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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: 2) by VLM on Saturday August 03 2019, @03:19PM
There's a major typo in the article:
Should be
The average age of viewers is exploding upwards, as you could guess by the contents of commercials. Some of the statistics are simply crazy. The majority viewers of some pro sports (baseball, golf) and some dramas (doctor shows, especially) are post-retirement age and continuing accelerating upward. TV is for old people.
Sentient 20-somethings will not tolerate seeing the same ad inserted three times during the same commercial break, but "forgetful" elderly literally can't notice because they're forgetful. This also shows up in impact of legacy TV ads which is plummeting, if some elderly viewer literally forgets what they saw in 30 seconds, the ad isn't going to have much impact on real world sales months later, unless you can get them to write themselves a note or something.
At some point in the next decade or two, the last TV viewers will be eighty-somethings with Alzheimer's and financially its going to be a significant struggle for legacy commercial TV to make a buck off them. Expect to hear calls for government bailouts much like some of the whining recently for bailouts of legacy newspapers (another legacy media which skews extremely toward the elderly)
Strange thought experiment that all forms of media eventually die like this with only old people "participating" so some day MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc will meet the same fate. Imagine 4chan being nothing but senior citizens, weird, but inevitable.