Empirical Evaluation Of Cost Of Annoying Ads

Viewers often react negatively to advertising they view as unpleasant. In this paper, we show that this negative reaction is not confined to the brand being advertised, but also effects the medium through which that ad was delivered. Using data from three large scale natural experiments (N= 10M) on the Yahoo front page to evaluate both short and long-term impacts of intrusive ads, we show that people actively avoid Yahoo after being shown intrusive ads on our home page. We saw as much as 6% less traffic, searches and clicks from people shown intrusive ads, and showed that this reduction continues over sixty days. We ran a Mechanical Turk study to measure visitors’ perceptions of ads, confirming that the ads different significantly in intrusiveness. We conclude by evaluating the long-term financial impact for Yahoo in terms of lost revenue, and contrast it with the advertising revenue, concluding that current pricing for front page ads does not suitably take into account the additional lost revenue from intrusive advertising.