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We May Hate Ads But Are We Willing to Pay?
When we asked consumers if they would pay $39.99 a year, which comes out to less than $4 a month, for an ad-free version of one of their favorite sites, only 2.4% said definitely yes, they would be likely to do so. And only 3.5% said they’d be very likely. In fact, 84% of the people said they’d be unlikely or not at all likely.
At the lower price of $29.99 a year, or less than $3 a month, only another 1.9% of consumers said they would be very likely to pay for an ad-free version.
What does this tell me? Consumers might “hate ads,” but not enough to pay even as little as a few cents a day to avoid them.
I think they just haven’t found the right model. My proposal?
When I was a child every mother collected S&H Greenstamps, and spent an inordinate amount of time sticking those stamps in books. Imagine a digital variation. The more ads we watch the more digital stamps we collect.
The kind and number of “stamps” offered could be targeted by age, geography, and a host of other demographic data. Instead of sticking them in books we could have an ad infested webquest game.
Ads as fun; targeted and relevant to us so ads we want. Winners all around.
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2 Responses to “We May Hate Ads But Are We Willing to Pay?”
Joe your proposal is almost exactly what I thought of when discussing it with my friend a couple days ago. I had a slightly expanded version though:
You can buy credits directly with cash.
You can earn credits by watching ads.
You can earn many more credits by clicking through ads and making purchases (the number of credits proportional to your purchase of course).
You can earn credits by being the content producer and earn a cut from all the people that earn credits by watching ads on your site or buying stuff through the ads on your site. The latter can turn directly into cash like it can now through AdSense, etc. but of course keeping it as digital credits to consume internet would give you a lot more “value.”
Of course I also pronounced that Web 3.0 would see the stratification of professional and hobbyist sites, where hobbyist things like Youtube, blogs, etc. run on a P2P backbone that has distributed load and the only central sever is trackers…so basically Bittorrent for everything. The professional sites would still have centralized distribution and run on an ad “stamp” model like you talk about.
Maybe what the numbers mean is that people basically don't pay attention to ads.