If you’ve ever wished that you could banish advertisements from the Internet forever with the wave of a hand, here’s a dose of reality for you: getting the same exact stuff sans ads would cost you hundreds per year.
That’s according to a study conducted by Ebuzzing, a video advertisement firm. What they did was simple; they took the amount of money spent on Internet advertising in the U.K. last year, and divided that by the number of people who use the Internet there. That works out to 6.4 billion pounds, or roughly $10.6 billion, divided by 45 million people.
Plug those numbers in, and you get an annual cost of 140 pounds per year for ad-free Internet. That converts to about $232. People are upset enough already by high cable and Internet service costs, and if you doubt whether most people would shell out that kind of cash for ad-free Internet, you’d be right.
Ebuzzing hired another company, Censuswide, to survey 1,400 people in the U.K., asking them whether they would be willing to pay that kind of money for an Internet devoid of advertisements. 98 percent of those 1,400 folks said that they would not want to pay that amount.
There is a silver lining though; more than 25 percent respondents would be more willing to put up with ads if they provided a laugh, or were otherwise entertaining. 21 percent said that ads should be less than a minute long, while 16 percent said that the ads in front of them should be revelant to whatever they’re doing online at that moment.
“We need to get better at engaging, not better at interrupting,” Jeremy Arditi, Ebuzzing’s U.K. managing director says. “That means introducing new formats which consumers find less invasive, more creative ads that are better placed, and giving consumers a degree of choice and control.”
Mr. Arditi seems to get it, but many more companies have to commit themselves to changing how Internet advertising works in order for big changes to be made.
Until then, ad blockers and the “X” button on Web browsers will continue to remain very popular.
