For those of you contemplating ways of covering up the ads:
This is the same airline that beat the shit out of that doctor because the airline overbooked the flight. For your own safety, do not cross this airline.
It's clear from a lot of stories like this (severe customer mistreatment) that United employees are miserable people who hate their jobs but this is nuts. I hope Dr. Dao got a huge settlement from United.
Is United Express actually United? I thought those tended to be a regional carrier using the name under license.
I'd expect the labour friction to be still worse; I was peripherally involved with such a firm 20 years ago and know they had terrible problems with staff retention, mostly because they wouldn't pay enough to retain people after they got fed up with the free-standby-flight privileges.
And the CEO who brushed that assault off ‘suffered’ a ‘delayed promotion’. Poor thing. For saying that stuff about anyone, let alone a customer, he should have been fired, no golden parachute.
I think the doctor’s patients should have sued the airline too, since no doubt having their doctor pounded to a pulp caused them to miss their appointments.
Have you ever turned a screen off on one of these planes? They turn back on. So you turn them off again. Sooner or later, they turn back on. And repeat.
I have. It usually stays off until they rig the cabin for final approach. Comes back on for landing but hey, whatever?
I'm getting beaten up for my stance here, but seriously: if all it takes to put you over is some midflight ads the do the rest of us a favor and don't fly. Take a train or whatever.
Y'all are acting like they're gonna strap us down and tape our eyes open like that Alex Whasisname kid in A Clockwork Orange. I assure you that doesn't happen for another 22 years in this timeline (give or take).
I don't think you're being beaten up for it. I certainly am not beating you up for it. But usually, yeah, the screen does come back on during the flight. I think they turn it back on automatically every time there's an announcement. As somebody who finds screens like that very distracting and even migraine-inducing (the "busyness" of that sort of thing is a big trigger), it's really frustrating.
Depends on the plane and system it has. Last United flight I was on it stayed off the entire flight. I use my phone and generally don’t look at it anyway but it was nicer I suppose.
I honestly couldn't care less how many adverts they show me, they can have a constant stream of adverts the whole flight if it means that some shitty corporation is paying a portion of my travel coats.
People really need to grow up about stuff like this, if you don't want adverts then pay for a premium service - I'm poor, I'll accept the adverts.
Here's the thing: companies have learned they can add ads to make additional money without passing any of that on to their customers.
If you think you're going to get a better rate for having ads, you're fooling yourself. They'll always charge as much as they can get people to pay and that amount isn't affected by ads most of the time.
This is thinking based on emotion not reality, most of the internet is free because of adverts so your belief that it's not used to lower prices is clearly silly. Yes companies love profit but they often increase profits by lowering prices to attract more business, it's a perfectly valid business model to use adverts to reduce the cost to the customer and increase customer volume.
Those employees could have stood. Frontier and Spirit give vouchers out when they intentionally overbook.......which before the pandemic was everyday. If nobody takes the bait, they up the voucher value. For them it's essentially monopoly money.
If United couldn't get anybody to bite at the vouchers, then the employees should have stood the whole flight. Instead, they beat a man who was not fighting back physically. He only insisted that he get to his patient. They LITERALLY dragged him off the plane. By his ankle, as he tried to grab onto anything he could.
At this point anyone calling the police in the US is a necessary accomplice, and guilty of conspiracy to commit murder, aggravated battery, and probably several other crimes.
Overbooking should be a mandatory minimum compensation of the greater of 1000x the ticket price or $20k. It's a truly fucked up practice to disrespect people's time like that.
This should count as violation of human rights. You're chained to the seat for hours and have no other option than look at this screen or force your eyes closed. Holy shit, people should get really mad. Flashing ads on a screen you don't look at directly are still very annoying, even if you look on your phone.
I need to start a business selling rectangular shaped covers for these displays. I’ll even make one that serves as a holder for an iPad, so you can substitute your own screen.
This is fucking hilarious. Do you know that sometimes, people go elsewhere for economic opportunities? Then they bring their children after they get settled in?
Sometimes they go back, and leave the children there.
The ultimate quest for wealth is worth destroying the planet.
Also vast majority of people take planes for leisure, I'm sure we can deal without them. People used to travel the world in sail boats and they still managed to get where they wanted to go.
I don't think you understand - I can live poor and destitute without a job in my hometown, or leave to find work somewhere else. This is the reality of many Americans in rural America.
This isn't a quest for "wealth", it's a quest for life
Lmao, it's cute how you think you have some moral/ethical high ground here. Wouldn't be at all surprised if you have this view because no one would want you around no matter where you happened to be. Run along little troll.
Oh bless your heart. I'm not talking about your online friends who wouldn't travel across the street to see you. Don't worry, someday I'm sure someone will be able to tolerate being around you. Run along now.
Targeted, individualized, advertising should be illegal. This will gut a lot of the motivations for the privacy invasions and data harvesting. This is how advertising worked for thousands of years. I think it could continue to be just fine.
The amount of resources humanity is spending on targeted advertising is extremely depressing when you consider the opportunity cost. There are thousands of engineers and product managers that spend all day on this stuff instead of anything useful.
We tried that in the 80s already. Here's how it went down.
1980s comes along, and people had been seeing commercials on tv for years. So along comes this new concept. Now you can PAY to watch tv.....without ads. GREAT!
So people started paying for this new "cable tv". Then the cable operators were like "I know they're paying to not see ads......but what if we STILL showed ads, and STILL took their money????"
So that happened.
Then after some decades Netflix came around, originally with liscensed tv shows from all over tv.......except now you could PAY to watch them, without the ads. And then they drastically lost their liscensed content, and produced their own original content.
After a few decades, Netflix said "I know they're paying not to see commercials.......but what if we STARTED showing commercials, AND raised prices every few months."
Man, I can't wait for the next guy to charge me money to not see ads. Only to inevitably show me ads a few years later....
I do look forward to the next generation of ad free media consumption powered by a small VC startup fund that has a bunch of low cost fresh-out-of-university students paid mostly in stocks working in a garage to say "yeah fuck this I've seen ads all my life in gonna do make something that doesn't make people hate life"
Each iteration of the technology eventually becomes hot garbage. But man, for like a decade there shit is pretty good while the rest of the entrenched industry is stuck trying to pay lobbyists to get law makers to write rules that neither side understands just to have them ultimately not get passed or not address the issue and those companies still disappear.
If you're getting targeted ads for penis enlargement pills, then the system thinks you have a small pp. If this is an error, you should submit photographic evidence to their office to prove you don't have a small pp.
What's the ROI on ads anyway? I feel like ads are just a way to funnel money between corps. People who are forced to see ads are really not even the point anymore. This is like corporations subsidizing other corporations. Don't even matter that you buy that item being shown to you.
Found a website saying Youtube adviews are $100-300 per 10k (ad views, not video views). That's 1-3¢ per view. If we assume an ad is 10seconds, then your time is worth 0.1-0.3¢ per second, or $3.60-10.80 per hour.
An A380 looks to be 380-615 seats. I'd imagine they're more often optimising for space, so let's say 550.
Long haul flight, 10% of people at any time using inflight stuff, 8 hours, 4 ads per hour = 5500.18*4 ads watched. 1760 ads. There will be a massive premium for planes, but surely only one order of magnitude more (e.g. 10x). That's equivalent to give or take 20k YouTube adviews which would be $200-600 per flight.
There are a lot of planes in the sky every single day though....
The thing is, it's only a ROI if any of those passengers converts to a buyer. The act of seeing an ad creates no value for the manufacturer unless they are converted to a buyer.
What you are describing is a market that has the consumer (ad watcher) almost completely removed from the conversion of capital. Being forced to watch an ad, in this case, only benefits the airline by their receiving ad revenue. The passengers are nearly supflourous.
ROI from adverts is always a shitshow though. If you come off a plane and see <brand name product> and buy it, is it because you just saw an advert for it, or were you always going to buy it. There is of course stats that may show number of impressions vs. total purchases trend, but its still just massive correlation that I imagine there is a bunch of people pulling spreadsheets together to justify their marketing spend. Anecdotally, I've heard of data teams working with marketing teams and just going "whelp, whatever you need to justify your job", etc.
Real ROI via direct sales though, that's somewhat measurable since you have a direct cost of acquisition (sales person salary, overheads, etc) vs revenue.
I assume they won't allow porns in ads, but you can still get worse stuff than porn, like erectile dysfunction medication ads which causes people around your seat to look at you with sorry eyes.
About a decade ago Fox News got brought to court, and had to defend themselves against the idea that their content wasn't actually factually accurate most of the time. Therefore not "news".
Fox responded by saying that their program wasn't meant to be news. I forget the exact quote, I'm sure duckduckgo is your friend, but it was along the lines of "No reasonable person would ever consume Fox News content and believe it to be trustworthy accurate news. It is an opinionated entertainment show about the news."
I don't remember their tagline at the time, but it was something along the lines of "Fox News is your only outlet for unbiased news!" Something to that effect. I just remember Jon Stewart calling out the hypocrasy of their tagline being the exact opposite of what they said in court.
If Fox News is entertainment meant to push the agenda that the right is right, and if CNN is entertainment meant to push the agenda that the left is right, then I don't see why The Onion can't join them as entertainment meant to push the agenda that the whole world is fucking stupid.
Still operating as a "real news source", except it's all bullshit like Fox News and CNN. Just entertainment.
Same thing happened with "VitaminWater", a product in the category of "enhanced water" (a term reminiscent of "enhanced interrogation technique"). Coca-Cola argued that, despite the name, no reasonable person would believe it's actually healthy. They settled.
They could come up with some bullshit like, obstructing your screen is interfering with the display of critical airplane safety information or something.
To begin the flight, please drink Mountain Dew Verification Can.
Verification Can Invalid. Please drink Mountain Dew Verification Can.
ERROR! Passenger attempting to steal Premium Ad-less Flying Option! Adding your name to the No Fly List and automatically deducting penalty fee from your credit card.
Seriously. It's nearly a sure thing. I should buy on Monday and see how it goes. People are sleepwalking about adtech shit so they'll continue to fly United. There's already a dude in this thread telling people to chill and just don't fly if they don't like it. The ad revenue should be pretty juicy, too. They have a bored captive audience identified by full name and credit card number.
Part of the problem is that UA is such a massive airline, odds are any alternatives would involve quite a bit of sacrifice. Not many people would be willing or can afford to take an extra 2 layovers or 50%+ extra travel time or cost in order to get to where they want to go 🫤 That's not to say I won't try my best to avoid UA though, I was already sick of them after my last trip and now I find this news.
Remember when the assholes at United overbooked a flight and sent someone to knock a doctor's teeth out and carry him off a plane? The doctor refused since he was on his way to oversee the opening of a clinic he founded for veterans.
He and his wife started the clinic as a way to thank American servicemen and women, because he was plucked out of ocean waters by the U.S. Navy as he fled communism in his home country of Vietnam about 44 years ago, he said.
United will kill your dog, bust up your guitar, and knock down and drag out your doctor. They've made the headlines for all three of those. And the guitar guy made a song about United.
Unfortunately, the other airlines aren't much better.
Your united data is going to be tied to an email. They could just use that. It's reasonable to see this as further invasiveness, similar to Meta™ account recovery.
