A website with a barrage of advertisements (Lauren Chavez / The Puma Prensa)
by Lauren Chavez, Co-Executive Editor
If you’ve spent any time online in the past couple years, you’ve probably noticed and felt some level of frustration about the sheer amount of ads that appear on websites, streaming services, and videos — seemingly everywhere. No matter how much money you might pay to upgrade your package or have access to a higher tier, there’s just nothing you can do to escape the colorful, loud pop-ups. It might seem like you can’t get through two minutes of a YouTube video without having to sit through another ad, and scrolling through Pinterest has become almost impossible. But have you thought about why this is, and what this means for our algorithms and the future of online consumer experiences?
When looking at why there seems to be such a large influx of advertisements, the answer can’t be attributed to just one simple reason. For one thing, those who create and run ads have realized that displaying them on TV during commercial breaks isn’t nearly as effective as it once was. Not as many people watch television today than they once did, which happens to be a result of the increasing rise in popularity of the Internet being used for entertainment. Wanting to make as much money as possible, ad-runners have shifted the main harbor for commercials from television to internet services, because when someone is scrolling through a website or opening an app daily, their eyes immediately jump to the advertisements that cover the page, maximizing the likelihood that they will invest in what the ad is promoting.
Advertisers have also begun to catch onto the impact of influencers and content creators, knowing that they will be more than willing to promote their products across their social media pages and their ads will get more engagement.
In order to keep people using a free service, usually a hallmark of a new website, you also have to run a ton of ads in order to keep the page running. Most people will stop using something if they need to pay for a subscription, and with more and more start-ups and new companies popping up everyday, an influx in ads on websites isn’t surprising.
It’s also worth thinking about the conflicting effects that ads have. Many companies will use ads because people are more likely to interact with something personalized to what they’re already looking at, but we’ve seen the annoyance and frustration that actually ends up resulting from the commercials, and it’s likely that people will even leave a website and stop interacting with it because of the amount of ads.
So, what exactly does all of this mean about how we might deal with this problem in the future? Clearly, there aren’t many options that we have to get around the ads. If they’re there, we complain about them. If they’re not, a website dies because it doesn’t have funding. The presence of these ads is largely a byproduct of the time we’re living in, and there doesn’t seem to be much that can be done unless websites and companies are able to receive money in a different way. Of course, there are always ad-blockers that you can download and use on your own devices, but these aren’t always reliable and because the money made from advertisements is based on impressions that are created when an ad forms, companies actually lose 10 to 40 percent of their total revenue because of ad blockers. In turn, the customer experience is still being hurt by a short-term solution because it’s like the website will die out from lack of funding.
Right now, there seems to be no easy way out. If we want to reduce the amount of commercials we’re bombarded with everyday, we’ll have to come up with a way to make sure companies still receive the funding they need in a way that remains ethical and appealing to everyone.