I don’t mind internet ads, not at all actually as long as they don’t slow down a page too much. Non-hobby websites must be profitable to earn their existence and I don’t mind seeing ads on the sites I choose to visit. I’ve even clicked a few. Ads are not there because someone wants to pay to ruin my web experience but because someone has something they think it’s worth spending money telling me about. So they can make money of course. So I think of ads as funding the sites I like to visit and without them some sites would simply not exist. I’ve even found some nice, cool and interesting things by clicking on ads that had a message that appealed to me.

The next big thing in internet advertising according to this sales letter is audio ads. Reading that got me thinking about how it would be if that became common.

I listen to music when I’m in front of my computer, almost all the time. Either using speakers or headphones and I dread the day when the web becomes full of noise that interfere with what I actually want to listen to. There are already video ads with audio but fortunately the ones that starts playing sound without user interaction are few so far.

For a site owner though these kind of audio ads have a couple of benefits(given it doesn’t scare the visitors away). They are invisible, hence don’t take up any space and ruin the looks of a page and they bring additional income.

With visible ads it’s measurable how many times an ad has been displayed or how many times a link has been clicked. With sound, there is no way of measuring if someone as actually heard it. This is something they have already taken into account. They expect 20% of the played ads to actually be heard by someone. I think that sounds like a reasonable number, until it becomes common knowledge how to avoid the audio for those ads to ever reach the eardrums!