Ad Inundation

Ad Inundation

Hulu.com provides us with a good example of how many more commercials we see (or are expected to see--thank you DVRs) today than yesterday.

Looking at "half-hour" programs on the site, for shows from the 50s, we see program lengths of sometimes 29 and a half minutes. That's just 30 seconds of ads for a half hour. Pretty decent, really. Some are shorter, but 28 minutes seems to be about average.

Looking at the same length shows from the 70s, we see program lengths of 25 minutes. That's 5 minutes of ads. OK. That's still 5 minutes of show for every minute of commercials. That's a lot, but OK.

When we look at modern shows, however, we see program lengths of 21 to 22 minutes, and thus 8 to 9 minutes of commercials. That's nearing a 2 to 1 ratio of show content to ad content. That's horrible.

I'm glad that technology allows me to pretty much never watch ads. Even if you just watch an hour of TV here or there, that's still way too much time spent watching advertisements in my opinion.