21 ms·

To combat falling ratings, TV networks are increasing ads up to 10%

87 points by bane 11y ago

syense 11y ago
seems a bit like they are punishing the loyal. id think that you could drop commercial percentage in an effort to lure viewers back and make up for the loss of revenue by time with an increase in viewership? or perhaps the commercial boat has already sailed and a new revenue model is needed.
mirimir 11y ago
Originally there were no ads on cable ;)
brc 11y ago
TV is already mostly unwatchable. As people channel-surf more to avoid ads or boring TV, the TV shows try and adapt by regularly recapping what has happened before the last ad break. So they spend less time on the content and more time on ads and then recapping after the ads. The results are poor quality shows which are even less desirable to watch. It's hard to view it as anything other than a death spiral.
- maerF0x0 11y ago
  and its the worst when you buy a season of a show that does the recaps. "WE'll be right back", "Before the break..." so you get about 10 minutes of real content per show.
  - axyjo 11y ago
    One of the worst offenders of this is MythBusters in my opinion. Thankfully, I recently found streamlined-edits of MythBusters.
    - harryc2011 11y ago
      This happens on the BBC (which is ad-free) & it drives me mad! E.g. Dragons' Den is clearly pre-formatted to be sold to commercial channels with ad breaks - there is about 20 mins of content in a 1 hour show w/ 40 mins of recaps and dramatic panning around the 'Den'.
      - acomjean 11y ago
        Martha Stewarts cooking (show on ad free PBS) has a tacked on "Bonus Feature" at the end that seems to be just the right amount of time that it wouldn't be needed if they were showing ads.
        jon-wood 11y ago
        I'd never clocked that, but all the BBC's nature programs have a 15 minute "making of" documentary at the end as well, which now you mention it must get cut for commercial networks.
    - petepete 11y ago
      In case anyone is wondering: https://www.reddit.com/r/smyths https://www.reddit.com/r/smyths
    - dredmorbius 11y ago
      Nova, Discovery, History Channel, Airline Disasters, etc. All of them (I view via YouTube / YT Download). For Airline Disasters, skipping forward to 20 minutes skips most of the useless pre-accident crap with 5x replays of all critical moments. Annoying as fuck.
  - noonespecial 11y ago
    That should be a service. You don't download the show, you just download a cut list as a text file that makes your DVR skip all that junk. I'd pay.
    - josteink 11y ago
      https://www.reddit.com/r/smyths https://www.reddit.com/r/smyths I'll just throw this here.
- tajen 11y ago
  I live in France where I wonder whether there's a law against abusive ad sequences, because they're much less intrusive: Movies/programs start at 9pm. The ad breaks are at 9.45pm and 10.30pm. It means most movies (1.30) have only 1 ad break, series such as X-Files and 24 hours are displayed with uninterrupted episodes. Football games match this format. At high school, those who went to Spain or UK discovered the poor state of TV in the rest of the world. We're lucky.
  - umanwizard 11y ago
    Must have been strange watching 24 in France, then. In the US, the time in the story was set up to align with ad breaks, so when it was XX:47 (for example) in the story, it was always 21:47 in reality.
    - Maarten88 11y ago
      I can watch a recorded episode 24 in ca 35 min. Poor Americans, watching series like these on broadcast TV makes you sit through 25 minutes of advertising (and watching US advertising makes me angry, though Americans probably think it's normal). No wonder subscription services have taken off there first.
    - tajen 11y ago
      Indeed, times didn't match. And worse: In most movies/series we can clearly see that a sequence is supposed to be a summary for people who come back from a break. Very similar experience to series you "buy on bittorrent".
    - david-given 11y ago
      Living in the UK with the ad-free BBC, you could always tell US import TV series because they had 45 minute slots rather than the 30 or 60 minute slots of the local content. The first (and only) time I saw an episode of Star Trek on US television I was shocked when I realised there was a commercial break immediately after the credits. (I turned it off in the disgust.)
      - 11y ago
- joshstrange 11y ago
  > TV shows try and adapt by regularly recapping what has happened before the last ad break This Mitchell and Webb sketch shows this off perfectly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MFtl2XXnUc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MFtl2XXnUc When they do this they ruin the experience watching it later on DVR/Netflix/DVD/etc.
toast0 11y ago
This is like stuffing more ad units on a page. It might help your revenue in the short term, but it turns off viewers, and it turns off advertisers; so next quarter you're in the same spot, but with less room to put in ads. If I were running a tv network, I would be doing whatever it takes to get ad rates up now, since next year is an election, and there's some rule about charging all political ads the same price, fixed based on earlier rates.
ryanolsonx 11y ago
Seems counterintuitive..
anigbrowl 11y ago
That's why I don't like watching it! Cut the number of ads and increase the price, watch viewers flock back.
mc32 11y ago
This tactic is desperation. Short-term profits for a long-term loss. People will migrate to a more tolerable alternative. Alternatively, they're just squeezing as much juice as they can from the last fruit. They know the end is nigh for network TV so they might as well burn it all the way down.
nvader 11y ago
"The beatings will continue until morale improves..."
nugget 11y ago
I saw an interesting stat recently: the average hour of broadcast TV has traditionally had between 12 and 18 minutes of advertising, whereas on the web the most people seem to put up with is about 6 minutes per hour. That means that even in a best case where ads transition over to web along with all tv viewership (and people don't favor ad free, subscription services), 2/3rds of that advertising medium is gone.
- wldcordeiro 11y ago
  That's for now, I wouldn't be surprised if over time it meets or exceeds the TV minutes.
  - yareally 11y ago
    I'm sure it will eventually meet TV in # of commericals, just most potential advertisers haven't made the full leap into online video ads yet and content publishers are probably reluctant on increasing video ad quantities until they're certain they have an audience that will accept them. People once said the same thing about satellite and cable being great because they didn't have as many commercials as traditional broadcast TV. Once cable channels had broadcasting quality on par with traditional TV and audiences committed to watching their shows, commercials increased until they were on par.
- saurik 11y ago
  In practice, the experience of six minutes of ads when watching television on the web is watching the same two advertisements six times each, so I would not be surprised if people had much less ability to tolerate them for very long.
RobLach 11y ago
That's like your if solution to surviving an increasing number of hemorrhages is to pump in more blood.
- nvader 11y ago
  Hmm, I'm not a doctor, but that sounds pretty reasonable to me.
bane 11y ago
There must be a law somewhere, where some business exec comes up with terrible schemes to squeeze more and more blood from a stone: - let's fire the engineering staff to improve the profit figures - let's slowly fill up content channels with so much advertising, consumers can't read/watch/listen to the media they're trying to access - let's sell subscription access with a promise of no ads, then slowly introduce ads until the subscription payers are also earning significant money per ad - let's reduce the quality of our product so we can improve the profit percentage - if cars only last 5 years, consumers will have to buy new ones! (planned obsolescence) - let's see how much we can carve out of this shrinking pie - etc. These kind of harebrained schemes seem so obviously stupid from the outside, but they keep showing up over and over again. It's like there's a population of con-artists who've managed to get into positions of influence in lots of companies, and will pitch and sell these ideas and make them happen, then everybody is aghast when the company tanks shortly after...meanwhile the "proven idea guy" goes on to another company and shows "improved profitability by 21% and revenue by $3mil/quarter blah blah" and slithers in to another decision making position where this happens again.
- hliyan 11y ago
  It works because of the short term nature of modern corporate goals. A lot of stockholders are institutional investors looking to buy low and sell high, rather than long term stakeholders in the company. Neither they, the board and there for the CEO has any reason to see beyond a 1-2 year horizon unless the company is in really good shape.
  - billforsternz 11y ago
    I think there is quite a lot of related irrationality outside the corporate world. You see it in environments like a committee of volunteers running a club for hobbyists. "Subscription income is down therefore we must raise our subscription fees" seems to be obvious and common sense to many, maybe most people. Pointing out that this is most likely to have the deadly unintended consequence of driving current members away and further reducing income often seems to be fighting against the tide.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
optimiz3 11y ago
Sort of related, it's always felt odd that Hulu Plus (paid) forces ads on the user. Seeing as time is extremely valuable, why not provide an option to skip ads? F2P games figured this out long ago, you annoy users into paying to make the pain go away.
- alyx 11y ago
  Apparently there is a subscription version of Hulu on the way, which will be ad-free.
  - HNaTTY 11y ago
    A Hulu++ you say?
- L_Rahman 11y ago
  Because the people who can afford to pay to not see ads are the users who are the most valuable to advertisers. The subscription price to run no ads at all is therefore likely higher than the ad supported one.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- kevin_thibedeau 11y ago
  Cable television was once touted as an ad free medium. Then they started creeping in until nobody questioned why they were paying so much to subscribe to ads.
- stormcrowsx 11y ago
  Hulu is heavily influenced by cable providers and the cable business model is being forced on it.
xupybd 11y ago
Oh no we are getting out competed by online vendors, I know lets crap all over our product.
godgod 11y ago
That'll show em!
icanhackit 11y ago
Would it be safe to deduce that the decision to counter-intuitively add more of what people dislike is due to executive remuneration being tied to share performance i.e. they don't give a shit if the whole things tanks as long as they vest and get out while they're seemingly profitable? I say this under the assumption, perhaps naively, that the people in charge are aware that the decision, long-term, is not a very good one and they're playing strategically for their own ends (rather than simply being pants-on-head stupid).
- Asbostos 11y ago
  Is it really a bad idea? Will people actually get off Facebook and watch more TV if the ads were shorter? I suspect ads aren't the reason TV viewing is declining and aren't going to accelerate it much.
PhantomGremlin 11y ago
I've got one four letter word that really helps counter this trend: TiVo But they get very little love. People would rather watch 10 hours a month of commercials than pay $10/month to bypass them. And there's also laziness. I've seen so many people with cable company DVRs, but they don't FF thru commercials. Huh? Not only are the commercials mind-numbing when viewed for the 50th time, but there's also the matter of 20 minutes lost per hour of viewing.
- danieltillett 11y ago
  I think a lot of people like ads. I personally hate them, but I have noticed other around me don’t seem to care.
  - WalterBright 11y ago
    Back in the 80's when I first got a VCR, I taped some shows. Ironically, today the old commercials are more interesting than the old show.
    - tomswartz07 11y ago
      For your viewing pleasure: http://www.retrojunk.com/commercial-index/new http://www.retrojunk.com/commercial-index/new
  - reustle 11y ago
    I think us (hn readers) are generally more aware of the value of our time (and/or our time is more valuable).
    - lorenzhs 11y ago
      For me, it's not about the value of my time (calculating like that is a huge can of worms, and realistically, most of us don't work in the time we save by not seeing ads, but watch an additional episode instead). I just loathe ads. I gladly pay 9€/month for the ad-free experience on Netflix. (Plus, in Germany, everything on TV is dubbed, and it's hard to enjoy that if you know the original. Netflix offers the original soundtrack.)
mullingitover 11y ago
Well, when you're in a death spiral, spiral as hard as you can I suppose.
Animats 11y ago
Myspace tried that. How'd that work out?
- danieltillett 11y ago
  -$545 million. Not one of Rupert’s finest investments, but I suspect he lost more on the WSJ.
ddingus 11y ago
This isn't going to help the ratings. If they were paying any attention at all, they would see what happened to radio when they jacked up the ADS. More ADS per hour did improve revenue, but that improved revenue came at a loss of audience. There is a curve function, and it's complex. No ADS will deliver a nice audience, assuming the program is compelling enough, but no revenue. A few ADS will do just about the same thing, but deliver revenue. From there, as the AD rates ramp up, audience will drop off and at some pivot point there the value of the AD, due to insufficient audience impressions, drops off impacting both revenue and audience. If you ask me, TV is already well into the pivot point.
- jfoster 11y ago
  It's more complicated than that, though. Content quality/cost is also a factor. This problem is multidimensional.
  - ddingus 11y ago
    Indeed it is. I do believe the AD / content axis is dominant. Quality can do some damage on the problem, but the move to lighter AD loads is clear. We are close to 50/50 and worse at times now. Completely unacceptable to growing numbers of us. The thing is almost nothing can't wait. So I will, if nothing else. Buy it straight up AD free. Worth it.
Radle 11y ago
They are feeding the cancer, that is feeding upon them...
mifreewil 11y ago
I feel bad for older folks who are less capable/willing to adopt newer technology. Give the grandparents a hand, eh?
venomsnake 11y ago
I think that Steve Jobs nailed it. People are willing to pay a lot for the experience. Right now bittorrent gives the best TV viewing experience at all. You click, you download, you watch. No logins, no DRM, no bullshit. Until TV can beat the quality of that experience - they are doomed.
- joshstrange 11y ago
  I'd argue usenet + sonarr/sickbeard (+sabnzbd/nzbget) + plex is even better but I agree overall. I pay for TV, Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc but I rarely watch content on those platforms. Plex is just so many times better and I'm not dependant on my crappy ISP.
downandout 11y ago
It isn't just that they are stuffing more ads in. I have noticed a huge spike in what I call "program guide fraud" - networks indicating in the program guide information they provide to cable systems that an episode of a show is new, when it is in fact a rerun. This causes any DVR programmed to record only new episodes of a show to record the rerun, which fraudulently inflates DVR views, which leads to increased ad rates and ratings. Some shows have taken a slightly less fraudulent, though equally frustrating, approach. 60 Minutes remixes old segments into "new" shows, but the only thing new about them is the order in which the segments appear, along with a total of maybe a minute in added commentary or updates on the segments. Whenever you hear "as we first reported..." at the beginning of a segment, that's a remixed segment. Nightline has also been remixing old segments into most of their "new" shows over the summer. TV is dying, and the networks are turning to fraud and annoyance to try to save themselves. I can't imagine that it will work.
- a3n 11y ago
  I don't know if it's "fraud," but Netflix's "Recently Added," "Recently Released" etc categories are just plain cynical, at the least.
  - HCIdivision17 11y ago
    I've been wondering if maybe they just switched something in the backend and a whole bunch of shows got confused metadata. They're not at all what would be interpreted as "Recently Added". Charitably, my only guess is the system just doesn't detect that certain shows used to be in the line-up. Cynically, I imagine someone in their management is taking advantage of a bug and calling it a feature.
antihero 11y ago
What I do hope is that things like Prime and HBO Go succeed. TV is already going down the shitter, and I don't know any millennial peer that actually still watches it (it's so backwards, why would we want to tell us what we can watch and at what time?). What I do hope is that Netflix doesn't become a complete monopoly, else they'll stagnate.
fapjacks 11y ago
I'm pretty sure this tactic is going to work brilliantly to get people to watch more television. I'm pretty sure.
jacquesm 11y ago
Which will drive more people away from watching TV which will require an even more aggressive approach. Maybe TV networks should start an 'ad free Saturday' or something like that to combat the failing ratings? Show the first episode of something without ads on that Saturday and the follow up on some random day of the week.
tired_man 11y ago
When I was very young, and broadcast television was still in its infancy, a 60 minute network show contained about 50-52 minutes of content. Today, you can feel _very_ lucky to see as much as 44 minutes of content per show. Personally, I don't care if they stuff 54 minutes of commercials into each 60 minute show. I'm not going to watch the show as it's broadcast. I'll watch it on netflix, stream it, or download it. In any event, as far as I'm concerned, the commercials never happened :-)
tempodox 11y ago
So, that would mean, the audience hates the program but if you show them more ads instead, they will not switch channels because the same ad is so much better on your channel than on any other? That's really fascinating, I had no idea.
wheaties 11y ago
Radio did the same thing. Now we all use anything but radio.
justwannasing 11y ago
For some reason I can't access the article at the moment but, when I was in radio and TV, years ago, the FCC restricted how many advertising minutes you could run in an hour or per show. I want to say that, in radio, you couldn't go over 13 minutes in any hour but few dared to approach that limit except the kiddie rock-n-roll stations lest they turn away listeners. iirc, that ruling has been removed.
dragonwriter 11y ago
I think the relationship between falling ratings and increased ads may be different than the title communicates. In fact, it has to be for the specific numbers cited, since they are simultaneous rather than the action occurring before the response, but even though the reported numbers are simultaneous, its likely one occurred first and there is some kind of cause-and-effect relationship, but even assuming that the decline trend leads the ad increase rather than the two being lockstep or the order being reversed, it may not be that the ads are strictly to "combat" the falling rating so much as being a response to the perceived market characteristics of the remaining audience -- if networks believe that the remaining audience is less sensitive to the quantity of advertising, increasing advertising makes sense (just as if a product has a smaller but less price-sensitive market because of a new competitor stealing the most price sensitive part of the market, increasing prices and focussing on other differentiating features may be a more successful strategy to maximize profits in the new market reality than price competition -- this is a fairly exact analogy, since ads are essentially a price consumers pay for TV content.
forgotAgain 11y ago
Original source article: http://adage.com/article/media/commercials-tv/299810/ http://adage.com/article/media/commercials-tv/299810/
acomjean 11y ago
As someone who lives in the US in a competitive senate race (and has a nearby state that are politically important, competetive and share tv markets). If more states had competitive elections in the US, including splitting electoral college votes, they could solve their stations revenue shortfall and get a cut of that sweet sweet PAC money. Plus I'd like everyone in the country to feel the pain of non-stop election advertising. Maybe then campaign finance reform might show up.
rickdale 11y ago
No surprise TV ratings are falling. The graphical user interface for my cable has to be over a decade old and zero updates have ever been done to it. DVR is an alright option, but I always pass right into the show, and on some networks it disables! fast-forward. As ESPN continues down the road of being unwatchable, I honestly think the only thing carrying cable television in America is football. This year the NFL will broadcast one game over the internet. If, or rather when, that becomes the norm, cable subscriptions are going to drop at a faster rate than they are now. I enjoy being able to put something on really fast, but cable television reminds of the music industry as CD's died.
oldpond 11y ago
That's the same logic as "ratings are down, let's create more channels, cuz people like variety". They ended up diluting their captive audience even more resulting in even worse ratings. Time to turn off the TV, and that includes internet TV. You really won't miss it.
Everhusk 11y ago
Fighting fire with fire
asnyder 11y ago
If anyone's interested, I know Telestream's Tempo (http://www.telestream.net/tempo/overview.htm http://www.telestream.net/tempo/overview.htm), is super popular as it can actually cut and/or interpolate frames from content, to allow content producers to run more ads, without any perceptible difference from the viewer perspective.
stephen_cagle 11y ago
I really find it amazing that even to this day there is not a dynamic process for inserting adds into tv programming. Cable box should simply see that this tv watches NOVA, Star Trek, and Saturday morning cartoons. Because of this, I am a nerdy guy who may have kids. Reduce if from 3 minutes of 6 ads to a single minute long add. Something really specific like Disney Vacations, science kits for the kids and their parents, whatever. It isn't even a privacy thing necessarily. Cable box could be the only one that actually "watches" what you watch; streams in all possible adds and decides which adds to display to you based on its private (and un-shared) knowledge.
user_235711 11y ago
This is hilarious. I would never pay for cable anyway because advertisements are just repulsive, even when the volume of them (in both senses) was slightly lower a decade or two ago. But whenever I happen to be in a hotel room and happen to turn the TV on I am just amazed that it is actually possible to click through nearly 100 channels in sequence and see nothing but commercial after commercial on. And if I do find something to watch it seems like every two minutes or so I have to mute the TV because it starts yelling at me to buy pharmaceuticals. Definitely not sad to hear that this medium of communication is in trouble because the internet alternatives are amazingly and obviously much better.

87 points by bane 11y ago

seems a bit like they are punishing the loyal. id think that you could drop commercial percentage in an effort to lure viewers back and make up for the loss of revenue by time with an increase in viewership? or perhaps the commercial boat has already sailed and a new revenue model is needed.

mirimir 11y ago

Originally there were no ads on cable ;)

brc 11y ago

TV is already mostly unwatchable. As people channel-surf more to avoid ads or boring TV, the TV shows try and adapt by regularly recapping what has happened before the last ad break. So they spend less time on the content and more time on ads and then recapping after the ads. The results are poor quality shows which are even less desirable to watch. It's hard to view it as anything other than a death spiral.

maerF0x0 11y ago
and its the worst when you buy a season of a show that does the recaps. "WE'll be right back", "Before the break..." so you get about 10 minutes of real content per show.
- axyjo 11y ago
  One of the worst offenders of this is MythBusters in my opinion. Thankfully, I recently found streamlined-edits of MythBusters.
  - harryc2011 11y ago
    This happens on the BBC (which is ad-free) & it drives me mad! E.g. Dragons' Den is clearly pre-formatted to be sold to commercial channels with ad breaks - there is about 20 mins of content in a 1 hour show w/ 40 mins of recaps and dramatic panning around the 'Den'.
    - acomjean 11y ago
      Martha Stewarts cooking (show on ad free PBS) has a tacked on "Bonus Feature" at the end that seems to be just the right amount of time that it wouldn't be needed if they were showing ads.
      - jon-wood 11y ago
        I'd never clocked that, but all the BBC's nature programs have a 15 minute "making of" documentary at the end as well, which now you mention it must get cut for commercial networks.
  - petepete 11y ago
    In case anyone is wondering: https://www.reddit.com/r/smyths https://www.reddit.com/r/smyths
  - dredmorbius 11y ago
    Nova, Discovery, History Channel, Airline Disasters, etc. All of them (I view via YouTube / YT Download). For Airline Disasters, skipping forward to 20 minutes skips most of the useless pre-accident crap with 5x replays of all critical moments. Annoying as fuck.
- noonespecial 11y ago
  That should be a service. You don't download the show, you just download a cut list as a text file that makes your DVR skip all that junk. I'd pay.
  - josteink 11y ago
    https://www.reddit.com/r/smyths https://www.reddit.com/r/smyths I'll just throw this here.
tajen 11y ago
I live in France where I wonder whether there's a law against abusive ad sequences, because they're much less intrusive: Movies/programs start at 9pm. The ad breaks are at 9.45pm and 10.30pm. It means most movies (1.30) have only 1 ad break, series such as X-Files and 24 hours are displayed with uninterrupted episodes. Football games match this format. At high school, those who went to Spain or UK discovered the poor state of TV in the rest of the world. We're lucky.
- umanwizard 11y ago
  Must have been strange watching 24 in France, then. In the US, the time in the story was set up to align with ad breaks, so when it was XX:47 (for example) in the story, it was always 21:47 in reality.
  - Maarten88 11y ago
    I can watch a recorded episode 24 in ca 35 min. Poor Americans, watching series like these on broadcast TV makes you sit through 25 minutes of advertising (and watching US advertising makes me angry, though Americans probably think it's normal). No wonder subscription services have taken off there first.
  - tajen 11y ago
    Indeed, times didn't match. And worse: In most movies/series we can clearly see that a sequence is supposed to be a summary for people who come back from a break. Very similar experience to series you "buy on bittorrent".
  - david-given 11y ago
    Living in the UK with the ad-free BBC, you could always tell US import TV series because they had 45 minute slots rather than the 30 or 60 minute slots of the local content. The first (and only) time I saw an episode of Star Trek on US television I was shocked when I realised there was a commercial break immediately after the credits. (I turned it off in the disgust.)
    - 11y ago
joshstrange 11y ago
> TV shows try and adapt by regularly recapping what has happened before the last ad break This Mitchell and Webb sketch shows this off perfectly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MFtl2XXnUc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MFtl2XXnUc When they do this they ruin the experience watching it later on DVR/Netflix/DVD/etc.

toast0 11y ago

This is like stuffing more ad units on a page. It might help your revenue in the short term, but it turns off viewers, and it turns off advertisers; so next quarter you're in the same spot, but with less room to put in ads. If I were running a tv network, I would be doing whatever it takes to get ad rates up now, since next year is an election, and there's some rule about charging all political ads the same price, fixed based on earlier rates.

ryanolsonx 11y ago

Seems counterintuitive..

anigbrowl 11y ago

That's why I don't like watching it! Cut the number of ads and increase the price, watch viewers flock back.

mc32 11y ago

This tactic is desperation. Short-term profits for a long-term loss. People will migrate to a more tolerable alternative. Alternatively, they're just squeezing as much juice as they can from the last fruit. They know the end is nigh for network TV so they might as well burn it all the way down.

nvader 11y ago

"The beatings will continue until morale improves..."

nugget 11y ago

I saw an interesting stat recently: the average hour of broadcast TV has traditionally had between 12 and 18 minutes of advertising, whereas on the web the most people seem to put up with is about 6 minutes per hour. That means that even in a best case where ads transition over to web along with all tv viewership (and people don't favor ad free, subscription services), 2/3rds of that advertising medium is gone.

wldcordeiro 11y ago
That's for now, I wouldn't be surprised if over time it meets or exceeds the TV minutes.
- yareally 11y ago
  I'm sure it will eventually meet TV in # of commericals, just most potential advertisers haven't made the full leap into online video ads yet and content publishers are probably reluctant on increasing video ad quantities until they're certain they have an audience that will accept them. People once said the same thing about satellite and cable being great because they didn't have as many commercials as traditional broadcast TV. Once cable channels had broadcasting quality on par with traditional TV and audiences committed to watching their shows, commercials increased until they were on par.
saurik 11y ago
In practice, the experience of six minutes of ads when watching television on the web is watching the same two advertisements six times each, so I would not be surprised if people had much less ability to tolerate them for very long.

RobLach 11y ago

That's like your if solution to surviving an increasing number of hemorrhages is to pump in more blood.

nvader 11y ago
Hmm, I'm not a doctor, but that sounds pretty reasonable to me.

bane 11y ago

There must be a law somewhere, where some business exec comes up with terrible schemes to squeeze more and more blood from a stone: - let's fire the engineering staff to improve the profit figures - let's slowly fill up content channels with so much advertising, consumers can't read/watch/listen to the media they're trying to access - let's sell subscription access with a promise of no ads, then slowly introduce ads until the subscription payers are also earning significant money per ad - let's reduce the quality of our product so we can improve the profit percentage - if cars only last 5 years, consumers will have to buy new ones! (planned obsolescence) - let's see how much we can carve out of this shrinking pie - etc. These kind of harebrained schemes seem so obviously stupid from the outside, but they keep showing up over and over again. It's like there's a population of con-artists who've managed to get into positions of influence in lots of companies, and will pitch and sell these ideas and make them happen, then everybody is aghast when the company tanks shortly after...meanwhile the "proven idea guy" goes on to another company and shows "improved profitability by 21% and revenue by $3mil/quarter blah blah" and slithers in to another decision making position where this happens again.

hliyan 11y ago
It works because of the short term nature of modern corporate goals. A lot of stockholders are institutional investors looking to buy low and sell high, rather than long term stakeholders in the company. Neither they, the board and there for the CEO has any reason to see beyond a 1-2 year horizon unless the company is in really good shape.
- billforsternz 11y ago
  I think there is quite a lot of related irrationality outside the corporate world. You see it in environments like a committee of volunteers running a club for hobbyists. "Subscription income is down therefore we must raise our subscription fees" seems to be obvious and common sense to many, maybe most people. Pointing out that this is most likely to have the deadly unintended consequence of driving current members away and further reducing income often seems to be fighting against the tide.

deleted 11y ago

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optimiz3 11y ago

Sort of related, it's always felt odd that Hulu Plus (paid) forces ads on the user. Seeing as time is extremely valuable, why not provide an option to skip ads? F2P games figured this out long ago, you annoy users into paying to make the pain go away.

alyx 11y ago
Apparently there is a subscription version of Hulu on the way, which will be ad-free.
- HNaTTY 11y ago
  A Hulu++ you say?
L_Rahman 11y ago
Because the people who can afford to pay to not see ads are the users who are the most valuable to advertisers. The subscription price to run no ads at all is therefore likely higher than the ad supported one.
deleted 11y ago
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kevin_thibedeau 11y ago
Cable television was once touted as an ad free medium. Then they started creeping in until nobody questioned why they were paying so much to subscribe to ads.
stormcrowsx 11y ago
Hulu is heavily influenced by cable providers and the cable business model is being forced on it.

xupybd 11y ago

Oh no we are getting out competed by online vendors, I know lets crap all over our product.

godgod 11y ago

That'll show em!

icanhackit 11y ago

Would it be safe to deduce that the decision to counter-intuitively add more of what people dislike is due to executive remuneration being tied to share performance i.e. they don't give a shit if the whole things tanks as long as they vest and get out while they're seemingly profitable? I say this under the assumption, perhaps naively, that the people in charge are aware that the decision, long-term, is not a very good one and they're playing strategically for their own ends (rather than simply being pants-on-head stupid).

Asbostos 11y ago
Is it really a bad idea? Will people actually get off Facebook and watch more TV if the ads were shorter? I suspect ads aren't the reason TV viewing is declining and aren't going to accelerate it much.

PhantomGremlin 11y ago

I've got one four letter word that really helps counter this trend: TiVo But they get very little love. People would rather watch 10 hours a month of commercials than pay $10/month to bypass them. And there's also laziness. I've seen so many people with cable company DVRs, but they don't FF thru commercials. Huh? Not only are the commercials mind-numbing when viewed for the 50th time, but there's also the matter of 20 minutes lost per hour of viewing.

danieltillett 11y ago
I think a lot of people like ads. I personally hate them, but I have noticed other around me don’t seem to care.
- WalterBright 11y ago
  Back in the 80's when I first got a VCR, I taped some shows. Ironically, today the old commercials are more interesting than the old show.
  - tomswartz07 11y ago
    For your viewing pleasure: http://www.retrojunk.com/commercial-index/new http://www.retrojunk.com/commercial-index/new
- reustle 11y ago
  I think us (hn readers) are generally more aware of the value of our time (and/or our time is more valuable).
  - lorenzhs 11y ago
    For me, it's not about the value of my time (calculating like that is a huge can of worms, and realistically, most of us don't work in the time we save by not seeing ads, but watch an additional episode instead). I just loathe ads. I gladly pay 9€/month for the ad-free experience on Netflix. (Plus, in Germany, everything on TV is dubbed, and it's hard to enjoy that if you know the original. Netflix offers the original soundtrack.)

mullingitover 11y ago

Well, when you're in a death spiral, spiral as hard as you can I suppose.

Animats 11y ago

Myspace tried that. How'd that work out?

danieltillett 11y ago
-$545 million. Not one of Rupert’s finest investments, but I suspect he lost more on the WSJ.

ddingus 11y ago

This isn't going to help the ratings. If they were paying any attention at all, they would see what happened to radio when they jacked up the ADS. More ADS per hour did improve revenue, but that improved revenue came at a loss of audience. There is a curve function, and it's complex. No ADS will deliver a nice audience, assuming the program is compelling enough, but no revenue. A few ADS will do just about the same thing, but deliver revenue. From there, as the AD rates ramp up, audience will drop off and at some pivot point there the value of the AD, due to insufficient audience impressions, drops off impacting both revenue and audience. If you ask me, TV is already well into the pivot point.

jfoster 11y ago
It's more complicated than that, though. Content quality/cost is also a factor. This problem is multidimensional.
- ddingus 11y ago
  Indeed it is. I do believe the AD / content axis is dominant. Quality can do some damage on the problem, but the move to lighter AD loads is clear. We are close to 50/50 and worse at times now. Completely unacceptable to growing numbers of us. The thing is almost nothing can't wait. So I will, if nothing else. Buy it straight up AD free. Worth it.

Radle 11y ago

They are feeding the cancer, that is feeding upon them...

mifreewil 11y ago

I feel bad for older folks who are less capable/willing to adopt newer technology. Give the grandparents a hand, eh?

venomsnake 11y ago

I think that Steve Jobs nailed it. People are willing to pay a lot for the experience. Right now bittorrent gives the best TV viewing experience at all. You click, you download, you watch. No logins, no DRM, no bullshit. Until TV can beat the quality of that experience - they are doomed.

joshstrange 11y ago
I'd argue usenet + sonarr/sickbeard (+sabnzbd/nzbget) + plex is even better but I agree overall. I pay for TV, Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc but I rarely watch content on those platforms. Plex is just so many times better and I'm not dependant on my crappy ISP.

downandout 11y ago

It isn't just that they are stuffing more ads in. I have noticed a huge spike in what I call "program guide fraud" - networks indicating in the program guide information they provide to cable systems that an episode of a show is new, when it is in fact a rerun. This causes any DVR programmed to record only new episodes of a show to record the rerun, which fraudulently inflates DVR views, which leads to increased ad rates and ratings. Some shows have taken a slightly less fraudulent, though equally frustrating, approach. 60 Minutes remixes old segments into "new" shows, but the only thing new about them is the order in which the segments appear, along with a total of maybe a minute in added commentary or updates on the segments. Whenever you hear "as we first reported..." at the beginning of a segment, that's a remixed segment. Nightline has also been remixing old segments into most of their "new" shows over the summer. TV is dying, and the networks are turning to fraud and annoyance to try to save themselves. I can't imagine that it will work.

a3n 11y ago
I don't know if it's "fraud," but Netflix's "Recently Added," "Recently Released" etc categories are just plain cynical, at the least.
- HCIdivision17 11y ago
  I've been wondering if maybe they just switched something in the backend and a whole bunch of shows got confused metadata. They're not at all what would be interpreted as "Recently Added". Charitably, my only guess is the system just doesn't detect that certain shows used to be in the line-up. Cynically, I imagine someone in their management is taking advantage of a bug and calling it a feature.

antihero 11y ago

What I do hope is that things like Prime and HBO Go succeed. TV is already going down the shitter, and I don't know any millennial peer that actually still watches it (it's so backwards, why would we want to tell us what we can watch and at what time?). What I do hope is that Netflix doesn't become a complete monopoly, else they'll stagnate.

fapjacks 11y ago

I'm pretty sure this tactic is going to work brilliantly to get people to watch more television. I'm pretty sure.

jacquesm 11y ago

Which will drive more people away from watching TV which will require an even more aggressive approach. Maybe TV networks should start an 'ad free Saturday' or something like that to combat the failing ratings? Show the first episode of something without ads on that Saturday and the follow up on some random day of the week.

tired_man 11y ago

When I was very young, and broadcast television was still in its infancy, a 60 minute network show contained about 50-52 minutes of content. Today, you can feel _very_ lucky to see as much as 44 minutes of content per show. Personally, I don't care if they stuff 54 minutes of commercials into each 60 minute show. I'm not going to watch the show as it's broadcast. I'll watch it on netflix, stream it, or download it. In any event, as far as I'm concerned, the commercials never happened :-)

tempodox 11y ago

So, that would mean, the audience hates the program but if you show them more ads instead, they will not switch channels because the same ad is so much better on your channel than on any other? That's really fascinating, I had no idea.

wheaties 11y ago

Radio did the same thing. Now we all use anything but radio.

justwannasing 11y ago

For some reason I can't access the article at the moment but, when I was in radio and TV, years ago, the FCC restricted how many advertising minutes you could run in an hour or per show. I want to say that, in radio, you couldn't go over 13 minutes in any hour but few dared to approach that limit except the kiddie rock-n-roll stations lest they turn away listeners. iirc, that ruling has been removed.

dragonwriter 11y ago

I think the relationship between falling ratings and increased ads may be different than the title communicates. In fact, it has to be for the specific numbers cited, since they are simultaneous rather than the action occurring before the response, but even though the reported numbers are simultaneous, its likely one occurred first and there is some kind of cause-and-effect relationship, but even assuming that the decline trend leads the ad increase rather than the two being lockstep or the order being reversed, it may not be that the ads are strictly to "combat" the falling rating so much as being a response to the perceived market characteristics of the remaining audience -- if networks believe that the remaining audience is less sensitive to the quantity of advertising, increasing advertising makes sense (just as if a product has a smaller but less price-sensitive market because of a new competitor stealing the most price sensitive part of the market, increasing prices and focussing on other differentiating features may be a more successful strategy to maximize profits in the new market reality than price competition -- this is a fairly exact analogy, since ads are essentially a price consumers pay for TV content.

forgotAgain 11y ago

Original source article: http://adage.com/article/media/commercials-tv/299810/ http://adage.com/article/media/commercials-tv/299810/

acomjean 11y ago

As someone who lives in the US in a competitive senate race (and has a nearby state that are politically important, competetive and share tv markets). If more states had competitive elections in the US, including splitting electoral college votes, they could solve their stations revenue shortfall and get a cut of that sweet sweet PAC money. Plus I'd like everyone in the country to feel the pain of non-stop election advertising. Maybe then campaign finance reform might show up.

rickdale 11y ago

No surprise TV ratings are falling. The graphical user interface for my cable has to be over a decade old and zero updates have ever been done to it. DVR is an alright option, but I always pass right into the show, and on some networks it disables! fast-forward. As ESPN continues down the road of being unwatchable, I honestly think the only thing carrying cable television in America is football. This year the NFL will broadcast one game over the internet. If, or rather when, that becomes the norm, cable subscriptions are going to drop at a faster rate than they are now. I enjoy being able to put something on really fast, but cable television reminds of the music industry as CD's died.

oldpond 11y ago

That's the same logic as "ratings are down, let's create more channels, cuz people like variety". They ended up diluting their captive audience even more resulting in even worse ratings. Time to turn off the TV, and that includes internet TV. You really won't miss it.

Everhusk 11y ago

Fighting fire with fire

asnyder 11y ago

If anyone's interested, I know Telestream's Tempo (http://www.telestream.net/tempo/overview.htm http://www.telestream.net/tempo/overview.htm), is super popular as it can actually cut and/or interpolate frames from content, to allow content producers to run more ads, without any perceptible difference from the viewer perspective.

stephen_cagle 11y ago

I really find it amazing that even to this day there is not a dynamic process for inserting adds into tv programming. Cable box should simply see that this tv watches NOVA, Star Trek, and Saturday morning cartoons. Because of this, I am a nerdy guy who may have kids. Reduce if from 3 minutes of 6 ads to a single minute long add. Something really specific like Disney Vacations, science kits for the kids and their parents, whatever. It isn't even a privacy thing necessarily. Cable box could be the only one that actually "watches" what you watch; streams in all possible adds and decides which adds to display to you based on its private (and un-shared) knowledge.

user_235711 11y ago

This is hilarious. I would never pay for cable anyway because advertisements are just repulsive, even when the volume of them (in both senses) was slightly lower a decade or two ago. But whenever I happen to be in a hotel room and happen to turn the TV on I am just amazed that it is actually possible to click through nearly 100 channels in sequence and see nothing but commercial after commercial on. And if I do find something to watch it seems like every two minutes or so I have to mute the TV because it starts yelling at me to buy pharmaceuticals. Definitely not sad to hear that this medium of communication is in trouble because the internet alternatives are amazingly and obviously much better.