Captive Audiences
I spent many, many hours in airports this week. It wasn’t going to be cost effective for me to blog during that time. In the area where I spent the most time, there were terminals that provided you with the internet for the surprising cost of £1 for ten minutes.
I paid this sum only 3 times during my time in Luton. I spent a few hours examining how the browser was set up on these computer terminals. I discovered that there is a link on the browser that takes you to ‘free’ content. Some of the categorized links are clearly paid advertising for loan companies, casinos, you know, the good stuff. With most of these, the free part ends at the landing page, links are either changed to revert to the page itself or to trigger a request that you pay. I also noticed that some of these sites looked dated and made claims of being the best such and such of 2000 or 2001. Spectrum Interactive began installing these desks in 2001.
There are also some big sites like Ebay and Amazon included in the free content on these machines. The marketing ploy here is to get bored people to pay to surf. The bulk of the business that these terminals get is from people who are using them to make and receive quick messages.
If a bored person sees that they can look at Amazon for free, they might be disappointed to find out that they have to pay to go beyond the landing page. They might also pay.
I found out to my surprise that while the message pops up asking me to pay for internet time, the page behind the message was actually loading. I spent part of my boring day at the airport reading reviews on Amazon.
One thing I liked about the airport internet service browser was that I could go through the whole sign-in process for gmail before being asked to pay. This saves you less than a minute, but when the minutes are this expensive, it feels like a gift.
