Would you rather have ads or pay for on-line content?

85% say give us ads.  75% say they would drastically reduce their online activities if they had to pay.

In fact, Americans assigned a value of nearly $1,200 per year to the array of free, ad-supported services and content currently available to them on computers and mobile devices, according to a survey conducted by Zogby Analytics. That’s nearly $100 a month.  If they had to pay for that, they wouldn’t access the content.

Commissioned by the Digital Advertising Alliance , the Zogby Analytics poll tracked more than 1,000 adults.  They were asked to estimate how much people would have to pay for 17 different online services, from news to video, weather to email if they were offered up on a subscription only basis instead of being “free with ads.  Significantly, respondents assigned a combined value of$99.77 per month to this combined package of free, ad-supported services – or $1,197.24 per year.

“This survey shines a spotlight on the critical role that ad-supported content and services play in the lives of nearly every American, and it underscores the importance of the DAA’s role in providing meaningful, accountable consumer choice for interest-based advertising to help fund that ecosystem.” – Lou Mastria, Executive Director of the DAA.

Among the survey’s findings:

• Consumers assigned an aggregate value of $99.77 per month to a package of 17 major types of ad-supported services and content.
• The vast majority of respondents (85 percent) said they would prefer to have today’s ad-supported Internet where most content is free, rather than a paid Internet where everything costs money because there is no advertising (15 percent).

  

• An equally large majority said they would reduce their online and mobile activities a great deal (75 percent) or somewhat (11 percent) if they had to pay several hundred dollars a year or more for the ad-supported content and services they use that are currently free.
• Nine in ten respondents said that free Internet content like news, weather, e-mail and blogs were either very important (73 percent) or somewhat important (17 percent) to them.
• Eighty percent of respondents said they had found ads useful in finding new products, researching a purchase, or assisting with the shopping process.
• The types of advertising that consumers had found most useful were movies/TV shows (43 percent), technology/devices (37 percent), clothing (36 percent), local restaurants (34 percent), groceries (33 percent), phone/Internet services (32 percent), and travel (30 percent).

“Consumers see tremendous value in the ad-supported content and services they use, and they overwhelmingly support the current ad-supported model.”

The Zogby survey’s full findings can be found on the DAA website.