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
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).
Someone at Wizz skipped the statistics lesson on variance. There is no way an adblocker accurately identifies price sensitivity outside of qualitative handwaving.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
We flew 200 euros cheaper to Portugal with TAP and a stop in Lisbon. And they operate flights daily rather than once a weeek. If you add lugagge, seats and other hidden costs, WizzAir stops being low cost.
Recently Wizz bought new Airbus 321 neo jets and operate quite cost competitive flights to Spanish islands, so we decided to put up with their crap for the time being.
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
My solution is to avoid flying altogether! I can go many places by car or high speed rail, I can videoconf with anyone in the world; there better be a damn good reason I really must get on a plane and I will get myself a good seat when I do.
Yeah but it still takes 2-3 days to get from Amsterdam to Naples by train, if I had unlimited days off I would do it, but if I have days off that are counted I would rather spend them with the family instead of on a train, another think would be to travel while working, I guess I will try to ask my a employer if that would be a thing to let me do that next time
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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?