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The cost of annoying ads

Published: 13 May 2013 Publication History

Abstract

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 first 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 different 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., 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 findings could affect the economics of Internet advertising.

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Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
WWW '13: Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web
May 2013
1628 pages
ISBN:9781450320351
DOI:10.1145/2488388

Sponsors

  • NICBR: Nucleo de Informatcao e Coordenacao do Ponto BR
  • CGIBR: Comite Gestor da Internet no Brazil

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 13 May 2013

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Author Tags

  1. advertising
  2. compensating differential
  3. display
  4. quality

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

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WWW '13
Sponsor:
  • NICBR
  • CGIBR
WWW '13: 22nd International World Wide Web Conference
May 13 - 17, 2013
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

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WWW '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 125 of 831 submissions, 15%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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  • (2022)Characterizing Sponsored Content in Facebook and InstagramProceedings of the 33rd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media10.1145/3511095.3531289(52-63)Online publication date: 28-Jun-2022
  • (2022)Algorithms: The New Leaders of the Advertising MarketAchieving Business Competitiveness in a Digital Environment10.1007/978-3-030-93131-5_5(121-149)Online publication date: 22-Jan-2022
  • (2021)What Makes a “Bad” Ad? User Perceptions of Problematic Online AdvertisingProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445459(1-24)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
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  • (2019)Effective, Privacy-First Display AdvertisingCyber Law, Privacy, and Security10.4018/978-1-5225-8897-9.ch014(267-291)Online publication date: 2019
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