The Great Compromise: Ads for Free Content?

By on January 20, 2006 in Tech

MobHappy asks the question- will people accept ads in exchange for free content.

In general, I think the answer is absolutely not. Here are the 3 reasons why not:

People want less ads and will go to great lengths to avoid them.

Just about every piece of media equipment I have is designed to avoid ads. TIVO, DVD Player; XM Radio; DirecTV satellite service; anonymous call blocker on my phone, caller ID on my cell phone; email spam filters; voice mail at the office. Almost everyone I know has a similar fortress protecting them from people who want to sell them something. Large companies are founded on the basis of protecting privacy, which for purposes of this conversation means…no ads.

There will always be too much other similar content available without ads.

Even if you have to pay for it, it will be deemed worth it. I can’t imagine what sort of content it would take to get me to agree to hear or see ads to get it. Just about everything I want to see or hear is available to somewhere without ads. I may have to pay a little more, but I am happy to pay for an ad-free life and so is almost everyone I know. After having XM Radio for a few years I literally cannot imagine listing to one second of ad-infested, over the air radio. I’d rather listen to nothing.

Even if we would accept ads, it would be the ineffective kind.

I don’t mind unobtrusive ads on web pages. But I have never, once clicked on an ad banner that wasn’t on a page I owned. Never, ever. Not one single time. And I bet there are a lot of others who could say the same thing. So if you want to put an AdSense ad or a banner on a web page, I don’t care. I won’t notice it and you’ll get very few clickthroughs. Add pop-ups or unders or, even worse, those irritating mouse traps and I’ll never return to your page.

The bottom line is that the cost to get permission from people to bombard them with ads would be more than any realistic revenue model could absorb. Pay for my gas for a year, and you can send me a few ads while I drive to and from work. Give me a top of the line Treo and service for a year and you can send me text message ads. Nothing that will fit in your pro-formas will be enough.

Advertising in its traditional sense is dying along with its original home- the printed newspaper. People don’t like ads and people don’t like other people dreaming up new ways to force advertising on them.

So if you really want to make some enemies, start tracking people via GPS and spamming their cell phones.

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  • http://www.blogger.com/profile/08934605126648312686 Randy Charles Morin

    All the commercial Websites with redundant popups and ads down your throat, Forbes, MSN, Yahoo! don’t seem to be scaring off users.

  • http://www.tjwood.co.uk/ tjwood

    Google’s ads work (on search pages), because often they do match what I’m looking for. (Say I want to shop around for cheap office supplies, the sponsored links that come up when I type in “Office supplies” to Google are as good a places to start as any).But I’ve never clicked an ad on Gmail, or a Google ad on someone’s blog, or whatever. They don’t match what I’m trying to do at the time.I can’t stand the websites like MSN, Lycos etc which have annoying flash ads and things everywhere. If anything was going to make me chose Gmail over Hotmail, for instance, the lack of obtrusive ads would be it.One thing I really don’t get is why Amazon have started putting Google-style ads in their search result pages – often these turn out to be for one of their competitors, which surely isn’t good for business?Without ads in exchange for free content, you have the age old issue of how to pay the relatively small, but still significant, costs for web servers, bandwidth etc. I will happily donate a few pounds a year to the likes of Wikipedia (which I find very useful), or pay for a Flickr pro account (again, a very useful service), but for other smaller providers of free content it’s much harder to justify a donation or payment, and obviously the administration costs involved in collecting very small payments aren’t worth it.What do you suggest the solution is to keep free content alive, without ads?

  • http://www.blogger.com/profile/00428649718647203180 Kent

    On TV and radio, I think the TIVOs and other DVRs and XM solve the problem nicely.On the web, I like the idea of having a choice. I am happy to pay a little to eliminate or reduce ads on the sites I use a lot.On others, I agree with you that ads are a necessary evil. I also think (at least I hope) that the negative reaction to flash ads (or anything flash for that matter) and pop ups, etc. will lead web sites to the less intrusive ads, like Google’s.But I just don’t know how effective those ads are. If they aren’t working, then eventually the advertisers will stop buying them. We’re on an upswing of the internet as a business cycle right now and people are trying new things in the way of advertising. When we get to the other side of the cycle, I wonder what will happen. I think 1999-2001 taught us that the ads as a revenue model thing is very fickle.