As a general concept, I'm not opposed to having to pay for a service instead of seeing ads. Or even better, to be able to choose whether I want a free service with ads or a paid service with no ads.
But if I'm already paying for the service (in this case, the airline ticket) why are you trying to show me ads? This makes absolutely zero sense
If a customer is using an ad blocker, and they're on your site spending money, then they got to your site without you having to pay anyone for their traffic. They're already higher margin than a customer who you'll have to pay a conversion fee for if they make an attributable purchase on your site.
In the article, a Wizz Air rep explained it’s meant to charge bots and other automations for booking, but is catching users who use ad blockers as a false positive.
Ad blockers blocks ads, it does not block bot detection scripts. Even if ad blockers did block bot detection, all the bot operator have to do is… not run any ad blockers on their puppets?
I think it might make sense assuming that the ticket to "increase price for automation bots" ticket was taken by someone who did not think through the implications, and maybe there wasn't an adequate sprint planning (or maybe place is sort of old fashioned no actual sprint planning) and so nobody else discussed potential downsides.
So instead of getting a bot detection script they rolled their own solution.
Why am I giving them the benefit of a doubt here, because it doesn't really make sense for an airline to want to punish ad blockers.
> Ad blockers blocks ads, it does not block bot detection scripts
While not wrong explicitly, I think that most ad blockers I’ve used are very generous in what they block, incl trackers and other monitoring scripts. In this case, I think it’s reasonable to assume that the statement is true, that blocking or otherwise interfering is messing up bot detection. That said, they could be intentionally misleading in that they are trying to bill ad blockers not bots but don’t want to say it for PR. Especially considering others have said they run a captcha already.
The general concept sounds great, but it never lasts. Even if you’re paying for a service, the company will eventually realize they’re leaving money on the table not showing you ads.
Which is why ads being introduced to a product in any form is a sign to start looking for alternatives. It may not impact your tier yet, but it's only a matter of time before an executive thinks that enabling ads on all tiers is free money. They've already done all the actual work of integrating with an advertising network, and the only thing left is flipping the switch.
> But if I'm already paying for the service (in this case, the airline ticket) why are you trying to show me ads? This makes absolutely zero sense
Personally I find ads on company/commercial websites make the company look very cheap and untrustworthy.
But I'm guessing your purchase of an airline ticket, means that hotels, car rentals and other ads for things in the city you're visiting are far more effective, clickable and profitable.
Hotel affiliate schemes can pay anything from 2-15%. You don't need many of those for hundred dollar hotel bookings to make it more profitable than the actual flight alone.
> make the company look very cheap and untrustworthy
Which WizzAir is. They reschedule or cancel flights all the time, mentioned that you needed a negative covid test during the pandemic and requested a PCR test for boarding, they charge for seats and monetize just about everything. During the flight there's a frenzy of commecrial activity which reminds me of Moroccan bazaars.
I email them to have written conversation in case I need to and resort to the consumer protection authority, which is what is needed most of the time in order to extract refunds from low cost flight operators. Fortunately my most recent WizzAir tickets that needed refunding due to covid-19 flight cancellations were purchased through a ticketing agency, along with other Ryanair return tickets, so I filed my complaint against the agency. It took like 6 months and several e-mail exchanges with two to three week delays between responses to get a 90% refund.
There is no universe where Wizz is earning £10 per visitor booking a ticket through their website. Ads are dollars or parts of a dollar per thousand clicks
It identifies passengers that are not price sensitive. Price sensitive customers are subsidized in all airlines by overcharging customers that are not price sensitive (e.g. business class).
Someone at Wizz skipped the statistics lesson on variance. There is no way an adblocker accurately identifies price sensitivity outside of qualitative handwaving.
Why not? It seems at least somewhat plausible that people who know about ad blockers are technically savvy and technically savvy people do better in the job market, therefore higher income and lower price sensitivity.
Correct. Your comment is qualitative handwaving, an armchair speculation that sounds plausible. Is that enough justification to pend off eventual discrimination lawsuits? I personally doubt it.
Very few companies have the analytics maturity to use A/B testing in production to prove your hand-waving assertion without the effect failing sensitivity checks. And by very few, I point to the ones that hire economists and eocnonetricians en masse as having an inkling and trying to work this out in the ad tech space.
>Correct. Your comment is qualitative handwaving, an armchair speculation that sounds plausible.
As the saying goes, what is asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence. You rag on people for doing "qualitative handwaving" and "armchair speculation", yet you make the claim of "There is no way an adblocker accurately identifies price sensitivity" with nothing but "qualitative handwaving" and "armchair speculation".
>Is that enough justification to pend off eventual discrimination lawsuits? I personally doubt it.
Obviously nothing can fend off "eventual discrimination lawsuits", because anyone can sue for any reason. That said, I find it really a reach to say that discriminating based on ad-blocker status would be construed as discrimination against a protected class in a court of law.
> Very few companies have the analytics maturity to use A/B testing in production to prove your hand-waving assertion without the effect failing sensitivity checks.
Right, that's why I said it was plausible, not that it was a rigorously proven theory.
On the other hand they're flying Wizz Air which is a budget airline so they've implicitly demonstrated their price sensitivity regardless of ad-block usage.
On some routes, there are no alternatives to low-cost airlines if you want a direct flight. For example, when I flew from Prague to Milan a couple of months ago, the options were basically Wizz Air and Ryanair.
We flew 200 euros cheaper to Portugal with TAP and a stop in Lisbon. And they operate flights daily rather than once a weeek. If you add lugagge, seats and other hidden costs, WizzAir stops being low cost.
Recently Wizz bought new Airbus 321 neo jets and operate quite cost competitive flights to Spanish islands, so we decided to put up with their crap for the time being.
Yeah I came home in Italy today from Netherlands it was a 2:40 hrs flight on Transavia, and I had a realisation that I don’t have the age anymore for these kind of airlines and I think I will try to find a better , larger, quieter airline and class from next holiday, it was really hard today, I had a guy next to me that would have needed 2 seats and I couldn’t find a way to seat comfortably to give him space, had to have half body outside in the middle lane , and try to fit back when someone had to pass to go to bathroom, these airlines are shrinking planes like hell and it’s becoming painful
My solution is to avoid flying altogether! I can go many places by car or high speed rail, I can videoconf with anyone in the world; there better be a damn good reason I really must get on a plane and I will get myself a good seat when I do.
Yeah but it still takes 2-3 days to get from Amsterdam to Naples by train, if I had unlimited days off I would do it, but if I have days off that are counted I would rather spend them with the family instead of on a train, another think would be to travel while working, I guess I will try to ask my a employer if that would be a thing to let me do that next time
That's quite a journey, sure, but seeking agreement on working on the train (with a first class seat on a HST that's certainly possible) is a great solution. Maybe meet family in the middle, and force older family members figure out how to VC (been there ;)). Unavoidable travel such as seeing relatives is also a good reason to shell out for good seat on an airplane.
The point isn't (just) to avoid air travel, also to avoid those shitty Ryanair/WizzAir/Easyjet seats/travels ;)
I used to travel between Amsterdam and Lyon, the KLM flight was so much better than Easyjet, in every respect. I didn't have a lot of money, but that splurge on KLM was worth it.
Also, business and holiday travel where I'd seek the easiest wins in terms of just not flying.
First, perhaps not. In that case, the budget airline mindset kicks in: if some people are willing to pay for something, charge differentially.
However, I wouldn't be so sure that £10 per user isn't the actual value of the ad impressions and data. Users who would pay to opt out of ads aren't a random sample. They're adblock using airline ticket buyers who paid for some sort of premium experience. Could easily be a premium segment.
Advertising is valuable, and that value isn't evenly distributed at all.
It you are trying to stay revenue neutral as a company, and want to charge people to avoid ads, you can't just charge them the exact same amount that you make per customer from your ad provider.
People who can afford to pay to avoid seeing advertisements are more valuable to advertisers because they have more money.
What's to say the ad blockers aren't visually hiding upsells though? This might actually cost them a lot of money. There are plenty of visual hiding rules in the most used blocklists.
You are right! I wasn't debating the ethics but the mistaken notion that ads on a website could only give "pennies" of revenue. (aka Cost per impression)
Maybe not a loss from adverts as you book - but knowing when somebody is going to arrive in a city is worth an f'in fortune to hotels looking to shift unsold rooms.
But do they really need some kind of elaborate fingerprint-and-retarget scheme when they've already got your name, address, credit card, and possibly passport details?
The very act of selling over the web in an automated fashion makes the sale cheaper for Wizz compared to selling via a ticket agent. And, no bit of code costs Wizz £10 per sale.
Ad revenue isn't needed to recoup sale-costs, because those exist for people who do not purchase. Those costs are zeroed out for the people who do purchase.
> what you call ads it's actually called upselling.
Are you sure you don't mean cross selling? IIUC upselling means trying to sell a customer a more expensive version of their chosen product, while cross selling means trying to sell extra products which combine well with the customer's chosen product.
Why use a separate term for them? If "upsells" are advertisements from the same company, and "ads" are only advertisements from other companies, what difference does that make to me?
I don't insist that others know the difference between software, a script, a program, and an executable, because my industry jargon isn't relevant to how they are interacting with it. I don't see why the specific jargon of how advertisers categorize or rename their advertisements is necessary for anybody outside of marketing to know.
An hardware store that puts a sign for a particular kind of painting is not doing advertising, it's promoting some product because maybe they have better margins on it or it sold so badly that they wanna get rid of what they have left.
a magazine putting the same product on display is advertising it, because they don't sell it or anything related to it.
if Ryanair showed on their website a link to an anti virus software or garden furniture, that would be plain and simple advertising.
advertising is a specific business
aggregators or Spotify playlists, even though they promote something and might profit from it, are not advertising
cross selling serves the purpose of giving customers options related to the product they are buying or using, like a train company asking if you want to buy food.
cross selling is easy to avoid: just ignore it.
what Ryanair does in cabin is advertising and it's much worse than having to say no to a rental car option in the checkout process.
Why should I want to buy a watch on a plane??
> between software, a script, a program, and an executable,
because they are different representations of the same thing.
> An hardware store that puts a sign for a particular kind of painting is not doing advertising, it's promoting some product because maybe they have better margins on it or it sold so badly that they wanna get rid of what they have left
That sounds like a form of advertising to me. The hardware store is placing something in public view in order to cause a different behavior in the public. That's advertising. Being done in-house, rather than subcontracting out the advertisements to another company, doesn't change its nature.
> cross selling serves the purpose of giving customers options related to the product they are buying or using, like a train company asking if you want to buy food.
So, cross selling is a form of advertisement, done for a different department within the same company.
> cross selling is easy to avoid: just ignore it.
I wouldn't say it is easy to "just" ignore any type of advertisement. They are crafted to be as difficult to ignore as possible.
> because they are different representations of the same thing.
Exactly! Just as a "script" and a "program" are technical terms that are merely different representations of the same thing, calling it "cross selling" or "up selling" or "promotions" are just different representations of advertising. There's no difference to the public between them.
Advertising is when they pay you to advertise the product.
Advertising is a marketing communication that employs an openly sponsored, non-personal message to promote or sell a product, service or idea. Sponsors of advertising are typically businesses wishing to promote their products or services. Advertising is differentiated from public relations in that an advertiser pays for and has control over the message. It differs from personal selling in that the message is non-personal, i.e., not directed to a particular individual
> Exactly! Just as a "script" and a "program" are technical terms that are merely different representations of the same thing, calling it "cross selling" or "up selling" or "promotions" are just different representations of advertising. There's no difference to the public between them.
No.
Baguette, ciabatta and pita are all different kinds of bread.
Just like a script and an executable are both software artifacts.
But pizza is not bread, even though it is made with the same ingredients, like a script is not a natively compiled program and an executable cannot be edited in a text editor and be run again or executed on an unsupported architecture.
Up/Cross selling is selling, advertising is advertising.
If you gloss over the distinction, you could say that Google Ads is the same thing as Amazon, because both display links to products you can buy.
> Advertising is a marketing communication that employs an openly sponsored, non-personal message to promote or sell a product, service or idea.
Applying this definition to cross-selling:
> marketing communication
Putting a sign out for another product you sell is a form of marketing, and is intended to communicate to the reader.
> openly sponsored
Cross-selling messaging is openly sponsored by the company, and appears as a message from the company.
> non-personal message
Cross-selling isn't being sent directly to me, nor is it specifically aimed around me. It may be targeted toward people who fall into a similar category, but it isn't a personal message to me.
> to promote or sell
Cross-selling is an attempt to sell something.
> a product, service, or idea.
No restriction here about it being a product/service/idea sold by a different company, so this applies to cross-selling.
It meets every part of the definition you gave, and therefore pushes for cross-selling are a form of advertising.
Edit: Perhaps you're confused about the use of "that employs"? In this usage, "employs" doesn't mean "has a contractual relationship with" but instead means "uses".
Advertising is differentiated from public relations in that an advertiser pays for and has control over the message
me promoting a product I sell is not advertising. It's business. Businesses work on client's trust, promote a bad product, they'll leave you for someone else.
Sellers are not advertiser and vice versa.
Advertisers don't lose their job if they advertise a bad product, their job is to create a campaign for the product, their reputation does not depend on the quality of the product, but only on the quality of the ad.
Adding a feature to a software product is not marketing, it's a way to have an edge on the competition (or be on par)
If everything is advertising, than me giving you the phone number of my dentist should be advertising.
If I pay for signage, or if I pay somebody else to put up signage, I've paid either way. I also ignored that sentence as it was adding clarification, not changing the initial definition.
Giving me the phone number of your dentist would be a personal message, so it wouldn't be "advertising". It also wouldn't be paid for by your dentist, so not advertising.
> If I pay for signage, or if I pay somebody else to put up signage, I've paid either way. I also ignored that sentence as it was adding clarification, not changing the initial definition.
Moving the goalpost
I explicitly made the example of an hardware store putting the signage for its own good
> I also ignored that sentence as it was adding clarification, not changing the initial definition.
clarification is what makes all the difference.
> Giving me the phone number of your dentist would be a personal message". It also wouldn't be paid for by your dentist, so not advertising
Funny that ADV nowadays says the same thing: "we think you might like this"
My dentist might also reward me for sending a new client.
The real difference is I don't sell dentists phone numbers as a job, that's why it is not advertising.
Like the hardware store sells wall paint and want people to tell their friends "try that store, they have this amazing wall paint, you won't be disappointed"
This is really really reductive. There is a range of prices that people will pay, and the final ticket price is probably a a study of how long it would take to pay off a project with a range of demand levels. As a plus, advertising is more effective with more traffic, so lower prices to get more demand and offsetting that with ads could be worthwhile.
Now tbh, I have no idea if this is how it works. Just my own reasoning about things.
Yes, also, all airlines have ads visible to you. The name on of the airline is a big billboard on every plane. It's not actually necessary. I'm honestly surprised airlines don't put more ads on their planes, but perhaps there is some regulation preventing that.
“We ask that you pay attention to the security presentation - which conveniently is now bookended by ads that of course cannot be skipped and since audio comes out of the plane’s PA, everybody has to put up with”.
I'm honestly surprised airlines don't put more ads on their planes, but perhaps there is some regulation preventing that.
More due to cost than regulation --- painting a plane is not cheap. Hence why their name (which of course doesn't change often if at all) and the mandatory information like registration ID is usually all they have.
It is so expensive that airlines will often not repaint planes even after a rebrand (and sometimes after an acquire) until such time as it becomes necessary.
Making ads optional is often suggested, sometimes tried, and there aren't many success stories. Most successful combinations of ad/payment commercial strategies aren't customer choice scenarios.
Most subscription papers made more on ads than subscriptions, but subscribership made ads sell at a premium. The stable revenue is nice too. Ryanair clones use advertising as within their get-an-extra-penny ethos. Buses and such do the same.
A lot of people seem to like the theory of paid opt-out... but that doesn't seem to be a thing.
YouTube premium seems to be a counterexample. I wonder why it's managed to stick around (and be pushed so hard) when other pay-for-no-ads attempts have failed (either before or after they launched).
The thing that's interesting is that according to what I've heard, it seems that YouTubers do actually make more money off of YouTube Premium viewers than they would off of advertisements from free users, on average. Now this could be false or dependent on channel, but that I can't answer.
The fact that this even can be the case, though, I find interesting. It makes me wonder if YouTube is either subsidizing YouTube premium payouts, or simply waiting to squeeze the margins until there's more revenue. But if this is sustainable today, it seems promising.
Two things I've noticed is this:
- YouTubers pick up paid sponsorships in addition to advertisements presumably because today's viewership doesn't provide a good stable revenue, especially due to issues like demonetization. However, many videos that get demonetized are actually still eligible for revenue from YouTube Premium, according to LTT.
- Paid sponsors are much more likely to have no problems with edgier YouTubers and podcasters. I believe this to be a net good, especially since YouTube flourished as an edgy, scrappy alternative to traditional video content (maybe somewhat similar to how Flash games were a sort of edgy, scrappy alternative to conventional video games.)
I don't really want to pay Google more money, but I don't see serious alternatives to YouTube popping up, so I really hope the subscription model can work this way. Even if I have to skip or even sit through sponsor segments here and there, it feels like it's part of what could help save YouTube from just continuing to degrade into another version of TV that somehow is even more crappy and oversaturated. And some YouTubers even make the sponsor segments genuinely entertaining. (I think Internet Historian is a good example here, though as a warning his content is probably more crude than his name is evoking if you've never heard of the channel.)
I occasionally run into issues with the Android TV app where I have to kill and restart it for the premium subscription to kick back in. As far as I know, YouTube Premium really does get rid of all video ads, although they do offer a confusing "Free With Ads" benefit for movies. (Why anyone would want to watch movies on YouTube when there's so much great video native to the platform is beyond me, and it's a giant misstep by Google imo.)
Maybe you’re conflating in-video sponsorships with ads? If you’re signed into YouTube Premium the system won’t serve you ads in that browser/app, but obviously a video creator can still read a sponsorship message.
Paramount+ (formerly CBS All Access)? As far as I know it still offers two subscription modes, ad and ad-free, and subscriber stats on Wikipedia seem to be trending in a positive direction.
But I think the real issue is this: aside from services that use ads as an explicit differentiator, there is really no reason for a service that charges customers not to also add ads. It's just extra revenue. The only reason I could see for services not wanting to do this is when they want to specifically cultivate a "premium" feel. Cable in the US was/is a classic example: people paid inordinate feels for access, and then also put up with ads on top of it all. And for a large segment of the population, cable was so ubiquitous as to be unthinkable not to subscribe to it.
That's a good counterpoint, but to play devils advocate online ads seem to degrade user experience more than a static advert. Seeing a printed ad on the side of a bus doesn't make more hassle or slow me from getting from Point-A to Point-B while online pop-ups do.
Do those ads at all block/interfere with my ability to ride the bus/train? Do they use up (steal) my (artificially) limited public transit mileage (bandwidth/data-cap)? Do those ads track my bus/train trip and sell that info to other transit businesses? There's a pretty significant difference between those passive ads one sees (or ignores) on a bus or train and the sort of constant abusive behaviors we see from Internet advertisers.
But if I'm already paying for the service (in this case, the airline ticket) why are you trying to show me ads? This makes absolutely zero sense