Online banner ads are not the advertising industry’s most glorious achievement. From the pop-up to the sudden blast of music, the clickbait to the nonsensically animated gifs, the stroboscope to the advert that simply appears to have a spider scurrying across it, there seems to be no end to the ways in which banner advertisements can annoy us.
Up to a point, this is part of the deal. Publishers offer something we want to look at, our attention is worth money to advertisers, and the advertisements help to pay for the content we’re enjoying. But how annoying does an ad have to be before a website should refuse to run it? While the question is obvious, the answer is not: it’s hard for publishers to know how much the adverts may be driving readers away.
Daniel Goldstein, Preston McAfee and Siddharth Suri, all now at Microsoft Research, have run experiments to throw light on this question. (They are, respectively, a psychologist, an economist and a computer scientist; do send in your suggested punchlines.)