Commentary
People Hate Your Ads But 85% Would Rather Watch Your Ads Than Pay For Content
- by Richard Whitman , Columnist, May 12, 2016
Most recently I made note of the fact that the predominance of ad blocking is going to cost publishers $27 billion and 74% of Millennials and GenZs hate social media ads. That's really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to just how much people hate advertising. And yet, people still prefer ad-supported (in other words, free) content as opposed to paying for ad-free content.
A new study, commissioned by the Digital Advertising Alliance and conducted by Zogby Analytics, found that 85 percent of respondents said they supported an ad-supported internet model instead of paying for content online. In addition, a majority said they would reduce their online and mobile activities a great deal (75%) or somewhat (11%) if they had to pay several hundred dollars a year or more for the ad-supported content and services they use that are currently free.
advertisement
advertisement
That "several hundred dollars a year" for free content was arrived at within the survey which asked respondents to estimate how much they would have to pay for 17 different types of online services and content in a given month. That figure averaged $99.77 per month or $1,197.24 per year.
In terms of the types of content respondents found important, 9 in 10 respondents said that free Internet content like news, weather, e-mail and blogs were either very important (73%) or somewhat important (17%) to them. And while people may hate the interruptive nature of ads, 80% of respondents said they had found ads useful in finding new products, researching a purchase, or assisting with the shopping process.
The types of advertising that consumers had found most useful were movies/TV shows (43%), technology/devices (37%), clothing (36%), local restaurants (34%), groceries (33%), phone/Internet services (32%) and travel (30%).
The argument that people find ads useful is, of course, supportive of the DAA's YourAdChoices offering which purports to give people more control over how their personal information is used to determine the advertising they see.
I can think of only one publication that's done it right from the get-go; The Wall Street Journal.
When newspapers and magazines went on-line for free, they destroyed for themselves the value-for-value relationship. This set in motion a cascade of unintended consequences. The New York Times tried to recover from it by going from free to paid, but they never figured-in basic human nature; people resent it when you take something from them such as free, news reportage.