Count the long-run cost before you add more ads to a free tier

Grounds of Kameido Tenjin Shrine, from Utagawa Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (1856). A calm view needs few interruptions.

A short test said that more ads cost little. A long test showed the real price.

The study. Ali Goli, Jason Huang, David Reiley and Nickolai Riabov ran a 21-month experiment on the free, ad-supported tier of Pandora. They put almost 35 million listeners into groups with different numbers of audio ads per hour.

The finding. Each extra ad per hour cut mean listening time by 2.082%. The effect grew over time, and the authors say that a short test could underestimate it by a factor of 3. More ads also made a few more listeners pay for the ad-free tier.

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