Digital Advertising's Human Toll: How Implied Cost-to-User Affects Web Content Platforms (A Research Proposal)

Online advertising is a 26 billion industry in the US. While this represents significant income for Web sites hosting such ads, sites need to balance the income against the needs of their audience. Inasmuch as advertisements dissuade users from returning to a site and cause delays and decreases in task performance, their presence extracts a "cost" from users. This proposal discusses exploring drivers of this cost through a laboratory experiment in which subjects navigate a purpose-built Web site in order to complete a task all the while being subjected to a given advertising treatment.