I haven't had cable for about 15 years now, and commercials are a big reason. But it's not even just the commercials, I just wasn't interested in the six hundreth special on Nostradamus or aliens on the history channel, or shows purportedly about space exploration that are 50% CGI and 49% speculation masquerading as observations or any kind of "reality shows".
Yes and nothing makes me feel like my brain cells are committing suicide faster than watching commercials for cars, pills or insurance made by some of the least funny and stupidest people in the business.
Then there are the travel or cooking shows which basically take 5 minutes of interesting content and smash it with a proverbial hammer into a 30 or 60 minute show.
Yep; either show me ads and give me the content for free, or (ideally give me the option) let me pay and don’t show ads. If product people / The MBAs at a company think that there should still be ads on the paid version, consider what those are worth. I haven’t seen anyone try it, but consider a model of three options: 1. Free with lots of ads, 2. Paid but cheap with less ads, 3. Most costly but no ads. Basically, I always want an option to pay whatever a company thinks it’s worth to remove all ads. If there’s really good content on offer, people will pay. Ads make any content look sleazy. Even the best YouTube channels shilling for random products gets lame and old real quick.
Please let people who are willing to do so pay the true cost of the content to remove all ads.
I would guess that there's a vicious cycle at play here. The more someone is willing to pay to avoid ads, the deeper their pockets are, the more valuable they are as a consumer, the more money a company is willing to pay to advertise to them.
> I haven’t seen anyone try it, but consider a model of three options: 1. Free with lots of ads, 2. Paid but cheap with less ads, 3. Most costly but no ads.
This is essentially what Amazon does (did?) with their Fire tablets, excluding the completely free tier. There is an ad subsidized version and a more expensive ad free version of the same hardware.
I must be in the minority here, but Ancient Aliens is one of my favorite tv shows. It has some of the funniest, most outlandish, content I’ve ever seen.
It used to be a uniquely American thing. The Discovery and Nat Geo channels in my home country used to be truly educational. (I don't know/think it's the case anymore, sadly.)
Yes and nothing makes me feel like my brain cells are committing suicide faster than watching commercials for cars, pills or insurance made by some of the least funny and stupidest people in the business.
Then there are the travel or cooking shows which basically take 5 minutes of interesting content and smash it with a proverbial hammer into a 30 or 60 minute show.