A paper published in the Journal of Marketing Research examines the effects of annoying display advertisements on publishers and users. Animation, poor aesthetics, and questionable advertiser reputability were among the most common reasons for an ad to be deemed annoying.
Results from the empirical work indicate that annoying ads have an effect on content consumption, increasing task completion time and leading to slightly lower accuracy on reading comprehension questions. The authors suggest that publishers may have to compensate for annoying ads to retain users, such as through higher value content. Longer-term costs are possible as well — for example, “upon dropping out, users may decide to never return to the site that annoyed them.”
Read the abstract.
For more on this topic, check out the Advertising Tab in Morning Coffee .
See all 5 Cups articles.