
Annoying Online Ads Do Cost Business - collinmanderson
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/annoying-ads-cost-business/
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collinmanderson
> The researchers studied 35 million users of the Pandora streaming music
> service during the period from June 2014 to March 2016. Because of the large
> sample size, all the findings in the study are statistically significant at
> the p < .01 level, and I won’t even bother discussing the statistical
> analyses, which you can find in the full paper.

> 18.3 million users were assigned to a control group who used the normal
> Pandora service with its normal amount of advertising: 3.6 ads per hours of
> listening.

> 1.8 million users were assigned to a low-ad group who were served 25% less
> advertising than the control group (2.7 ads per hour).

> 1.8 million users were assigned to a high-ad group who were served 38% more
> advertising than the control group (5.0 ads per hour).

>(13 million users were assigned to intermediate treatment groups that I will
not discuss further.) The results are clear, though not as striking as I would
have expected: after 1.5 years of being exposed to the experimental
conditions, people did use the service more, the fewer ads they were served.
At the end of the experiment:

> The low-ad group listened for 1.7% more hours weekly than the control group.

> The high-ad group listened for 2.8% fewer hours weekly than the control
> group.

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ddtaylor
Do they know if any of the affected base had ad blockers installed? Pandora
does get ads skipped when I use uBlock Origin as does Spotify web player.

Also, not that I expect them to model it, I am willing to guess that users
with a hardware volume knob are less likely to care about ads or workers that
take breaks during ad time.

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sharemywin
Isn't this just a demand curve where price is in minutes. you raise prices
sales go down.

