I hate video ads, and while the youtube skip after 5 seconds feature is nice, I hate wasting my time sitting through product placement before watching a video. I am fine with ads accenting a page and the content therein, but I am not fine with gating content behind ads.
It may not work for everyone, but I pay more attention to those side-ads too. Not flash ones, just still images or text, because my eyes sometimes wander. If I have an ad stuck in my face, I have a hostile reaction that makes me actively negative towards whatever the product is. When it accompanies content, I am more willing to meander towards it.
Reddit does a really good job with it. The side bar ads they have are not intrusive and don't block content, but I always end up seeing them when scrolling, and since they are non-intrusive they are about the only ads I do click.
I do hate ads and have installed ad-filtering software at the router level (with Tomato) -- it's a great solution because it filters ads on all mobile devices without any other action on each device.
But apparently there are people who don't mind ads, or who even enjoy some of them.
It seems difficult for one side to understand the other side. People who hate ads don't understand how one can tolerate them, while people who don't mind them don't see why anyone would have a problem with them...
What would be interesting to know is how many people there are in each camp; there are relatively few users of ad-blocking software, but I don't think this number is relevant. Many people who hate ads don't know how to install ad-blocking software or don't even know that it exists (my parents, for example). Once they discover it they wouldn't go back to how things were before, for the world.
It depends on the ad. Search-based ads are probably welcome.
Display ads, less so. It's an arms race between advertisers and readers. Advertisers want a slice of a fixed supply of reader attention; readers presumably want to read/watch whatever they came to the site for. It's a zero sum game, so anything the advertiser gains is lost from the reader.
So readers develop countermeasures (ignoring ads in certain positions) and advertisers counter-countermeasures (sound, movement, popovers) and so on it goes in a continuous spiral.
The operator of Free can make the case that he is taking payment from users to enter the contest on their side. That it saves him a bunch of bandwidth is gravy.
> It's an arms race between advertisers and readers. Advertisers want a slice of a fixed supply of reader attention; readers presumably want to read/watch whatever they came to the site for. It's a zero sum game, so anything the advertiser gains is lost from the reader.
interesting that you put it this way. Perhaps instead of ads that mimic television ads on the internet, there should be new forms of advertising. The internet is an interactive medium, and why should it copy TV?
If an advertiser made an addictive game that brands the product, people would come willingly to play that game, and in the process, be exposed to the branding message.
That is: users hate ads. But someone has to pay for all this stuff.
The obvious model -- user pays -- has never really worked. There's been lots of variations on micropayments but so far they've all sucked.
Naturally I am taking no account of the horrendous base rates in this area and am crawling ahead anyhow.