Enough Already With All The Commercials

[yeoldeschool]

I watched the Weird Al movie (a fake biography) on Roku and no commercials.

I may have had one on the finale of "Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist".

Ads on Youtube are very inconsistent. Uploaders can choose to make a particular video ad-free, or overload it with ads. The site's algorithms will also withhold ads (demonetize) various videos for all kinds of crazy reasons, including the mention of certain words and terms. Copyrighted content detection can demonetize some videos, or force the monetization of others (with the turning over of all proceeds to the copyright holder). A video being linked to too many times by the "wrong" sites can even get it demonetized. It's all very convoluted.

 

[TheBigA]

Copyrighted content detection can demonetize some videos, or force the monetization of others (with the turning over of all proceeds to the copyright holder).

We see this a lot with recorded music and videos. Google is responsible for paying music royalties regardless of who uploads the video. So they need to monetize that video in order to pay the copyright holders.

 

[TexasTom]

I would say commercial loads have not grown longer but that the frequency of the same commercial and more irritating per inquiry ads are now commonplace. Most syndicated programming has X number of avails and you cannot exceed that without your programming clock being off. You might speed up a show a tad or run closing credits and the start of the next show as a split screen to get another commercial or two slipped in.

Tall Guy is right. The place you have freedom is in local programming. That includes news blocks and movies. You can squeeze in all you want.

I don't know any stations that are still running local movie programming -- pretty much, the few movies that still show up on broadcast television are either network (Sunday movies from ABC and CW lately) or one of the very few remaining barter syndication packages.

That said, regarding commercial loads those seem to have held relatively steady for the past couple decades at around 17-18 minutes per hour. But before that there was a steady escalation throughout the eighties and nineties. In the early eighties, the typical commercial load during network prime time was six minutes/hour of national spots, two minutes/hour of local spots, and a twenty second network promo every quarter hour or so. Add it all up and it came to just under 10 minutes/hour.

And you're right that as competition proliferated, it seems that the commercial loads went up. Cable was spreading throughout that era, and independent broadcast stations also proliferated during the eighties (giving birth to the Fox network). By the early nineties, the total load for commercials and promos was typically around 14 minutes. A decade later, it was up past 16 minutes.

 

[vchimpanzee]

I lost count of all the commercials I had to watch in order to see what I missed of "Totally Funny Kids" when someone pushed the wrong button, or pushed the right button at the wrong time. In other words, I had to watch more commercials than actual content. What happened on the TV station was commercials right in the middle of the program. And the kid videos that I just saw online were really good.