Study: Ad-Free Internet Would Cost Everyone $230-a-Year 611
Several readers sent word of research into the cost of internet content without ads. They looked at the amount of money spent on internet advertising last year in the U.K., and compared it to the number of U.K. internet users. On average, each user would have to pay about £140 ($230) to make up for the lost revenue of an ad-free internet. In a survey, 98% of consumers said they wouldn't be willing to pay that much for the ability to browse without advertisements.
However, while most consumers regard ads as a necessary trade-off to keep the internet free, they will go to great lengths to avoid advertising they do not wish to see. Of those surveyed, 63 per cent said they skip online video ads 'as quickly as possible' – a figure that rises to 75 per cent for 16-24 year olds. Over a quarter of all respondents said they mute their sound and one in five scroll away from the video. 16 per cent use ad blocking software and 16 per cent open a new browser window or tab.
A quick couple of things wrong with the study... (Score:4, Informative)
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2) it did not take into account the costs associated with the malware distributed by the various ad platforms.
Re:$230 (Score:5, Informative)
Totally with you. FWIW, YouTube offered to let me "monetize" my videos - I assume by showing annoying ads - but I've declined because I hate YouTube ads so much, and also because it'd probably net me a whopping $0.05/year.
Anyway, I created a toolbar bookmark in all my browsers with the following in the URL field:
javascript:window.location=String(window.location).replace("watch?v=","v/");
If you click it while watching a video on YouTube, it causes the video to fill your browser window (for better resizing control, also to get [nearly] full-screen Flash in Linux), but also has the unintended but welcome side effect that it skips the preroll adds. Obviously this won't work if the "v" parameter in the URL doesn't come first, but that's rare enough that doing it by hand isn't a nuisance.
Now, how much are ads costing us? (Score:4, Informative)
Just $20 a month? And that's from someone biased towards it?
Anyway, now let's see a study of how much advertising has cost each of us from:
- clicking, scrolling, and squinting for the actual content
- giving up, quitting, clicking back, and missing something
- buying, setting up, and using antivirus and adblocking software
- buying some of the frivolous things advertised, after at last being worn down by it, even a bit
- waiting for the page to load
- waiting for computer to run at all, given the heavy load some of our protective software puts on our computers
Re:$230 (Score:5, Informative)
Occasionally jars me when I see people complaining about how horrible YouTube ads are and it reminds me "oh yeeeaaah.."