paywalls vs. permission ads:
In December Advertising Age’s Mike Vorhaus asked online readers how much they’d be willing to pay for an ad-free version of a favoured website. Turns out even if we dislike ads, we detest paywalls more. Survey results show 70% of respondents were unwilling to pay anything at all, not even 10 cents a day, for ad-free sites. Only 4% agreed to the dime-a-day subscription fee.
Alongside the increasingly ingrained expectation that online media content should be free, users are growing more tolerant of ad-supported online services. Research indicates that teens report feeling indifferent to ads online (but hate them on their mobile phones), and that the majority accept the hypercommercialization of the Internet as business-as-usual.
This might explain why most respondents to the AdAge survey were uninterested in forking over cash for a commercial-free website visit. What’s one ad-free zone really worth, to online surfers, skimmers, scanners, and glancers who rapidly bounce between sites, most of which are framed/inundated with banners, popups, interstitial, and Google AdSense sidebars?
Instead of charging users to opt-out and skip ads, a permission marketing approach lets users opt-in see relevant adverts. This option has widespread appeal, as evidenced in a 2008 study from TNS Global, which found that more than half of consumers would be willing to fill out an anonymous survey in order to receive highly targeted ads. So apparently folks are more willing to invest their time and hand over their personal prefs to data-miners in exchange for a little relevancy on the commercial web, rather than to fork over that dime-a-day for a miniscule slice and fleeting moment of ad-free Net.
