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posted by martyb on Tuesday December 08 2015, @04:52AM   Printer-friendly
from the this-story-brought-to-you-by... dept.

In the U.S., digital advertising will surpass TV in 2016.

For the first time in history, outside of recession years, global television advertising revenue fell year-over-year as digital advertising surged once again. Digital, in fact, should overtake TV by the end of 2017, according to a study released Monday from Magna Global.

In the U.S., digital advertising will surpass TV in 2016.

A different study from ZenithOptimedia, also released Monday, says TV's share of the advertising pie probably peaked at 39.7 percent in 2012, and it will be overtaken by digital for the first time in 2018.

Both studies paint a rosy picture for digital advertising and a troubling one for traditional cable and broadcast TV, at least in the long term. Many TV cable channels have been losing subscribers lately — including Disney's crown jewel, ESPN, down 7 million subs in two years — while others at Viacom and elsewhere have seen declining ratings.

The advertising dollars jumping to digital will be just in time to run into a box canyon formed by AdBlock, NoScript, Ghostery, and other improving ad-blocking technologies.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by edIII on Tuesday December 08 2015, @05:39AM

    by edIII (791) on Tuesday December 08 2015, @05:39AM (#273211)

    The advertising dollars jumping to digital will be just in time to run into a box canyon formed by AdBlock, NoScript, Ghostery, and other improving ad-blocking technologies.

    IIRC, digital ads are had to measure precisely because of some blocking technologies in use, so determining the efficacy is digital marketing is iffy. I'd take any estimates of "eye balls" or "clicks" with some doubt.

    Regardless, I also remember a pretty advertising devastating technology: The SonicBlue automatic commercial skipping technology that could be removed and replaced with a 30 second skip button, and then eliminated entirely.

    On October 31, 2001, numerous TV companies, including the three major networks, filed a lawsuit against SONICblue, which at the time marketed the ReplayTV device. They alleged that the ReplayTV 4000 series was part of an “unlawful scheme” that “attacks the fundamental economic underpinnings of free television and basic nonbroadcast services” according to the lawsuit.

    The TV industry attacked ReplayTV for two reasons:

    - The machines enabled people to record television programs and then watch them without commercials via the optional "Commercial Advance" feature.[6] This had the potential to undercut advertising revenues which the lawsuit called "the lifeblood of most television channels".
    - The machines allowed users to share programs they have recorded with others via the "Send Show" feature, which transmits digital copies of shows not only on a local network, but also over the Internet to other ReplayTV owners, thereby enabling people who had not paid for premium channels to watch premium content for free.

    Let's hope that box canyon isn't similarly ruled to be "unlawful schemes" that "attack the fundamental economic underpinnings of free websites and the Internet in general". At the moment there is great concern in digital advertising over it, but adblocking isn't yet ubiquitous enough to pose the same threat.

    The loss of advertising revenue in general, IMHO, is due to people cutting the cords as fast as they can, not them skipping the advertising. Even more misanthropically, I think ESPN lost those 7 million subs over the economy. They recognize that the primary access to television for entire demographics now is basically Hulu, Amazon, Netflix, and YouTube. The ad revenue is shifting because the cable TV network is crap on a technological level compared to Internet connected homes and SmartTV applications. A wifi enabled SmartTV with available wifi (like xfinitywifi for shits and giggles) completely bypasses the cords and effectively gives Netflix and YouTube about the same foothold the cable companies ever had, and for less infrastructure costs, AND less costs to the consumer. They still want to sell me their cablebox? Are they nuts? :) Those idiots have cancelled the cable cards that people were putting into their media servers, which are people literally a single hair away from cutting the cord in the first place.

    For me the holy grail will be when they can't tell the difference between ad blocking or ad consumption. I know it costs bandwidth, but I've been thinking it would just be better to fool them in the same way I fool the script monkeys on support calls. "Uh huh, I just totally clicked the start button. Yep, I'm going to my computer. Well, yes, it is Windows 7....". Meanwhile I'm not even looking at a screen, but playing a game, and waiting till we can get to the part where they help me with a network issue and stop asking stupid questions. I would love to develop some sort of way of fooling them into thinking that I'm consuming every ad, and perhaps, even clicking random ones to simulate interest. Unfortunately, that's not a trivial problem by any stretch of the imagination. It's as if I need to develop AI to completely simulate an ad consuming human being and platform, while scraping acceptable content to send to the user.

    Advertising right now is a battlefield, and I'm a little nervous about what happens when the "enemy" realizes that the war is already lost. In other words, there's going to be quite a bump when they hit rock bottom because these people really do know how to whore a senator out like it's payday.

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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Chromium_One on Tuesday December 08 2015, @06:28AM

    by Chromium_One (4574) on Tuesday December 08 2015, @06:28AM (#273229)

    Let's hope that box canyon isn't similarly ruled to be "unlawful schemes" that "attack the fundamental economic underpinnings of free websites and the Internet in general". At the moment there is great concern in digital advertising over it, but adblocking isn't yet ubiquitous enough to pose the same threat.

    Yeah, no. So long as advertisers continue to act badly or even in bad faith, many users continue blocking as aggressively as possible. If adblocking becomes criminal, I will be a criminal.

    For me the holy grail will be when they can't tell the difference between ad blocking or ad consumption.

    While it's not a complete solution, have you looked into AdNauseum? https://dhowe.github.io/AdNauseam/ [github.io]
    Yeah, it'll cost you some bandwidth, that's fo sho.

    --
    When you live in a sick society, everything you do is wrong.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 08 2015, @07:04AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 08 2015, @07:04AM (#273237)

      Just hope they don't create their own *AA and tell Obummer 2.0 to do something about all the ad-blocking thieves!

      • (Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday December 09 2015, @05:03AM

        by anubi (2828) on Wednesday December 09 2015, @05:03AM (#273802) Journal

        Next thing I know, telemarketers will lobby our Congressmen for law requiring us to accept their telemarketing calls.

        They will tell the Congressman that they have made a business investment in that call, and ignoring or hanging up on them is a theft of the effort they made to place the call.

        Suited men will shake the hand of the Congressman, telling him the business call was placed in good faith, and having it ignored represents a criminal act.

        Laugh if you will, but I have seen things just as unenforceable passed by our Congress.

        --
        "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
    • (Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday December 08 2015, @07:05AM

      by edIII (791) on Tuesday December 08 2015, @07:05AM (#273238)

      Thank you for adnauseam. I'm going to try it out.

      --
      Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday December 08 2015, @06:26PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Tuesday December 08 2015, @06:26PM (#273538) Journal

    Advertising right now is a battlefield, and I'm a little nervous about what happens when the "enemy" realizes that the war is already lost. In other words, there's going to be quite a bump when they hit rock bottom because these people really do know how to whore a senator out like it's payday.

    There's another interesting element to video content that has grown more apparent in our household: YouTube and its imitators. We cut the cord about 8 years ago and used Netflix exclusively for entertainment. Now, 80% of the time everyone in the house watches videos that regular people produced and posted on YouTube and the like. Most of that are how-to's of one kind or another, which get watched until they understand the how-to, and then they switch it off and go do. In a country whose people have been trained for generations to consume passively, it's a remarkable development in a number of respects.

    One aspect the content companies must be quite concerned about is that the production of content has been democratized and production values are getting higher and higher as people get the hang of things; I know from my days in advertising that was the one thing that the TV/movie guys always hung their hats on, "Sure, kid, you can shoot your little movie and post it on YouTube, but who's gonna watch it? Who?"

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by rts008 on Tuesday December 08 2015, @07:12PM

      by rts008 (3001) on Tuesday December 08 2015, @07:12PM (#273575)

      I fall into the category you describe.

      I became fed up with the commercials on TV, and just quit watching about 1998-1999. The incident that prompted me to quit ended up so ironic that it has become 'set in stone' mentally.

      I was having a lot of trouble with a vid card/drivers (on W98se- an Nvidia TNT Riva 64, IIRC), and finally had enough cash for an ATI ' Radeon 7000 All in Wonder' card. I was the envy of our LAN parties, and in my glory.

      All was well for a few weeks until I ran cable to the card and set it up, then started recording a 30 min. show, pausing during commercials. When done, I thought at first I had messed up somehow: the 30 min. recording was only 18 min.'s long! I watched it, and no, I had recorded it all. Almost half of the '30 min. show' was actually commercials. Obscene! Disgusting! Unforgivable!

      I promptly unplugged the cable, and have not watched TV since. Ironic that I got THAT card so I could watch TV on my PC, and THEN that card was the cause of my TV boycott.(it's more of a 'lost interest' than a statement-boycott may not be the ideal word choice)

      I read more, and 'do' more since I'm not parked in front of a screen.

      The youtube 'how to' vids do take up a lot of my screen time(along with some anime, and Netflix), and more time is spent doing what I watched, just as you described.