The NYT has caught onto web video ads. (For my initial report on this, read my column in 2.0 from last year). The news: The ads seem to be working….The caption from the Times piece says it all, in terms of how Big Media views this: “Such ads have annoyed far fewer viewers than expected.” What do you know!
An online survey of 1,700 Internet users who saw the full-motion commercials, which ran from late January until late February, showed that viewers found them less annoying than some marketers had expected. Indeed, just 28 percent found them annoying – compared with 38 percent of TV viewers, on average, who found commercials annoying in three separate studies. The survey on Web commercials was paid for by the advertisers.