7 ms·

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 w

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

krm01 4y ago
Perhaps the ads help make it cheaper
- paradaux 4y ago
  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
  - ErikVandeWater 4y ago
    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).
    - tomrod 4y ago
      Someone at Wizz skipped the statistics lesson on variance. There is no way an adblocker accurately identifies price sensitivity outside of qualitative handwaving.
      - krisoft 4y ago
        > There is no way an adblocker accurately identifies price sensitivity outside of qualitative handwaving. Perhaps they are banking on this information becoming public knowledge, so it can become a signal? :)
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - gruez 4y ago
        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.
        tomrod 4y ago
        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.
        gruez 4y ago
        >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.
        Nextgrid 4y ago
        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.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      Anybody flying Wizz Air is price sensitive.
      - jltsiren 4y ago
        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.
        tomrod 4y ago
        No alternative means the outside option is to not fly, so your price sensitivity is impacted.
      - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
        Most of Wizz flights are short. Most people will be price sensitive for short flights. Why pay more for what is only two to three hours in a plane?
        lnxg33k1 4y ago
        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
        InCityDreams 4y ago
        Charge fat people more?
        brnt 4y ago
  - bhedgeoser 4y ago
    Google is the only thing losing a lot of money because of adblockers. They told them to do it?
  - jpalomaki 4y ago
    Might be valuable if you can monetize the information that this person is looking to travel to certain location at certain time. To my knowledge, there’s different systems that are collecting this kind of information and then driving highly targeted marketing based on that.
    - fsckboy 4y ago
      this is a very good answer, sells hotel ads, car rentals, restaurants, casinos, stage shows, theme parks...
      - quickthrower2 4y ago
        Sites already do this on a commission basis in the same flow which would be more money than running ads.
  - dalbasal 4y ago
    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.
  - goldcd 4y ago
    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.
    - mattkrause 4y ago
      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?
      - vineyardmike 4y ago
        Who says anything about tracking tech? Show the ad right at checkout when the person is booking the travel… yanno on the site they booked the flight. The point isn’t getting info, it’s up selling in the moment.
  - cortesoft 4y ago
    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.
  - zapt02 4y ago
    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.
    - lodovic 4y ago
      That's like charging a blind person more because they can't see the in-store promotions.
      - zapt02 4y ago
        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)
- ErikVandeWater 4y ago
  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.
  - loloquwowndueo 4y ago
    More ads? “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”.
    - rad_gruchalski 4y ago
      The sefaty presentation will continue after an add.
  - userbinator 4y ago
    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.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      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.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  it doesn't make sense anyway. Me blocking ads should make flights less cheap for everybody, not more expensive only for me. Ads are not part of the deal when I am buying flight tickets. Unless they can prove me blocking ads costed them 10 pounds and I have accepted those terms.
  - comprev 4y ago
    When flying with Ryanair you're bombarded with ads - from car hire, to package holidays in hotels, to meal bundles and even scratch cards (!!) All the products/services are Ryanair branded mind but it's still quite full-on.
    - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
      > you're bombarded with ads what you call ads it's actually called upselling. I can buy none of those items and the price of the ticket will not increase. I do not travel Ryanair because I cannot skip the in cabin ads. But even if I did use their services, wearing noise canceling headphones would not cost me more.
      - acka 4y ago
        > 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.
      - inferiorhuman 4y ago
        You get all that shit with United (and I suspect other American based carriers) too. It's tacky but that's modern air travel for you.
      - MereInterest 4y ago
        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.
- teeray 4y ago
  Or, it could be the same price, but an airline MBA wants to squeeze out some ad impressions from you along with your full-price ticket.
- gaze 4y ago
  This is never how it works out. The ticket price is set to what people will pay for it. Everything else — ads and all, are just additional profit.
  - mym1990 4y ago
    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.
    - gaze 4y ago
      Why would you ask for less money than you could get?
- IncRnd 4y ago
  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.
dalbasal 4y ago
The general concept is, IMO, deceiving. 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.
- bruckie 4y ago
  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).
  - macintux 4y ago
    Sort of. Arguably the sponsored ads in many videos argues against it being a true counterexample.
    - jchw 4y ago
      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.)
criddell 4y ago
Are you opposed to having ads plastered on the insides of public transit vehicles?
- bumby 4y ago
  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.
- blooalien 4y ago
  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.
- dontlaugh 4y ago
  I am.
- bombcar 4y ago
  I’d rather they didn’t exist and I feel public transit shouldn’t be dependent on the whims of advertisers.
  - coin 4y ago
    They operate at a loss so every extra dollar counts
    - criddell 4y ago
      The police also operate at a loss. Perhaps we should put ads on police cars?
jameshart 4y ago
Actually probably makes less than 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.
jasonlingx 4y ago
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.
- vachina 4y ago
  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? Wizz Air’s explanation smells like bs.
  - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
    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.
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    > 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.
NotYourLawyer 4y ago
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.
- MereInterest 4y ago
  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.
helsinkiandrew 4y ago
> 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.
- petre 4y ago
  > 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.
  - ciceryadam 4y ago
    Plus they don't have a toll free number to call - for most countries it's even more expensive to call them than regular numbers, essentially making the call center revenue generating: https://wizzair.com/en-gb/information-and-services/contact/contact-us https://wizzair.com/en-gb/information-and-services/contact/c...
    - petre 4y ago
      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.

krm01 4y ago

Perhaps the ads help make it cheaper

paradaux 4y ago
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
- ErikVandeWater 4y ago
  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).
  - tomrod 4y ago
    Someone at Wizz skipped the statistics lesson on variance. There is no way an adblocker accurately identifies price sensitivity outside of qualitative handwaving.
    - krisoft 4y ago
      > There is no way an adblocker accurately identifies price sensitivity outside of qualitative handwaving. Perhaps they are banking on this information becoming public knowledge, so it can become a signal? :)
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - gruez 4y ago
      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.
      - tomrod 4y ago
        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.
        gruez 4y ago
        >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.
      - Nextgrid 4y ago
        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.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Anybody flying Wizz Air is price sensitive.
    - jltsiren 4y ago
      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.
      - tomrod 4y ago
        No alternative means the outside option is to not fly, so your price sensitivity is impacted.
    - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
      Most of Wizz flights are short. Most people will be price sensitive for short flights. Why pay more for what is only two to three hours in a plane?
      - lnxg33k1 4y ago
        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
        InCityDreams 4y ago
        Charge fat people more?
        brnt 4y ago
- bhedgeoser 4y ago
  Google is the only thing losing a lot of money because of adblockers. They told them to do it?
- jpalomaki 4y ago
  Might be valuable if you can monetize the information that this person is looking to travel to certain location at certain time. To my knowledge, there’s different systems that are collecting this kind of information and then driving highly targeted marketing based on that.
  - fsckboy 4y ago
    this is a very good answer, sells hotel ads, car rentals, restaurants, casinos, stage shows, theme parks...
    - quickthrower2 4y ago
      Sites already do this on a commission basis in the same flow which would be more money than running ads.
- dalbasal 4y ago
  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.
- goldcd 4y ago
  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.
  - mattkrause 4y ago
    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?
    - vineyardmike 4y ago
      Who says anything about tracking tech? Show the ad right at checkout when the person is booking the travel… yanno on the site they booked the flight. The point isn’t getting info, it’s up selling in the moment.
- cortesoft 4y ago
  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.
- zapt02 4y ago
  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.
  - lodovic 4y ago
    That's like charging a blind person more because they can't see the in-store promotions.
    - zapt02 4y ago
      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)
ErikVandeWater 4y ago
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.
- loloquwowndueo 4y ago
  More ads? “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”.
  - rad_gruchalski 4y ago
    The sefaty presentation will continue after an add.
- userbinator 4y ago
  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.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    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.
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
it doesn't make sense anyway. Me blocking ads should make flights less cheap for everybody, not more expensive only for me. Ads are not part of the deal when I am buying flight tickets. Unless they can prove me blocking ads costed them 10 pounds and I have accepted those terms.
- comprev 4y ago
  When flying with Ryanair you're bombarded with ads - from car hire, to package holidays in hotels, to meal bundles and even scratch cards (!!) All the products/services are Ryanair branded mind but it's still quite full-on.
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    > you're bombarded with ads what you call ads it's actually called upselling. I can buy none of those items and the price of the ticket will not increase. I do not travel Ryanair because I cannot skip the in cabin ads. But even if I did use their services, wearing noise canceling headphones would not cost me more.
    - acka 4y ago
      > 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.
    - inferiorhuman 4y ago
      You get all that shit with United (and I suspect other American based carriers) too. It's tacky but that's modern air travel for you.
    - MereInterest 4y ago
      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.
teeray 4y ago
Or, it could be the same price, but an airline MBA wants to squeeze out some ad impressions from you along with your full-price ticket.
gaze 4y ago
This is never how it works out. The ticket price is set to what people will pay for it. Everything else — ads and all, are just additional profit.
- mym1990 4y ago
  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.
  - gaze 4y ago
    Why would you ask for less money than you could get?
IncRnd 4y ago
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.

dalbasal 4y ago

The general concept is, IMO, deceiving. 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.

bruckie 4y ago
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).
- macintux 4y ago
  Sort of. Arguably the sponsored ads in many videos argues against it being a true counterexample.
  - jchw 4y ago
    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.)

criddell 4y ago

Are you opposed to having ads plastered on the insides of public transit vehicles?

bumby 4y ago
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.
blooalien 4y ago
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.
dontlaugh 4y ago
I am.
bombcar 4y ago
I’d rather they didn’t exist and I feel public transit shouldn’t be dependent on the whims of advertisers.
- coin 4y ago
  They operate at a loss so every extra dollar counts
  - criddell 4y ago
    The police also operate at a loss. Perhaps we should put ads on police cars?

jameshart 4y ago

Actually probably makes less than 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.

jasonlingx 4y ago

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.

vachina 4y ago
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? Wizz Air’s explanation smells like bs.
- bryanrasmussen 4y ago
  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.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  > 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.

NotYourLawyer 4y ago

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.

MereInterest 4y ago
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.

helsinkiandrew 4y ago

> 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.

petre 4y ago
> 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.
- ciceryadam 4y ago
  Plus they don't have a toll free number to call - for most countries it's even more expensive to call them than regular numbers, essentially making the call center revenue generating: https://wizzair.com/en-gb/information-and-services/contact/contact-us https://wizzair.com/en-gb/information-and-services/contact/c...
  - petre 4y ago
    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.