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TopIntroduction
According to Internetworldstats.com (2016) the number of Iranian Internet users has reached almost 56.7 million at the end of 2016 and were ranked first in the Middle East and sixth in Asia in this regard. In this situation, Iran, with one twentieth of Asian users, is considered a very appropriate area for studying Internet and its application as a channel for distribution of information on the part of companies and particularly Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) as advertising and online sale promotion.
However, despite all advantages mentioned for Internet advertising, statistics show that click rate is continuously decreasing. According to Nielsen (2000) click-through rate in 1995 was about 0.02 and in 2008 has reached to 0.3 percent (MediaPost, 2008). Accustoming to the novelty of this medium and excessive display of ads in web pages have resulted in a kind of avoidance from Internet advertising (Cho and Cheon, 2004). Avoidance from advertisement is represented in all activities of the users (Speck and Elliott, 1997). When consumers avoid advertising on the internet, advertisers try to understand the causes of this avoidance in order to develop their strategies in a way to effectively and efficiently convey their messages to target market. Hence, identifying the factors of users' avoidance from Internet advertising provides solutions for enhancing the effectiveness of Internet advertising and reducing the avoidance. To this aim, some studies have been conducted to gain insight about factors affecting Internet advertising avoidance (Cho and Cheon, 2004; Kelly et al., 2010). In this regard, this study is also conducted to complete the previous studies with a new perspective. This study aims at finding the answer to the following question:
TopLiterature Review
Avoidance is a situation where the users, consciously or unconsciously, try to avoiding a stimulus (Tellis, 1997). Avoidance from advertisement includes all activities of the users that prevent the audience from being exposed to the advertisement (Speck and Elliott, 1997). Many studies have been conducted about the effectiveness of Internet advertising. Some of these studies focus upon the medium and its nature, and try to increase the efficiency of Internet advertising by identifying the factors the medium (Shamdasani et al., 2001; Ko et al., 2005). Some studies, focusing on the characteristics of the message, have investigated the effectiveness of the advertisement (Rodgers and Thorson, 2000; Kim and Leckenby, 2002), and some other examined information processing by the consumer for raising the involvement level of Internet advertising (Rodgers and Thorson, 2000). Also, some researchers indicate that consumers avoid advertising on the internet due to cognitive, behavioral, and mechanical factors (Speck and Elliott, 1997).