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Notice more TV ads lately? You're not imagining it.
The amount of commercial time on cable TV keeps increasing as networks try to make up for shrinking audiences by stuffing more ads into every hour of television. That's despite years of promises to cut back on ads.
Last quarter, commercial time rose 1%, according to Michael Nathanson, an analyst at MoffettNathanson LLC. After declining in 2017, the volume of ads increased every quarter last year and expanded again in the first half of 2019, he said. Fox was the only major cable network group to lower its ads last quarter, cutting them by 2%, Nathanson said.
As TV viewership declines and more consumers jump to streaming services like Netflix, media companies have only a couple of options to generate the advertising revenue that Wall Street expects: They can raise prices, run more commercials or do a little of both.
"Look at the decline in ratings," Nathanson said. "Everyone's got pressure to make their quarterly numbers. Long-term, it's a very bad decision, but you don't want to miss your numbers and have your stock go down."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Snotnose on Friday August 02 2019, @10:52PM (4 children)
The only "live" TV I watch nowdays is the local news. Everything else is from elsewhere, where either the ads are already cut out or I can skip them easily.
They're killing themselves. The more ads they show the more people tune out. The more people tune out the more ads they need to show to "get their message across". Eventually people say dafuq and quit watching live TV, so they need even more ads to "get their message across".
Bunch of overpaid clueless assholes if you ask me. Show fewer ads, charge more for them, and it's not as tempting to skip them while you make the same amount of money. Then again, I write software for brain surgery so I'm far too stupid to understand the advertising world.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @10:58PM
The local "news": https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=32926&page=1&cid=874859#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by SpockLogic on Friday August 02 2019, @11:11PM
News and sport too for. "live" TV but when the local MLS soccer game was broadcast the commentator started reading adverts while the game was playing. WTF - Zap - Off, I won't put up with that pollution. Even though I have access to OTA and streaming channels I download TV series from usenet that have their adverts stripped out and this makes for a shorter and much more enjoyable viewing experience.
Overreacting is one thing, sticking your head up your ass hoping the problem goes away is another - edIII
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Saturday August 03 2019, @03:41AM (1 child)
Local news is even full of ads. They scroll the bottom and even have "sponsored content" breaks with people sitting on a couch talking. That said I do like all of the sub channels that play mostly old programming.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Saturday August 03 2019, @04:25AM
I love the scrolls at the bottom. Local station scrolls traffic reports, one constant is "67 SB between Broadway and 8 stop and go". Um, first that's maybe 1/4 mile. Second, there are traffic lights there. Of course it's stop and go, if it wasn't then everyone would be running red lights all morning.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.