all the noise, motion, and overly busy moving ads - those are the ones I block. I try to leave the ads working unless they get too annoying - then I kill them mercilessly.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
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.
The same thing has happened to me. I don't have a TV at all. I use netflix to rent DVDs of TV shows that I want to watch. I cannot stand listening to radio excpet NPR and Pacifica (and NPR has started running advertisements as well! (Pacifica is annoying in it's own special ways)). If I am at someone elses home and they are watching TV I am usually very annoyed with the frequency, volume, and length of ads. I'll usually leave the room and talk to someone who isn't a slave to the the tube.
6 462.asp
I've made special effort to protect my 3 year old from persistant advertising. There is a growing consensus that advertising contributes to many social ills in children, including obesity, anorexia, alchohol consumption, early sex.
http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20061204/106
Apparently, on average, children see 40,000 ads per year on TV alone! Now advertsising is common in schools. All those ads may be good for buisness but I'll do what I must to protect my boy from this mental poison.
-- QED
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.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
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
Edit your /etc/hosts (works on Mac or Linux), add:
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
and 90% of all annoying ads disappear! If you run across another site feeding annoying ads, just add a line redirecting it to 127.0.0.1.
I usually don't mind ads (I just ignore them), but when they started the large-pop-up-when-you-mouseover stuff, then they get perma-banned.
Of course - if we saved up for a home theatre system, and stopped going to the movies - it would be the fault of the movie piracy rather than anything else wouldn't it. It couldn't be ads could it
I mean the fact that we are watching DVD's rather than going to the cinema would reduce box office takings
damn pirates....
On a side note - any timeline on the release of Pirates of the Caribbean 3?
Although it can be funny, tell them to plug the power in.
How can I go about finding these gold theaters? I would happily pay the premium to enjoy what you've described. In the words of Homer Simpon, "I'm intrigued by your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter."
and the sites all shut down and we go back to reading and writing books and using our own imagina-
WTF IS HOMELAND SECURITY DOING AT MY DOOR!!111!#2!!@@!33!!
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
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
Ironically, some of the worst channels here for excessive commercials are the cable channels. Much as I love so much of their programming, BBC Canada is almost unwatchable live, so I record it and skip the ads. They do the right thing with some shows (e.g. Spooks), showing them uncut in an expanded time slot. Others they cut (e.g. Life on Mars), but I'm a regular customer of various U.K. DVD places and have a multi-system TV and multi-region DVD player.
In the U.K. the BBC is funded by license fees: in effect, a subscription scheme. I'd be happy to pay a reasonable subscription fee for my favourite channels (BBC Canada, Discovery) if they'd ditch the ads. The more ads they show, the more attractive it is to skip them...
...laura, who doesn't care if she never sees another Vonage ad again