Consumer Ad Blocking Doubles 379
Dotnaught writes to tell us about an InformationWeek article reporting that, according to a Forrester Research report, consumers are fed up with ads. From the article: "In the past two years, the number of consumers using pop-up blockers and spam filters has more than doubled.. More than half of all American households now report using these ad blocking technologies to block unwanted pitches... Today, 15% of consumers acknowledge using their digital video recorders to skip ads, more than three times as many as in 2004." The study would have been more meaningful if it hadn't conflated spam blocking with ad blocking.
Always has been (Score:5, Interesting)
DVR FF animation in future? (Score:4, Interesting)
This goes back and forth (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Ads styled to resemble the program they interrupt: this is common during the Daily Show, especially during the last commercial break.
2. Experienced DVR users note that the blank-screen pause length between shows and commercials is generally longer than that between two commercials. I've observed other people responding both consciously and unconsciously to this, unpausing shows quickly during that period of blackness. Who doesn't like being precise with the remote and avoiding the post-commercial rewind? I've noticed that some networks, for the greater part of this past year, put a longer pause between the second-to-last and last commercial. Usually, some of the ad's audio is played before the FF function is rapidly restored; sometimes, people will just sit through the ad. The fact that I've only seen this with this particular timing (it wouldn't make sense to do this between two early commercials, because the viewer's brain isn't cued up to unpause the DVR) is what leads me to suspect it as a deliberate ploy; perhaps some
Anyone noticed any more of these little tricks? If I was an advertiser in a market with a high proportion of people likely to use DVR, I'd try a 15-second, unchanging, large-text ad with voice-over to at least propagate the brand and slogan for a few seconds of FF time.
Re:spam or not, it's all bad (Score:2, Interesting)
Not anymore, at any rate. Vermont's banned them since 1968. [publicbroadcasting.net] They're apparently [wikipedia.org] illegal in three other states as well: Maine, Alaska, and Hawaii.
Re:How is this a new thing? (Score:4, Interesting)
Without these sponsors paying for garbage ads, maybe we get some decent content that doesn't cost 8-digts for 20 minutes.
Re:DVR numbers (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't know what the data would suggest, but my anecdotal experience indicates otherwise. Everyone I hang out with uses DVR to avoid ads; none of these people were previously using their VCR for the same function. It probably is a matter of convenience; although I don't know anyone (I hope) who is befuddled by VCR programming, it is undeniably easier to use a DVR, connected as it is to the technology which lets the viewer find shows in the first place.
Re:spam or not, it's all bad (Score:2, Interesting)
People don't buy DVRs just to skip ads (Score:5, Interesting)
The article could more correctly say that "people are fed up with ads" if it were showing that people are going out of their way to block them. Instead they're showing that a lot of people downloaded the Google toolbar and discovered that it also blocks ads, and a lot of people bought DVRs so they could watch shows whenever they want, and discovered they can also fast forward through commercials.
A better measure of people's "fed-upness" with ads would be keeping track of the increase in use of products like ad-block in Firefox, or see if there's a major increase in the use of products that block ads that cost money (far fewer people would use such a product, but a dramatic increase in usership could likely be extrapolated to the general attitude of a population).
When you use Wired you really have to block ads (Score:4, Interesting)
I got so fed up after yet another wired blog was covered over by their own paid advertising I started to block them, if they would have be un-obtrusive (for example google who I think do a good job in balancing the ads to be there but not in your face!) I wouldnt have bothered.
Until companies like Wired stomp on this practice rather than encouraging it they are going to be seen as just as much as (well not quite this bad) a pariah as companies such as zango.
Darren
Re:How is this a new thing? (Score:5, Interesting)
My daughter has lived pretty much AD free for a long time now. I use privoxy at home so no ad's come throughthe net, we only watch PVR Tv so ad's get skipped and she listens to only her ipod or sirius in the car. Our DVD player is a cheapo lite-on that is hackable to remove the must watch restrictions on DVD's. so she can press stop-stop-play to start the movie right away or simply press menu to skip the warnings and ad's.
when she goes to a friends or relatives house she cant stand how their TV has unskippable ad's or that they cant skip the junk at the beginning of the DVD, or that the internet is full of annoying ad's.
My wife and I also notice this in ourselves. Advertisments annoy us enough to swich off the cource the momen they start if we cant skip them.
Today advertising is getting even more annoying. we stopped PVR'ing anything on Spike-TV network as their damned blipverts in the show do nothing but ruin it. More networks are going to this and more shows are no longer watched because of it in our home. This is what people are seeing, Advertising is no longer an annoyance it's getting downright rude.
Re:When you use Wired you really have to block ads (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:When you use Wired you really have to block ads (Score:1, Interesting)
Be sensible, honest don't get in my way and I'm happy enough to have them around. I might even click one now and then.
It's like the fable about the wind and the sun having a wager as to who can make a man remove his coat - the harder the wind tries to blow the man's coat off the tighter he pulls it around him
The lack of interesting content is a problem too! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:And I thought... (Score:5, Interesting)
I just don't re-sub to them. Recently subscribed to several National Geographic publications and found that they contained so much advertisement that they weren't worth even the deeply discounted rates they offered to resubscribe.
Re:How is this a new thing? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:More than that (Score:5, Interesting)
Please explain, what is this gold class? Never seen that here in NY.
It's a smaller cinema with 4 rows each with 6 seats arranged in pairs. The seats are much larger, more comfortable, and include recliners, footrests and a small table in the middle of each pair. They are arranged such that your view of the screen cannot be blocked by a tall person with big hair in the front, and you still have a good view in the back. They serve food and drinks (including alcohol) inside the cinema (you order before you go in and they bring it to you), and there are foods they serve in gold class they don't serve in the candy bar.
But in reality? You pay MORE for your movies?
Yep. Like I said, it's priced out of range of the annoying younger people who like to spoil movies.
Save that money and buy yourself a decent home theater setup.
This is not so effective for things not yet on DVD.
Re:Study on effectiveness over time (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The lack of interesting content is a problem to (Score:3, Interesting)
It is interesting how using MythTV actually got me watching LESS TV. I would have thought it woudl increase the amount of time spent watching content, but by the time you remove all the ads and distill the content down to just the stuff you're really interested in, there isn't much left. There's maybe 4 series that take all of 3 hours per week to watch. Lost, Heroes, Grey's Anatomy, and The Office. Oh, and Family Guy. 5 shows. 4 hours, tops.
-matthew
* If the cable company would actually let me select the few channels that I like and only charge me for those, I probably wouldn't have canceled my service.
Re:Magazine Ads, or why those ads WORK (Score:3, Interesting)
Exactly. I too get Vanity Fair - and the only ads I tear out are most of the perfume ones (cause it stinks up my room with so many).
But most of the ads are quite informative, not too disruptive, and sometimes better than the rest of the magazine (especially some of the front fold-out ones.
If advertisers want to spawn ads when I visit a website - they need to stop doing all the noise, motion, and overly busy moving ads - those are the ones I block. I try to leave the ads working unless they get too annoying - then I kill them mercilessly.
Re:How is this a new thing? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes. And if the ads no longer pull in enough money to pay the bills, it's not the fault of the public. There's no natural law stating that, say, the TV advertising market will always be big enough to support the kind of high-budget programming you're getting at the moment.
People think of this backwards, seeing themselves as the consumers. They aren't. Mass media companies are selling eyeballs to other companies to advertise for, and all the TV and radio programming and magazine articles are the necessary ingredients to produce said eyeballs for sale. If the programming is no longer compelling enough to pull in enough eyeballs to pay for itself, then it's time to reevaluate how to value programming. And if the eyeballs are dissociating the programming and the advertising then it's time to reevaluate the business model.
Re:And I thought... (Score:4, Interesting)
Zero tolerance for Ads (Score:2, Interesting)
I've made special effort to protect my 3 year old from persistant advertising. There is a growing consensus that advertising contributes to many social ills in children, including obesity, anorexia, alchohol consumption, early sex.
http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20061204/106
Apparently, on average, children see 40,000 ads per year on TV alone! Now advertsising is common in schools. All those ads may be good for buisness but I'll do what I must to protect my boy from this mental poison.
Re:This goes back and forth (Score:4, Interesting)
Adult Swim on Cartoon Network seems to do the reverse (starting five minutes early)
If they are doing it intentionally, they're idiots, because people using DVRs aren't the only people who change channels on the hour boundaries. Some people watch shows on other channels that run right up to the hour marker, and then change the channel to discover that the new show they were watching has already started. (Or in your example, be forced to choose between watching the end of one show and the start of another one.)
Comedy Central seems to have perfected the art of getting the Daily Show to start at 11:00 sharp, while allowing it to run slightly over 11:30 and then having the Colbert Report run a minute after 12:00, cutting off the end for DVR users like me.
TV ads never used to bother me until I got my TiVo and discovered just how long they are. I've learned that if I wait 20 minutes after an hour-long show starts, I can watch the entire thing without commercials. 20 minutes of commercials for an hour long show! (OK, to be fair, it's closer to 18 minutes of commercials, but still - that's a pretty lousy signal to noise ratio.)
Re:And I thought... (Score:5, Interesting)
Would enough people pay $9.95/mo for, say, commercial-free Sci-Fi channel to make it worthwhile?
I would, so long as it didn't require continuing to pay $39.99 for 400 channels of crap just to get Sci-Fi Channel, USA, and a decent feed of local channels. Oh, and Cartoon Network and Disney. $5 for local channels + $10 each comes out to spending $5 more than I'm paying now without all the junk and without all the commercials. You bet your @$$, I'd do that.
Would I pay $40 in addition to my current bill? Hell, no. And that's precisely why we won't ever see those stations in an ad-free fashion until the majority of content is obtained by direct download rather than broadcast/satellite (which is already well on its way to becoming a reality).
Re:How is this a new thing? (Score:5, Interesting)
The VERY NEXT COMMERCIAL was for ford pickup trucks, no kidding.
I took it as a sign and threw the damn tv out right away. Best thing i ever did.
And youre right, it has made me more sensitive to advertising, I cant bear commercial radio these days, and i would never even dream of going online without an ad blocker. Ive simply had enough. If i want your product i will seek it out, otherwise leave me the hell alone, the more you shove your shit in my face, the less i want it.
Ive found that nowadays advertising has opposite the intended effect on me. When i do see an ad for the latest movie/product it makes me want to avoid seeing/buying it. When im at the store i ALWAYS look for generic/always save/no-ad brand (yes there actually is a brand called no-ad, and it is my favorite precisely because they dont advertise)
So advertisers, when you pop up in front of me & say "buy X-brand widgets" what *I* hear is "stay the hell away from x-brand widgets, they suck balls"
When I block your ads, i'm doing you a favor.
Re:This goes back and forth (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:And I thought... (Score:3, Interesting)
But there's more to the tragedy of the addition of commercial ads on cable TV. There's the drop in broadcast power as well! That's the REAL bitch of the problem. Just having local channels and news would be plenty good enough for me and for a lot of people. But it's not good enough for the ABCs, NBCs and CBSes. They actually own a stake in the success of cable TV you know. And the only people in my area who wouldn't spend money on cable, mysteriously have the clearest, cleanest over-air broacast quality. I speak of the Spanish language channels in the area. They're as clear as cable... as clear as TV was back before cable. I had saved some documentation long ago about their official reasons for decreasing broadcast power but I can't find it any longer. But I believed it was BS then and I still believe so now or else the Spanish channels would also be as weak. They aren't. Weird eh?
Re:How is this a new thing? (Score:3, Interesting)
That's because the FCC authorized the average volume of advertising can equal the peak volume of any given show (up to a max predetermined level). The louder the show, the louder the advertising. It is a constant race.
Phillips made a TV that "auto-mutes" advertising (SmartMute(TM) it is called). My neighbor has one and I saw it in action. Pretty slick if you ask me.
B.
Re:How is this a new thing? (Score:3, Interesting)
If focus groups were the answer we would have a lot more good television shows.
The truth is 70% of what they put out fails/is cancelled (including a lot of good stuff*)
Television was historically a *LIMITED* resource. Given a choice between a show that makes you 2 million in profits and another show that makes you 10 million in profits, and you can ONLY show one, you cancel the less profitable show.
Friends was LUCKY. Many many shows started. Due South is an excellent example of another very funny, well written shows that ended way too soon (tho mainly because the star said, "I don't care bout money- I want to sing in my band".
Now. The cost of a show works in both directions. Again, you are an advertiser and there is *one* show on that has 90% of your target asses sitting in chairs watching it. This means you want on it. But again- there are only 8 slots for commercials. The show might be fabulously profitable at 300,000 per commercial but there are 150 companies bidding for those 8 minutes. So the most profitable (or stupid) companies get the commercial slots because they pay the most.
At this point, the cast and crew of the show says, "Hey, we are making you a lot of money and we want our cut"
Here is where "friends" diverges. Unlike say, Monk, where they let bitty shram go, the crew of friends negotiated together as a block. They never stabbed each other in the back and they all supported each other (a bit of a rarity). Unlike Monk, the show was a true ensemble- every one of the six characters was really needed so they could not lower costs by killing off several characters like they did on "Forever Night". With regard to forever night, they KILLED the show by doing this because they thought it was about a vampire named nick but actually it was an ensemble show but it was to late to repair their horrible mistake by the time they realized this.
Summing up:
90 shows start the season.
There are only about 9 that "click" for whatever reason ( a lot of VERY good shows don't make it ).
As a result, they build an audience.
Advertisers pay for that audience.
The most aggressive advertisers with the most money get the slots.
The crew and cast renegotiates for a share of the profit (to the maximum value they can extract- in the case of friends, at the end they were really borrowing from future syndication profits to pay the salaries the last year).
Over time this has change expectations
A popular TV star in the 1950's might have a decent house and car- be "well off" even tho they had an audience of 75 million and a 40% share of all TV's (only 4 stations too!) In modern day terms- they probably made $250,000 a year (adjusting for inflation). As a result, the networks made a fabulous profit and only had 6 commercials per half hour.
Today a popular TV star is making $250,000 PER EPISODE multipled by the actors (directors, writers, etc. etc.) and they have to have 8 to10 minutes of commercials. The commercials which used to be a miner annoyance are now very intrusive and consume so much time that consumers are starting to avoid them in various ways or even give up watching shows until they come out on DVD (currently with out commercials)
Re:How is this a new thing? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Tear 'em out (Score:2, Interesting)
Every other source of adds get blocked as they don't add value and/or are a PITA.
-D