Exploring Influence of Advertising Load on User Experience in Online Media (the Case of Sports.ru)

Student: Stambulko Kirill

Supervisor: Evgeny Tsaplin

Educational Programme: Marketing Communications and Advertising in Modern Business (Master)

Year of Graduation: 2019

Significant number of online publishers are being oriented towards advertising business model nowadays. However, internet users still perceive online advertising as irritative phenomenon which affects customer experience of using websites in a bad way and contradicts the product concept of online video that stands for attracting and retaining the audience. The objective of this research is to examine the influence of advertising load on user’s experience within the framework of online publisher Sports.ru and Tribuna Digital. The following empirical methods of research have been employed: exploratory test, depth interviewing, experiment, processing data received through the experiment. The first chapter represents various concepts regarding advertising clutter and perception of clutter by customers in the context of advertising space and particular media as well. Besides theoretical concepts of programmatic technologies implementation in advertising for publishers, types of programmatic purchase and pricing politics have been reviewed. The second chapter defines the main processes of online media and business models types for online publishers and considers approaches and metrics being used for user’s experience within online media evaluation. The third chapter covers methodology of the research representing the first empirical stage that reveals specifics of business models realization by Russian publishers and the second stage that compares average numbers of viewed pages, session’s duration and bounce rate figures among the following groups of website users: registered and non-registered, those who faced with the highest, the middle and the lowest ad load through the t-test for independent samples. As a result three types of advertising load that have been employed within the research appeared to be similar enough from the point of user experience metrics such as depth, duration and rejection. The author proposed recommendations that may be applied by media publishers with the purpose of optimization of ad placement process by virtue of company’s business goals.

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