Latitude

“Free” is a Crowd

Over the past several months, I’ve watched a lot of my favorite information sites become overcrowded with advertisements, to the extent that it interferes with my experience of the content there.

The necessity of developing new business models around digital content is written in the encroaching minefield of flashy visual ads and all-too-familiar Google AdWords for which many online readers have developed a blindspot, except insofar as the stealthy avoidance of them is concerned.

The Cross-Subsidy Approach to Digital Access

To avoid affronting core communities at large with new charges, providers of digital services and content have caught onto the necessity of cross-subsidizing:

In the digital realm, the “freemium” model offers the elusive free lunch. Many millions of Skype users, for instance, making voice and video calls over the Internet, pay nothing at all, subsidized by a smaller group of customers who pay for additional functionality. The free service is a loss leader (and cheap marketing) for premium paid services.”

Wall Street Journal, “To Rake It In, Give It Away”

For digital content providers, new models for monetization have centered around premium content production in some form, such as GigaOM Pro, which offers higher quality “insider analyst research and commentary.”

Take It Away, Folks

In the spirit of DVDs, iTunes video downloads, and now more and more web and mobile applications, it’s a wonder that digital content providers don’t consider subtracting advertisements to improve the experiences of select users who are willing to pay for the “upgraded” environment.

From the standpoint of online user psychology, we accept that content is free (erroneously). But we also accept the presence of advertisements that make our site experiences less enjoyable. It seems therein lies the problem and one potential solution (given that this is the age of choice and customization, “solutions” needn’t be mutually exclusive).

What We’ve Found

Across recent studies, Latitude found that people–especially those who interact more heavily with digital content–are more likely to notice and to appreciate design, as well as multimedia integrations that improve their online experiences.

Individuals who interact often with digital content have also shown a tendency to be more aware of the advertising in their online environments (regardless of whether their impressions were positive or negative) and only a marked preference for ads that provide them with useful information (rather than entertainment-based ads or ads that break up or supplement content, with no delineated purpose of their own).

Essentially, the promise of “higher quality” premium content from a particular provider (especially when one has been happy with the free offerings thus far) is a vague, if worthwhile, one. But one knows exactly what an “ad-free” content environment means, concretely, as well as its personal value to himself, in this ad-overrun status quo.

Header image courtesy of omaromar’s flickr, (cc) some rights reserved.