Adds pay for fun, but can be quite annoying. In this research Goldstein et al. try to calculate the cost of annoying adds.
Some insights from their research:
- The first study reported here showed that people find animated advertisements more annoying than static ones, holding all else constant.
- The main result of this paper is that annoying ads lead to site abandonment and thus fewer impressions than good ads or no ads.
- Good ads and no ads led to roughly equal numbers of impressions.
Abstract of the research that can be downloaded here:
Display advertisements vary in the extent to which they annoy users. While publishers know the payment they receive to run annoying ads, little is known about the cost such ads incur due to user abandonment. We conducted a two-experiment investigation to analyze ad features that relate to annoyingness and to put a monetary value on the cost of annoying ads. The rst experiment asked users to rate and comment on a large number of ads taken from the Web. This allowed us to establish sets of annoying and innocuous ads for use in the second experiment, in which users were given the opportunity to categorize emails for a per-message wage and quit at any time. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three di erent pay rates and also randomly assigned to categorize the emails in the presence of no ads, annoying ads, or innocuous ads. Since each email categorization constituted an impression, this design, inspired by Toomim et al. [18], allowed us to determine how much more one must pay a person to generate the same number of impressions in the presence of annoying ads compared to no ads or innocuous ads. We conclude by proposing a theoretical model which relates ad quality to publisher market share, illustrating how our empirical ndings could a ect the economics of Internet advertising.