[gwern]

I don't know about 'authoritative', but ads do seem to hurt. The existing experimental and quasi-experimental literature shows very bad effects on user behavior:

1. "Measuring Consumer Sensitivity to Audio Advertising: A Field Experiment on Pandora Internet Radio", Huang et al 2018: https://davidreiley.com/papers/PandoraListenerDemandCurve.pd... [experimental]

2."The Effect of Ad Blocking on [Firefox] User Engagement with the Web", Miroglio et al 2018: https://research.mozilla.org/files/2018/04/The-Effect-of-Ad-... [quasi]

3. and my own A/B test: https://www.gwern.net/Ads [experimental]

[ta3216]

I think it depends on the audience. Looking at your blog I can see how ads may not work as well. My blog is focused more on dining out, shopping etc where viewers think nothing of ads and I think they would even think it weird if there weren’t ads.

[gwern]

You could say that about both Pandora (radio is expected to have ads) and Mozilla's general Internet sampling frame (the Internet is expected to have ads), but they still find a large average harm.

[ta3216]

My site is focused on shopping and dining out therefore I don’t think the conclusions in those papers apply in my case. The audio interruptions noted in the Pandora test are far more intrusive than in-page display ads. If I used interstitials then I would agree.