Will cable TV be invaded by commercials? (1981)

https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-invaded-by-commercials.html

by dgellow • 6 years ago

288 338 6 years ago

nytimes.com

sjwright• 6 years ago

And the real question is: will history repeat itself with Netflix, et al?

HBO demonstrates that it’s still an open question.

elliekelly2• 6 years ago

I’ve recently noticed some Hulu shows that let you know you’ll see ads even if you subscribe to ad-free Hulu.

zdragnar• 6 years ago

IIRC, the licensing arrangement between Hulu and the network prohibits not showing ads on those shows, or some such nonsense.

icelancer• 6 years ago

That's tremendous. That type of brazen not-give-a-shit is impressive to me, as abhorrent as it is.

scarface745• 6 years ago

There are three shows with ads on Hulu without ads.

https://help.hulu.com/s/article/hulu-no-ads?language=en_US#s...

The additional shows you can get on demand without Hulu Live TV have ads. But that’s more akin to traditional cable.

rjtobin• 6 years ago

I think there’s a chance it will be different: at least now there is the potential to offer customers an ad-free package for an extra cost. Some services like Hulu already do this (offering cheaper plan with ads and a slightly pricier plan with no ads). I think with cable this would have been difficult or impossible to achieve.

One nice thing about this is it makes plain how much the networks make from showing ads to your household. I happily pay a little extra to “outbid” the ad networks.

dicknuckle• 6 years ago

we actually split Hulu with a friend. we pay the difference between basic and no-ads. it's an auto payment from bank account to bank account every month. life on autopilot.

0xff00ffee2• 6 years ago

Not true. HULU still shows ads, even with "No Ads" version. From their website:

Hulu (No Ads)

Get First Month Free

then $11.99/month

A few excluded shows play with ads.

[from here https://signup.hulu.com/plans]

That last line kills me.

It's like H2G2, you can't have Tea and No Tea unless you remove your common sense particle.

mavhc• 6 years ago

Selling ads globally seems like it's more expensive, unless you automate it like Google etc do, so they'd rather stick to just having subscriptions and be considered premium content.

leereeves2• 6 years ago

HBO demonstrates that it’s still an open question.

What do you mean? Is HBO or HBO Go adding commercials?

SubiculumCode• 6 years ago

I assume he means that because HBO does not show ads, it is an open question of whether Netflix would try.

Personally, I will not subscribe to services that show commercials. Commercials are for free services, not for paid services. As soon as you allow them to cross that boundary....

bonestamp2• 6 years ago

They're not selling ads, but they do run a 15-30 second spot before each episode advertising one of their own shows. That doesn't really bother me for now, but it seems like a slippery slope towards showing two spots, or three, or selling those spots to other advertisers.

Side note, with all of the streaming subscriptions I have, I'm probably not saving any money compared to when I had traditional cable, but there are fewer commercials and the content is so much better.

m463• 6 years ago

For every shitty experience, there is a market opportunity.

(I hope. There hasn't been much of a market for privacy)

qppo4• 6 years ago

As long as I am given the option to purchase content without advertisements I will do so. If I can't watch a piece of content without ads, I'll either wait until I can or pirate it. Usually the former.

Frankly I think content is just overvalued and the actual creation of content is extremely inefficient, from a financial point of view. My personal experience has been that Hollywood film/television studios are poorly run businesses with massive losses at each point in the process, but is laden down by individuals who do things because it's the way it's always been done, are hostile to innovation (both technology and in business), and are anti-consumer, anti-viewer, and frankly anti-making-money.

It's honestly a terrible industry and needs to be disrupted. Market distortion is the only reason films cost what they do, from production to distribution and consumption. And literally everyone in the pipeline has an incentive to keep the market distorted, except people who watch content. Thank god for piracy.

akhosravian• 6 years ago

I’d be interested in hearing more about what you mean by market distortion here.

A lot of the silliness in things like how much stars are paid seems applicable to software development — tiny incremental value adds become very substantial with a large enough audience.

TeMPOraL5• 6 years ago

My personal experience has been that Hollywood film/television studios are poorly run businesses with massive losses at each point in the process, but is laden down by individuals who do things because it's the way it's always been done, are hostile to innovation (both technology and in business), and are anti-consumer, anti-viewer, and frankly anti-making-money.

Is it that, or is the industry mind-controlled by parasites to achieve a different goal than delivering quality entertainment cost-effectively? "Hollywood accounting" is a known term, and it doesn't describe being bad at making money - it describes being very good at making money for yourself by purposefully cheating those who actually brought in that money.

(My general heuristic is that, if they're inefficiencies persisting despite competitive pressure, it's because it's these inefficiencies that are the real reason the business is done, and someone is making a good money off them.)

dylan6045• 6 years ago

HBO also demands a higher fee than something like HGTV or A&E. The one that kills me is ESPN. It is the most expensive channel for a cable operator to carry, and it is also known as a must carry.

scarface745• 6 years ago

HBO is completely different than ESPN. You can choose to pay for HBO. You can’t choose to exclude ESPN.

jcfields• 6 years ago

I think the difference is that the infrastructure is decoupled from the content now. Cable systems and satellite fleets were both traditionally very high barriers for new competitors to overcome. Granted, consolidated media oligopolies may get us to the same place a different way.

0x2020202• 6 years ago

I think they are bound to. You don’t think as soon as Disney can they aren’t going to start showing ads for everything Disney related?

The worst step back to me from TV -> streaming -> streaming becoming more TV like is content release schedules. The Mandalorian on Disney Plus was a great example, you have all the episodes ready and there isn’t a good reason to keep them sitting behind a time gate. I would be much more likely to subscribe for a month to watch a show in a week than I would be to subscribe for a few months to few one show. Instead you get none of my money

Talanes3• 6 years ago

Catering to the customers least interested in keeping the service isn't a great business strategy. Those who do only want to pay for one month to watch the whole show still have the option of subscribing during the last month of airing. Or any time after that.

hinoki• 6 years ago

There is no global schedule of programming any more, so there is room to have tiers with and without ads.

So maybe it’s more like “Netflix with special offers”

Animats• 6 years ago

Classic ad, run in theaters, against Pay TV:

https://archive.org/details/Drive-inSaveFreeTv

tedunangst• 6 years ago

"30-minute toy-store shows." Which arrived in 1984.

downerending4• 6 years ago

It's like a creeping cancer that cannot be stopped.

Back around 1981, advertisers would take a certain percentage of ad pages in each newspaper or magazine and consider it a reasonable deal. These days, they absolutely will not accept this unless they get a lot more space, obnoxious animations, force-play videos, and overlays that you have to click through, and often various registration walls, cross-site tracking, etc.

They have only themselves to blame for ad blocking. With ML, eventually this will become pervasive, even into the physical world. (My VR goggles will gray out billboards, etc.)

judge2020• 6 years ago

My VR goggles will gray out billboards

Only if the billboard doesn't qualify for "acceptable billboard ads" (or you could jailbreak and run a different billboard blocker like a rebel)

nordsieck• 6 years ago

With ML, eventually this will become pervasive, even into the physical world. (My VR goggles will gray out billboards, etc.)

Will your glasses grey out James Bond's Aston Martin in Goldfinger?

llukas• 6 years ago

With style transfer improving a bit they can make it any brand ;P

jagged-chisel• 6 years ago

Not really necessary unless Bond’s current fling proclaims “This is a truly astonishing automobile, James. From which dealer is it available, and are there any current incentives?”

downerending4• 6 years ago

No, because it will be smart enough to know that I enjoy seeing that.

eranimo• 6 years ago

That cancer is called consumerism

bosswipe• 6 years ago

The only reason you can block ads on the web is because there was a small window where the idealistic academics that built the internet and the web were able to keep commercial interests out so they were able to use open universal protocols. The same will not be true for VR.

sneak• 6 years ago

It’s already not true on mobile generally. No view source, no extensions, no user injected scripts. You get the page the server wants you to see.

kevin_thibedeau• 6 years ago

It's only a matter of time until sites are rendering ads and content via websockets and wasm.

downerending4• 6 years ago

Are you sure? I will have VR (AR?) googles with a camera that sees what my head points at, processes the video graying out ads, and shows it to me on my screens. Not sure commercial interests can prevent this product.

ce4• 6 years ago

Totally agree. Bromite is a patched chrome with privacy enhancements and ad blocking. It used to provide a system webview engine that allowed all that for apps's integrated webviews... So its technically possible but Google doesnt like that feature

https://github.com/bromite/bromite/wiki/Installing-SystemWeb...

darepublic• 6 years ago

no hope for open source?

Nextgrid3• 6 years ago

A glimpse of the future: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs

takeda2• 6 years ago

WebAssembly is also trying to close that small window in the web.

technofiend• 6 years ago

As desperately as much as I'd like there to be a compelling VR experience equivalent to 2d internet we have today there just isn't one. VR seems to be the exclusive domain of games. I can't imagine Facebook's Oculus graying out billboards unless it's to replace someone else's advertisement with their own.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 6 years ago

I would guess that VR googles that can gray out billboards, etc will likely first get used by governments to keep people from seeing protests. What would previously have been anti-government protestors will be changed by the googles to show them holding pro- government placards. Police brutality will be censored by the goggles. You will get in huge trouble if you go outside without your goggles.

dylan6045• 6 years ago

(My VR goggles will gray out billboards, etc.)

I think it'll be the exact opposite. I think the Black Mirror episodes are closer to what will be in our (not too distant) future. The content will track your gaze, and if you are not looking at the ad, then measures will be taken to get your attention back to where "it should be".

matheusmoreira3• 6 years ago

The measures depicted in Black Mirror are straight up torture. Loud noise to punish people who refuse to look at advertisements? That level of abuse should be cause for violent resistance.

pixl97• 6 years ago

then measures will be taken to get your attention back to where "it should be".

Please drink verification can.

grecy• 6 years ago

It's like a creeping cancer that cannot be stopped

Billboards are heavily regulated and sparse in New Zealand. It can be stopped, but it takes willpower and hard work.

missedthecue2• 6 years ago

And a culture that has less respect for private property, for better or for worse. 4 states ban billboards fwiw

bovermyer2• 6 years ago

If advertising ever intrudes on streaming the way it did on cable, I'll just transition out of watching TV altogether.

I don't care near as much about keeping up with the zeitgeist as I used to. Maybe I'm just getting old.

etrautmann• 6 years ago

Yep, exactly. I refuse. I’m not sitting through any ads.

pmiller2• 6 years ago

More importantly, I’m not paying to sit through ads.

BurningFrog4• 6 years ago

The TV zeitgeist is gone.

People used to all watch the same shows at the same time.That made it the thing everyone had in common.

Now TV is more like reading books. Everyone does it n their own time. It's still a big things, but it doesn't create a nationwide community.

On top of this, you're also getting old :)

ocdtrekkie2• 6 years ago

If you heard about Game of Thrones or Westworld or Stranger Things, or most recently, Tiger King, you'd realize this is very much still a thing for a large population.

Weekly shows of certain types have massive speculation and plot discussion crowds with podcasts and analysis channels. Then there's a second viewership wave created by all the memes.

Netflix's just drop the whole season model has cost them a lot in public discussion and hence hype, some of their shows are now released in a weekly format to better capture the hype cycle.

dylan6045• 6 years ago

In the worst cases of cable/broadcast advertising, at least the content creators could dictate when the ads should be played. Sites like YouTube, just decided by algorithms when to place an ad based on time so you get ads in the middle of sentences. The streaming apps for cable channels also include ads just like watching it live. In these formats, they make it where you cannot skip ahead past the ad breaks, so it's even worse on streaming

caf• 6 years ago

Yeah that "ad in the middle of a sentence" thing annoys me, particularly because surely Google of all places has the ML chops to figure out how to place an ad at a natural break point based on the sound track!

TeMPOraL5• 6 years ago

I think it was less dictating, and more of being aware beforehand. The shows of TV era all have a pretty distinctive way they're cut, to have breaking points for ads. It gets especially noticeable today, when you're most likely to be re-watching them on an ad-break-free streaming service.

On the other hand, apparently there is a way for the YouTube creators to dictate where ad breaks will happen. I've seen at least two videos in which the person speaking said "and then YouTube will show you an ad right about... NOW"; lo and behold, an ad shows perfectly timed to when the speaker announces it.

titzer2• 6 years ago

Old? I feel like a dinosaur because I still watch shock DVDs. Still no ads. No DRM. No funky software needed, though, TBH, the bits are encrypted. Not sure how long optical media lasts, but I am hoping these things last a few more decades.

scarface745• 6 years ago

DVDs don’t have DRM????

rollingbarreler4• 6 years ago

I believe CDs and DVDs used organic compounds for their data layer, which begins physically rotting and destroying the data later

Later disks like M-disc type DVDs and Blu-ray don't use living components and don't really age

swilliamsio• 6 years ago

Your DVDs don't have unskippable anti-piracy ads and ads for movies that released decades ago?

caseysoftware2• 6 years ago

It's amazing how much commercials have crept in. If you watch an "hour long" show from the early 80s, it's roughly 48 minutes. If you watch a similar show from 10-15 years ago, it's closer to 44-45 and in the last few years, it's more like 42 minutes.

I assume it's only going to get worse as TV ad revenue drops faster with more alternatives.

jandrese• 6 years ago

Watch broadcast TV and you'll notice that hour long TV shows are in 1:15 timeslots because they need to pack in an extra 15 minutes of ads. Or the show will have bits cut out like half of the opening, the start and end of some scenes, etc...

timcederman• 6 years ago

Do you have a citation for this? It's been 42-44 minutes of content for at least the last 20 years in my experience.

magicalhippo• 6 years ago

Checked some episodes from some shows I had available, first seasons, DVD or Bluray source:

Miami Vice (1984): 48m

Homicide Life On The Streets (1993): 47m

TekWar (1994): 45m

Nowhere Man (1995): 45m

Battlestar Galactica (2003): 44m

Dark Matter (2015): 43m

12 Monkeys (2015): 43m

Lucifer (2015): 43m

There are exceptions though. Legion (2017) episodes are around 50m, and several of the newer "made for streaming" shows have 50-60m episodes.

johnbatch• 6 years ago

Big Bang Theory - 18-20 mins https://trakt.tv/shows/the-big-bang-theory/seasons/10

Brooklyn Nine-Nine - 21 mins https://trakt.tv/shows/brooklyn-nine-nine/seasons/7

The Office - 22 mins https://trakt.tv/shows/the-office/seasons/9

M.A.S.H - 24 mins https://trakt.tv/shows/m-a-s-h/seasons/10

Golden Girls - 24 mins https://trakt.tv/shows/the-golden-girls/seasons/1

Cheers - 24 mins https://trakt.tv/shows/cheers/seasons/10

onion2k• 6 years ago

I don't find it amazing. 1980 was 40 years ago. For context, the first commercial TV broadcast in the US was in 1941, and it didn't really get going until the late 40s. For the format not to have found it's most profitable show length for an hour long slot 35 years after it started, and for it to still be evolving 40 years from that point with a huge amount of innovation in the tech isn't really surprising.

ghayes• 6 years ago

I would suppose OPs argument is that this is like how much sawdust can you add to food before people notice and choose alternative media consumption. There's presumably a lot of deadweight loss and collusion that play to these results.

meh2frdf• 6 years ago

In the UK the amount of minutes is regulated for broadcast.

pmlnr• 6 years ago

Yet it's still unwatchable with so many commercials.

hawski• 6 years ago

That reminds me, that I would love for Netflix to have a common episode length filter. Or at least a category for around 20 minute shows.

sgustard2• 6 years ago

Ad revenue has also dropped with DVR use. It's amusing to think about adding 20% of ads to compensate for 20% of viewers skipping over the ads, since it's a race to 100% ads that nobody watches.

sarajevo• 6 years ago

This promise did not age well:

“We won't break programming at awkward times,'' promises Dick Cox, president of CBS Cable,

rollingbarreler4• 6 years ago

What a name to have

WheelsAtLarge• 6 years ago

I will bet a lot that Netflix is headed this way too. Once Netflix stops growing, it will need to find additional growth, and advertisement will be the way to additional profit.

janesvilleseo• 6 years ago

Possibly. But with original content it may just be through syndication as well.

mjrpes• 6 years ago

Also, in-show product placements.

banana_giraffe• 6 years ago

I've been waiting for the day for shows on Netflix to start replacing in-show things like posters on the wall with recent ads.

pests• 6 years ago

Shows and networks have already been doing this for a very long time.

https://www.hypable.com/how-i-met-your-mother-is-inserting-n...

the_duke2• 6 years ago

There is already plenty of product placement on Netflix.

The smoking is notorious, for example. They cram in cigarettes wherever they can, often to the detriment of the scene.

I really wish there were laws mandating a very obvious " this scene was sponsored by X" overlay.

sverhagen• 6 years ago

Which makes me wonder, internationally, if there aren't countries that would make them do that for their territory? I think in the Netherlands pretty much all kinds of tobacco advertising is banned, even the very creative ones (like opening a chain of bars named similar to one tobacco brand). And I just found a (Dutch language) site weakly referencing European rules around disclosure of product placement (though, in the context of television, that may be Netflix's loophole).

fulafel3• 6 years ago

Even bigger issue (measured in future loss of life years and ethics[1]): cars, there's so much driving. For environmental reasons we should heavily discourage that.

[1] smoking mostly is self inflicted harm, GW kills others

fergie• 6 years ago

Not sure if its region dependent, but my Netflix shows a warning about product placement at the beginning of the show.

I have to say that it was a bit of an eye-opener- a lot of these ads are not obviously product-placement at all. The one that shocked me the most was an episode of "Friends from College" where the main characters went up the Napa valley for some wine tasting and then stopped into McDonalds on the way back- it was such a sharp, natural and realistic storyline that I would have never assumed that it was product placement. It dealt with "McDonalds-shame" in very sophisticated way that you wouldn't think McDonalds was capable of, and actually made me feel (as somebody who has been wine tasting in Napa and tries to avoid Mickey Ds) that a fast food burger is "allowed".

anticensor• 6 years ago

Product placement is done since the beginnings of cinema and television.

jimmaswell2• 6 years ago

You actually want movies you're watching to have a distracting overlay taking you out of the moment? Before the start of the movie or something would be a lot better.

TeMPOraL5• 6 years ago

I really wish there were laws mandating a very obvious " this scene was sponsored by X" overlay.

I'd want that too.

I'd love to get my hands on even one list of all product placements in a given show; it would be trivial to make a userscript that overlays such data over a Netflix stream, as an artistic project. I suspect there's a strong point to be driven there.

hutzlibu• 6 years ago

About smoking, I never suspected that can actually be true, but I remember a Jet Li movie .. where he as the main character had to smoke a cigarette in one scene, which looked so artificial and unvoluntarily, where you could see he clearly did not wanted it, but was forced to. (and shame on him, as he does not seem to need to to this anymore)

And about product placement in general: it seems to be a bigger buisness, than I suspected:

https://blog.hollywoodbranded.com/how-much-does-product-plac...

LocalH• 6 years ago

I really wish there were laws mandating a very obvious " this scene was sponsored by X" overlay.

I don't think an in-vision in-scene notice should be required, as that is very intrusive to the viewer. However, I would support a requirement of full transparency, and I do believe they already notify people of product placement per episode (or am I thinking YouTube? I know I've seen recent notifications somewhere).

Alternately, I would support in-vision in-scene overlays if a subscriber could disable them. I can understand why it would be desirable to be enabled by default, but as an adult viewer who is quite capable of making my own purchasing decisions, I should have the right to consume media without that type of quasi-condescending warning invading my enjoyment of a given piece of media.

manmal• 6 years ago

So you want even better visibility for advertisers? Whenever a cigarette is lit, the overlay should also clarify that it’s a Marlboro?

SamuelAdams2• 6 years ago

Plus all the Apple branded things too. It's especially interesting because only "good characters" can use Apple's devices on screens [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22434315

hacym• 6 years ago

Or they just raise prices like they have done multiple times now.

cheschire• 6 years ago

Eventually this kind of approach would torpedo their company's growth. Every price hike alienates part of their base who, for whatever reason, cannot or will not accept the new higher price and they will jump to another provider who is the same or cheaper in price even if the product they receive is worse.

At some point the price difference between the quality product and the cheap product becomes so vast that the quality product company must shrink either by reducing the quality of the product, or by reducing the manpower necessary to produce the quality product.

It's better to first introduce ads into the current subscription plan, and then introduce ad-free subscription levels at a higher price.

PopeDotNinja• 6 years ago

They might introduce a cheaper tier with ads, like Hulu does.

Razengan6• 6 years ago

"Growth" is now one of my most hated overused business lingo, after "innovation".

Is it too naive to hope that this pandemic will make us collectively question the value of creeds like growth for growth's sake?

qubex3• 6 years ago

How can your hatred for any corporate lingo term outrank that reserved for the bulwarks ‘leverage’ and ‘synergy’?

‘Granularity’ is a big up-and-comer too.

mjburgess4• 6 years ago

To make it precise: growth is the next generation having a greater abundance than the current.

If you care about global poverty, disease, famine etc. then you care about growth.

Since we do not have levels of abundance which reach everyone even in rich societies, growth is everywhere a concern.

To "question its value" is to say: since I have sufficient wealth, that'll do for the planet.

jasode4• 6 years ago

"Growth" is now one of my most hated overused business lingo, after "innovation". Is it too naive to hope that this pandemic will make us collectively question the value of creeds like growth for growth's sake?

The "growth for growth's sake" is a thought-stopping meme. Let's unpack why that's an inaccurate reason for why companies do what they do and also why people who don't even work at those companies also care about growth.

The commenter you responded mentioned Netflix and "growth". Remember that Netflix went public in 2002 with an IPO.

When any company sells shares of ownership to investors, they're making a deal with society that if you buy their stock, your money will "grow". For investors' shares to become more valuable, Netflix has to grow new revenue, grow new profits, grow new markets, grow new products, etc. Why do so many public investors (and the so-called "investors" includes your grandparents' pensions, teachers/firemen retirements, etc) care about their money "growing"?!? Because they want to protect their future purchasing power. (My previous comment about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15728480)

On other hand, if a family restaurant wants to just open one location with 20 tables and a payroll of 10 workers and just be a stable business that never grows, they wouldn't be able to sell public stock because nobody would buy it. There's nothing wrong with being a company that never grows -- but that's not the deal Netflix made with society.

So to rewrite your question a different way which gets at the root of where the motivation of "growth" comes from... Are we questioning the value of companies "going public"? Or are we questioning the ideology of fiat-money "inflation"? How do we make your grandparents pensions not care about "growth"?!? That's very difficult to solve!

There are also non-public entities that also want "growth". Countries like growth because it raises the standard-of-living for their citizens. Some small private businesses like some limited-scale growth because the owners like the challenges of running bigger business (e.g. expand to 5 restaurant locations instead of just 1.)

Even though the pandemic has shown the benefits of less smog in Los Angeles because of less economic activity, it still has not removed the root of human reasons for desiring "growth".

Nextgrid3• 6 years ago

“Engagement” is another one.

imprettycool• 6 years ago

I doubt it. Netflix doesn't have a monopoly on infrastructure like the cable companies did.

joliu• 6 years ago

That may be true but as the popularity of Netflix exclusive content grows so does Netflix's ability to display ads without shedding as much of its user base.

robotnikman• 6 years ago

The moment they start showing ads is the moment I drop netflix

alexmingoia2• 6 years ago

The market is big enough for ad-free options.

HBO built a business providing ad-free TV entertainment. The Economist built a business selling ad-free news periodicals. YouTube provides a paid ad-free option.

You could look at the Web and say “it’s littered with ads” or you could look at the Web and say “it’s the largest collection of free information on the planet.”

TeMPOraL5• 6 years ago

YouTube provides a paid ad-free option.

It's an "ad-free", with a large disclaimer under asterisk.

you could look at the Web and say “it’s the largest collection of free information on the planet.”*

Or you could look at the way advertising influences curation of information, and how the viability of ad-based business models mean there's incentive to create sites with things that promise, but not deliver, information. You could look at that and say that the Internet is the largest collection of free disinformation on the planet. Most places that give reliable information do not show or involve themselves with advertising.

alexmingoia2• 6 years ago

I have a different perspective and experience.

Ads have enabled me to access information at little to no cost to me. Ads enable us to search the Internet.

I learned to exercise, eat healthy, and much more from watching YouTube. I’ve learned a lot from newspapers and blogs. I’ve learned a lot from people on Twitter. Do I enjoy advertising? No, usually not. But from my perspective it’s a win-win. Companies promote their products and I get to read things for free.

Look on the bright side.

zxcvbn40383• 6 years ago

Im enjoying Hulu/Netflix/Prime Video while I can. My kid has grown up in a household without commercials and where you get points for who can hit “skip” the fastest when one does pop up. Commercials were always annoying but when you aren’t used to seeing them then it really hits home that your seeing the exact same commercial for floor wax sixteen times an hour and the exact same commercial for anti-AIDS drugs sixteen times per hour.

You can forgive broadcast TV - someone had money to spend and wanted to hawk floor wax to the ethos excessively. But lets look at YouTube for example - their algorithms are supposed to be so sophisticated but I’m outside every desirable demographic except maybe not dead, I don’t impulse buy, I don’t have any wax able floors, if I did I would switch apartments before waxing them, and I downvote, skip, or just kill the youtube app every time I see a commercial. I should be number one in the lost cause file, but instead they keep showing me the same stuff that I’ve already downloaded, skipped, stopped transferring countless times. How do you explain that in the era of machine learning and no holds barred privacy invasion?

anpat• 6 years ago

Probably because it still earns them money over not showing you anything!

I have come to believe that over a period of time producers and consumers both will realise that the middleman cares more about it’s own cut over either of them.

Less cynical thoughts;

1. I don’t know if and what kind of controls/flexibility YouTube allows on demand side, but it could be a “foot meet gun” story. ie advertiser is new to platform and messed up targeting and/or is over-bidding.

2. Advertiser might think 1 cent CPM is worth it, no one else bothers to bid on your data (based on your description) - still kinda ties into cynical view.

war10252• 6 years ago

the middleman cares more about it’s own cut over either of them.

Rational self interest, as they say.

jwr• 6 years ago

They get paid for displaying the ads to you, so that's what they do :-) It's really that simple. And they will continue to do that while advertisers get a return on their ads (it isn't clear if they do, sometimes it can take a while for the market to realize that a certain fad strategy simply does not work). But I'm guessing it does work.

dataduck• 6 years ago

Maybe Google's algorithms have determined that the floor wax company doesn't look at / understand its analytics reports.

zxcvbn40383• 6 years ago

Haha, I think you’ve nailed it

deathhand• 6 years ago

I wish it was that intelligent. Ad buyers are morons and companies like Criteo are snake oil salesmen.

Advertising, as a whole, is one of the most inefficient use of man-power capitalism has ever created. Intelligent people who have been failed for the US education system(chasing the goal of 'be whatever you want to be... but there is no sustainable way) usually end up there in some fashion.

This glut of capable but ineffectual intellectuals is either helping the ponzi fiat money scheme or if this virus is a 12 month affair with limited buying leads to mass civil unrest.

The demographics of the ad companies skew left... which is ok as long as we don't get into South American Currency Territory which i think the petro dollar should keep away for the time being.

jstanley• 6 years ago

FWIW, uBlock Origin is very effective against Youtube. I never see ads on Youtube.

culturestate2• 6 years ago

Do you mean display ads or pre-rolls? I don't get any display ads but I get pre-rolls constantly with uBO.

GrumpyNl• 6 years ago

Same for me, when i use youtube on my mobile i am flabbergasted by the amount of ads and 20 minute promo programs. Why and how can you watch that without a add blocker?

nolok5• 6 years ago

the exact same commercial for anti-AIDS drugs sixteen times per hour.

European here, I will go over my surprise / weirdness about having ads for chronic disease medication like that, to ask : do you actually, you as the patient, choose which medication you receive for disease like that? Does your opinion override that of the doctor? Is it not ultimately a moot choice both by you and the doctor because the one you will get is the one your insurance covers?

I have a hard time reconciling what (little) I know about in the US medical system between insurance behavior, doctor choice, and ads aimed at patient choice.

I understand ads for non prescription drugs and little things like cough, but ads for HIV treatment I can't fathom.

As for your question, while the ad might be massively bad targeting for you, it might still be the best they have where you fit in the restriction set by the ad publisher, so better they get money on a poor match than no money at all. Usually a publisher that has terrible targeting.

vinay4272• 6 years ago

I'll take a stab at the simpler questions here:

do you actually, you as the patient, choose which medication you receive for disease like that?

No, but I imagine patients liable to the advertising might mention a specific medication in a conversation with their doctor. Whether that has any effect depends on the advertisement/patient/doctor.

Does your opinion override that of the doctor?

For prescription drugs, no.

drevil-v2• 6 years ago

Every time I am visiting USA, I am flabbergasted at the medication ads on TV. Not just for off-the-counter stuff like paracetamol or anti-inflammation medication but actual freaking prescription only drugs.

And they actually ask you to speak to your doctor about the drug. Haha what? Shouldn't my doctor morally and by default be suggesting the best treatment for what I have? And if I don't trust his/her treatment plan then why not switch to a different doctor?

wingspar2• 6 years ago

Twenty-odd years ago, I saw a tv ad for the drug Paxil. It was about social anxiety disorder. Didn’t know that was a thing, so I never looked into fixing it.

Talked to my doctor about it. Got a prescription, took the medication for several years. It changed my life for the better.

3xblah2• 6 years ago

Direct to consumer TV ads for pharmaceuticals were illegal in 1981. This did not change until 1997. As I remember it, in the few years after 1997 there were still relatively few drug ads on TV. It was nothing like today. It seems like the number of ads has dramatically increased in more recent times I would guess because many large pharmaceutical companies lack the pipelines they had in the 1990's and are under more pressure to increase sales on existing drugs.

JeremyNT• 6 years ago

You have to convince the doctor to prescribe it for you, but doctors take little convincing. The companies paying for the ads on TV are also taking the doctors out to expensive restaurants and giving them free samples of the advertised medicine. And of course doctors watch TV too.

All the incentives happily align.

zxcvbn40383• 6 years ago

It used to be forbidden to advertise prescription medication in the US but they changed the rule sometime in the 80s.

The usual format is lots of images of happy people walking in parks and spending time with family while a narrator says the drug name a dozen times and what it treats, then reads off a long list of side effects and warnings “blah-blah should not be taken by pregnant women, women planning to become pregnant”, “blah-blah should not be taken by smokers or those with reduced immune function”, “blah-blah may cause liver and kidney failure”, “deaths have occurred while taking blah-blah”.

Personally that makes me want to go suck on a soup bone and hope for the best, but for the larger population the ads are apparently very effective and scores of people who see them will go pressure their doctors to prescribe them or shop around for a doctor that will prescribe them. (Drug store clinics will pretty much prescribe anything if you can articulate having symptoms it treats - conflict of interest is obvious)

xxpor4• 6 years ago

As an American, what shocked me in the UK was the amount of ads for sports gambling. Literally every commercial during games was for a betting site. It felt pretty gross.

sgustard2• 6 years ago

The first goal of drug advertising is to define a category and convince people they have a disorder that no one had ever heard of before. Viagra invented "erectile disfunction" and went on to make billions of dollars, and an industry was born.

iso12104• 6 years ago

One reason that healthcare in the U.S. is so expensive compared with every other country is these adverts.

US TV costs something like $78b a year (based on 36% of $220b [0]), or $600 per household, on top of cable costs.

If 25% of adverts are for prescription drugs, then $150 a year of health spending is what you pay for the 6 minutes an hour of tedious healthcare adverts. (There's another $450 extra you pay when buying mattresses or whatever else is advertised on TV)

[0] https://www.emarketer.com/Article/Total-US-Ad-Spending-See-L...

jklein112• 6 years ago

I think the end game for pharmaceutical companies is something like this. They show this ad to 1 million people. Of those 1 million people, 3000 are HIV positive. Of the 3000, 1% ask their doctor about the new drug. Now 30 physicians research the drug and find that it might be more effective in patients that present with x or have y comorbidities. They start prescribing it in those cases. Rarely do physicians care about what it is going to cost the patient.

LukeShu• 6 years ago

ads for HIV treatment

To entirely ignore the broader point of your post: The HIV drug ads I see are about prevention, not treatment. Along the lines of "If you're at increased risk for HIV (you're a man who has sex with men), then you should take our new variety of PrEP, and reduce your risk of infection."

cosmie2• 6 years ago

I have a hard time reconciling what (little) I know about in the US medical system between insurance behavior, doctor choice, and ads aimed at patient choice.

As a patient, you don't get to choose what drugs a doctor prescribes to you. But you do get to choose (to an extent) your doctor. So if you ask a doctor about a particular prescription, and it's within the sphere of treatment options they would evaluate for you, then they'll usually give you that option. If for no other reason than to pacify you and prevent you from doctor shopping until one does give it to you.

To that end, medical marketing tends to work twofold: a salesforce focused on "educating" doctors on a particular medication, and patient advertising to get patients requesting it more. Doctors tend to have a go-to grab bag of treatment options they're familiar with and tend to prescribe, so both of these work to accelerate how quickly a particular new blockbuster gets its way onto that shortlist for any particular doctor.

Insurance companies, traditionally, operate as a backstop to prevent this from going overboard. Since they act as payor for both the physician and prescription, if they deny claims it can impede uptake. So they can put in place things like documentation requirements, prior authorization[1], and prescription formularies. That said, components of the Affordable Care Act (i.e. Obamacare) capped the profitability of insurance companies as a percentage of total revenue. Which doesn't really reconcile with trying to reign in costs, as runaway medical spending just means runaway premiums they can justify charging, and the absolute value of their percentage-based cap goes up.

[1] https://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=4...

Cass• 6 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if you're actually quite a good pick for the floor wax commercial demographic. Now you, specifically, may not have waxable floors or an interest in floor maintenance, but the more interesting questions is, how many people who look similar to you to an algorithm do?

Let's assume renters don't generally wax their floors, and cheap shitty floors don't need waxing. So we're looking for people likely to own a home nice enough too have wooden floors worth maintaining. You could probably do worse than to show that commercial to "highly-educated people with children, working in fields adjacent to software engineering."

rriepe• 6 years ago

Advertising isn't sales. Advertising is presence. If you're cognizant of an ad at all, then it worked, whether you buy the product or not.

xbmcuser• 6 years ago

You can pay the $10~ per month for premium and get rid of the ads. Many people here on hn complain about the ads but are unwilling to pay to support non ad version at the same time.

close04• 6 years ago

I'm a Premium user but between permanently enabled uBlock, Pi-Hole, and (almost) always-on VPN to use all that I never payed attention to the ads aspect. The most obvious benefits for me were that I can download the music and listen offline, including with the screen off which means I can connect now my Sonos system to Youtube.

mattmanser• 6 years ago

They're starting to creep into premium now too. I have Google play music which includes YouTube premium, just checked YouTube on my phone and it immediately showed an advert, even though I'm signed in.

wmeredith• 6 years ago

I pay for the premium version and there are still some ads.

ntsplnkv2• 6 years ago

I just use a Pi-hole server now.

I don't have a problem paying for subs, I use Apple Music and used Spotify, I like Netflix or Prime. But Google/Youtube is unethical with their ads. Yesterday I saw an ad showing "the police kidnapping people in california" from a Russian account. No way to report it anymore, now way to prove it was true, a blatant example of trying to influence people negatively.

I'll support the content creators I like directly now via other methods. If youtube can't at least remove blatantly false "ads" then they don't deserve my support.

ses19842• 6 years ago

You are on hacker news so it's likely you are a successful young adult male, what do you mean hn readers aren't in a desirable demographic? (apologies if that doesn't exactly describe you)

Google might know you are a lost cause but they don't actually care, they still sold the impression.

Anyway you might have Google targeting turned off, which is why you're seeing ads for floor wax instead of whatever saas is advertising on YouTube that day you happened to read a blog post about.

Kye• 6 years ago

Ads can't seem to decide if I'm a rich homemaking woman with a side business, a rich man high up in a company, or someone who speaks Spanish and loves fast food. I don't know how to tell them I'm none of those.

tartoran• 6 years ago

In a similar way I am a deadbeat for advertisers, they have never convinced me to by any product ever. Even worse, an irritating advertising made me expressly avoid advertised products because as a consumer I dont want to pay for the advertising through the added price to the product itself.

I stopped watching TV a long time ago and feel way more peaceful. While browsing online I am using adblockers anyway and wonder how long until I cannot access content this way. If it stops working I will stop using and theres no turning back to advertising to me, it doesnt work and irritates me.

I would like to see a micropayments system for online content but with the option to plus/minus up the microdonnation based on whether i found the content useful, whether it was clickbait, etc. It would be great to be able to pay more for a movie that i liked and less on a movie i couldnt stand and didn’t finish watching.

bsimpson• 6 years ago

If there were such a thing as a "this person isn't worth showing ads to" profile, people would game the system to try to earn those tags. Even if you never made ad-influenced decisions, it's probably still worth showing you ads to normalize them for people who do.

pandaman2• 6 years ago

I would be very worried if I started to see relevant advertisement (online or I also have the cheapest Hulu with commercials) : that would mean that somebody collects correct information about me and can sensibly interpret it. Luckily all the advertisement I see is barely relevant - at most I get banners for the sites I've recently visited.

pgt• 6 years ago

Anything smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to fail it.

There's a story from a few years ago about how Target knew customers knew themselves, but they were smart enough to mix the diaper discounts in with some lawnmower specials so it would not arouse suspicions.

I would not be surprised if the algorithms know more than they seem.

lrem2• 6 years ago

Have you enabled some kind of privacy feature? There are some checkboxes in the Google account settings that make ads appreciably dumber.

cosmie2• 6 years ago

How do you explain that in the era of machine learning and no holds barred privacy invasion?

Google provides a platform for advertisers to use. The sophistication of that usage, however, is up to the marketers actually using it. At a small scale, it's relatively easy to bootstrap the type of integrated infrastructure and execution required for sophisticated campaigns. But at scale, marketing programs require so much people-coordination (between various internal departments and external agencies) that relatively few firms end up in an operationally mature state to attempt to integrate sophisticated technical and data operations as well.

Anecdotally speaking, the morass of font licensing[1] is likely to have an order of magnitude more attention in a typical campaign than something as seemingly critical as the actual ad targeting or frequency caps.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22370372

derangedHorse• 6 years ago

They should be showing you ads for YouTube Red if their algorithm was really sophisticated lol

klausjensen• 6 years ago

I don't pirate because I don't want to pay for content - I pirate because it is the only way I can get a lot of content.

I wish there was a global way to subscribe to and pay for content in a market/app-independant way.

If you are not in the USA, Canada or UK, your options to pay for the most popular, newest content are very, very limited. And if you are in a very small and/or somewhat impoverished country, forget about it. "Sorry, this content is not available in your region. Please go fuck yourself".

Luckily, Netflix has improved this a lot (which is why I happily pay for it), but for a lot of content, it is still impossible to consume in a legal way.

kinleyd• 6 years ago

Coming from a very small and somewhat impoverished country, I agree fully with your comment. I enjoy Netflix now, and am warming up a lot to the NBA and NFL's League Pass subscriptions. These three have nailed it for me price-wise and content-wise, so much so that I'm considering switching from European/UEFA football viewing to the NBA and NFL. Outside of this, my only option is piracy - there isn't any other way.

nolok5• 6 years ago

I wish there was a global way to subscribe to and pay for content in a market/app-independant way.

The socialist party (biggest left wing party at the time, and in power 2012-2016)here in France talked at lengtht about this idea during Sarkozy's implementation of the repressive Hadopi system.

Pay a yearly fee, don't get punished for pirating, money gets redistributed. Similar but also vastly different to how we already have a specific contribution for French state medias, and then one to finance French production (movies, music,...).

It didn't get past the heavy talk part because no matter how you turn it, the abuse / unfair redistribution / increasing need unrealistic compared to usage is unavoidable.

RedShift12• 6 years ago

I've argued about this numerous times: ISP's need to provide customers with an opt-in p2p license that adds a small fee to their monthly bill. This monthly fee is transferred to a central authority, the ISP does not make any profit from this fee. The license would allow users to torrent whatever content they want. Torrent trackers would be fully legal, their only legal obligation would be keeping track of torrent popularity and reporting this to the central authority every month or so. The central authority that receives the money from the ISP's then forwards the money to the creators of the content being distributed, divided based on the popularity reported by the trackers. A minimum baseline amount is provided to each creator to subsidize indie and struggling creators. And obviously geoblocking should be illegal but as the media companies would be making more money if they didn't geoblock, it gives them incentive to not do that.

deelly• 6 years ago

M-m-m... "small fee" for "unlimited access to millions of music/movie/software/game/books entities that can cost billions of dollars". How exactly it should work, again?

slazaro• 6 years ago

In Spain we get the worst version of this. Media organizations (the equivalents to MPAA or RIAA) get a percentage of the price of all storage devices (hard drives, flash memory, anything) that are sold, implying that they might be used for piracy. But it's still illegal to pirate! So we're paying for something we MIGHT do, but we still can't do it.

DaiPlusPlus• 6 years ago

I've argued about this numerous times: ISP's need to provide customers with an opt-in p2p license that adds a small fee to their monthly bill.

brb downloading Windows Server 2019 Enterprise Datacenter iso torrents to put into production

bigbob23• 6 years ago

It worries me because P2P is a powerful censorship prevention mechanism. Requiring a license to use P2P technologies would mean disallowing much more than just torrents by default. Not only that but lots of illegal content distribution takes place on standard HTTP servers which would presumably not be considered P2P. With that said, disallowing any protocol which is currently allowed today seems like it would open the door for large corporate and governmental interests to disassemble what we know as the open internet. Furthermore it sounds like it would be complicated to deal with ownership of derivative work and resolution of disputes.

Kalium• 6 years ago

Are you purposely modeling this on how ASCAP works?

lain_2• 6 years ago

Even in some first world countries sometimes you don't necessarily get much of the content, or so I've heard, and can't pirate either, because illegal.

Anecdotal, but atleast here in my poor country I'm less inconvenienced than when I was in Germany. I do sometimes feel guilty not being able to support the creators that make this content and often wish there was a way to donate, much more than I wish that the distributors covered my country - because they're shit.

The piracy world that torrents/hosts for free, in my experience, seem to do a far better job.

gfxgirl• 6 years ago

If was to pirate I'd be doing it because I don't want to be tracked. I don't want Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Google, whoever knowing what I'm watching, when I'm watching, how many times I watched, what parts I reviewed, etc... I don't like the idea that some computer is adding me to categories I have no control over and making judgements I neither want nor can correct nor delete nor prevent and then sharing an selling that data.

Jemm• 6 years ago

I don’t understand why people pay upwards of $200 a month for a television service that plays ads every three minutes

JKCalhoun• 6 years ago

They crossed the line for me. Someone wiser than me said they'll put as many ads as we will tolerate.

Imagine that when "Star Trek" was originally airing, the episodes could be 50 minutes long to allow for commercials in a 60 minute slot.

By the time Star Trek was in reruns in the 80's they were cutting a few minutes here and there to allow for the longer commercial time.

By the time the cable Sci-Fi (or was it Sy-Fy yet?) aired them "un cut" they had to put them into a 90 minute slot.

Sometime before the latter example, I ended up cutting the cord: stopped paying for television. You have to decide where the line is for you and act.

SamuelAdams2• 6 years ago

''Propaganda masquerading as information'' is the reaction of Peggy Charren, president of Action for Children's Television, to such proposed programs. Unless there are sufficient safeguards, viewers - especially children - may find it difficult to distinguish between the program and the advertisement, says Mrs. Charren, raising the specter of ''30-minute toy-store shows.''

It's interesting how a generation raised in war (WWII, Vietnam) was very sensitive to propaganda and how it influenced their children. Whereas today, propaganda is spread on TV networks, the internet, and other news sources and yet very few people stop and ask what the intent of the source of information is.

fdgwhite• 6 years ago

I worked in b2b publishing for a while. Magazines are just ad delivery systems so they need to sell ads. But ad buyers need to sell their product too and and their job is to buy ads. They can’t go back at the end of the year and tell their boss “look at all the money I saved by not advertising“.

PunksATawnyFill• 6 years ago

Funny how far things have gone. "Basic cable" had ads, but it was "free," as in included with your base-level subscription. But then basic-cable channels like MTV decided to try to charge for their viewership, AND have commercials. So now you're supposed to PAY to watch commercials.

But let's face it: The stupidity of the public seems to have no bottom. Look what Apple gets away with.

Will cable TV be invaded by commercials? (1981)

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