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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)
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.
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
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.
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.
No, I don't whine about the ads in print magazines I purchase.
I just don't re-sub to them. Recently subscribed to several National Geographic publications and found that they contained so much advertisement that they weren't worth even the deeply discounted rates they offered to resubscribe.
Fill in your four or five-letter word of wisdom here _ _ _ _ _.
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.
> 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.
You're in the wrong country.
The ABC here in Oz doesn't have ads (at least never in the middle of programs, and in between shows only to promote their other shows)
Same with the BBC in the UK, except here in Australia we don't have the licencing system. Problem with that is the Govco here cuts the ABC's budget whenever they say something it doesn't like. Can't do that to the BBC.
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
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.
Would enough people pay $9.95/mo for, say, commercial-free Sci-Fi channel to make it worthwhile?
I would, so long as it didn't require continuing to pay $39.99 for 400 channels of crap just to get Sci-Fi Channel, USA, and a decent feed of local channels. Oh, and Cartoon Network and Disney. $5 for local channels + $10 each comes out to spending $5 more than I'm paying now without all the junk and without all the commercials. You bet your @$$, I'd do that.
Would I pay $40 in addition to my current bill? Hell, no. And that's precisely why we won't ever see those stations in an ad-free fashion until the majority of content is obtained by direct download rather than broadcast/satellite (which is already well on its way to becoming a reality).
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.