Often put on various Cat TV channels from YouTube on before leaving for work. They are usually like 8 hour long shots of birds and squirrels eating nuts someone left on log, the cats love it and will watch diligently. They are monetized channels often enough, and its just funny to me knowing that every once in a while the cats, who are otherwise alone in the house, are being treated to a commercial for some sports betting service, or for profit college experience. This entire edifice of targeted ads being directed to two cats who suddenly experience a very human moment in this absurd context. Can't help but feel like they sense it, that they are suddenly interpolated into this thing, subjects to the streams of money and incentived attention. brought down into our inferior world of commodities and money. Have been close to getting the premium YouTube just for their sake, and of course for the sake of the nice people making the videos.
Last I checked YouTube premium doesn't pay out for your views like ads do. It goes into a single pot that is split amongst creators based on their views or ad revenue (can't remember).
Premium views pay out part of your subscription to the creator you watched. A normal ad view is worth fractions of a fraction of a penny, but YouTube premium views pay out much more.
> Currently, new revenue from YouTube Premium membership fees is distributed to video creators based on how much members watch your content. As with our advertising business, most of the revenue will go to creators
It's pretty vague, but my reading of this is that it's paid out of a single pool based on the watch time of all YouTube Premium Members. So e.g. if you only watch one video a month, that creator doesn't get all of your money.
I subscribe to YouTube premium solely for the music service, which I listen to for hours a day. I watch maybe 15 minutes of YouTube a month. How do they split this up? Do they pay out more to the music copyright holders since I listen to music so much more? Or does each side of the house have its own "bucket" to draw down?
If so, maybe I should seek out worthy YouTubers to donate to be leaving it running in the background.
I didn't do the math, but can't imagine that leaving a TV on/off for ~9 hours (guessing that's how long time OP works + transit) has a huge impact on the total carbon footprint from that household, but I might be wrong. Care to show how it's actually "incredibly wasteful for the whole world"?
Yeah, that makes sense. Americans are incredibly wasteful. My claim wasn't that they aren't. My claim is that if some of them leave the TV on VS leaving it on for ~7 hours some days doesn't have a huge impact on the carbon footprint, even less is "incredibly wasteful for the whole world".
It is always funny to see how watching TV can be so differently culturally. With my Spanish in-law family the TV is on almost the whole day in the background, even during big family dinners as background sound. With often news, sports or game shows. With their late dinner times of 9pm they often watch series and movies even later.
And here in the Netherlands it is with many a sin to have the TV on in the background if there are visitors and should only be on if you watch something together.
I think it's generational. My Dutch parents also have the TV on all evening (although, much less so since retirement). I would always make sure the first thing I did was mute the thing when I visit, because I simply can't have a conversation with a TV shouting over everything.
My generation, few even have a TV. We're one of the few with one in the living room (hooked up to a laptop though), and I think I haven't turned it on in a month now?
Yeah I feel like it differs by generation in Russia as well. My parents' generation and older would often have either TV or radio on in the background most of the time. My generation mostly considers the mere act of watching broadcast television a sin because of how much propaganda there is and how much more useful content, available on demand, is out there on the internet anyway. Those who do own a TV often use it as a big display for streaming/torrented movies and/or console games, with the antenna cable often not even connected.
It's the same in my family, with one exception. We sometimes do have TV on in the background, but the only permitted channel is TV Kultura -- news about art, museums, exhibitions, theatre, humanities, arthouse cinema, etc.
It seems to be generational in the USA too. My parents and in-laws have the TV on in the background constantly. We, and our friends, never have it on unless specifically watching something. But, we are on our phones constantly. I feel like we’ve replaced one background media/entertainment device with a different one.
I'm 30 and have a tv and Bluetooth speaker in every room. Both me and my wife get anxious in silence. We do retreat to the bedroom if we need silence though. Our puppy seemed to have figured out the same... We used to think she did it when she was sick, but it became a pattern and seems to be her way to tune out the world.
The best way I can describe the effect of silence is like what brains do in extreme sensory deprivation: they begin imagining and hallucinating external stimulus. Silence makes my internal stream of consciousness stark. It is severe to the point of causing me decades of insomnia. As soon as I lay in bed, if I don't have white noise or otherwise, the recursive nature of my thoughts spirals immediately into existential panic.
If you have a sustainable solution to provide you'll be rich. I default to squelching thoughts of my mortality. That is at the top of the list of mental frames that have improved my life. I otherwise lived in constant existential panic from the ages of 12 to 25. Thanks a lot Nietzsche...
What works for me is negative visualization. Thinking of the worst possible thing that can happen, and how I'd feel in that situation. It's kind of like exposure therapy.
I had the same issue I think, struggled with it up to around 25 when a doctor asked me to try melatonin.
It actually changed my life, now I can sleep and be like a normal person. I used to joke that I was a C-type person (instead of A/B) when it comes to sleep.
I thought so too. I have at least 150 hrs of meditation under my belt. I can't say I'm worse or better, just another silly thing for my ego to carry around.
Take it from me. Ignoring your mortality is a lot easier.
150 hours over how long time? Those who aren't "naturals" may need more than that to "get it" and start seeing benefits (coming from someone who after several attempts in various forms finally "broke through", in lack of better words, on day ~6 of a 10 day Goenka-Vipassana retreat. That'd be ~10 h / day during that time).
After that I was able to do 30-60 minute sittings at home and experience the associated change. If you're also a very cerebral person you may also need a similarly concentrated "boot camp" or similar to get to some base level.
In a similar vein, if someone has extremely weak physique, it's not really convincing when they claim that physical exercise doesn't work for them, as they did spend 150h at the gym machines ;)
That's a great point. I guess hype made my expectations unrealistic. I have it on my to-do list to get the habit going again. I'll try this weekend!
I've wanted to do a retreat very badly. I would need to work to organize my current world to fit it in but it's something I have in the back of my mind.
I'm in my 30s and I went through the phase of watching a lot of TV as a teen, then not watching at all in my 20s and not owning a TV for many years, and now I'm back at moderately watching TV everyday. There're several pros of TV compared to streaming: you turn it on and there's immediately something playing, if it's not interesting you just change the channel (I hate scrolling through stuff on a streaming service and getting stressed that I can't find anything interesting and just wasting time), there're many movies I would never watch otherwise but sometimes you just leave something on because "there's nothing better to watch" and it turns out to be a great movie, there's also many classic movies and TV series that are hard to find online, even "trash" daytime TV shows sometimes are fun to watch if you just want to "reset" your mind :-)
Yes. I missed putting on the History channel and just letting it run all day and night. Pluto TV made that possible again and it's free. RiffTrax, MST3K, Pluto History, Pluto Science, and on and on. I hat the stress of trying to figure out what to watch on demand.
I have the opposite problem and need some background noise in order to stay focused. That said, I can't use TV as background noise unless it is something I have zero interest in. The visual component is too distracting, so I tend to use music instead.
I think it's just a semantic thing. Everyone watches TV, but a subset likes to describe themselves as not having/watching TV on an extremely pedantic technicality.
At this point, I have been offered pretty nice TVs for free more than once.
If you really get use to living without a TV though it feels like it has negative value to have one IMO. Even more now with Netflix and long binge watch series with disappointing endings.
Of course, I don't get to participate in the conversations about how much show X ending sucked after wasting a week of my life on it.
Before I had a smartphone and a TV, I was much more physically active and got a lot more done on hobby projects. The 'quality' of TV programming is inarguable; if that's a net positive is debatable. The quality of carfentanyl is amazing, from what I hear...
not the OP, but I ride my bike (indoors or outdoors, mostly indoors now because riding outdoors around here is dangerous, even for me), lift weights, read Reddit (my front page is super curated; mostly niche subs, none of the huge ones), go to breweries/bars/restaurants, find things to do in the city, code, and write on my blog.
i do think that TV is fine in moderation like everything else, but, like social media and video games, overconsumption is socially normalized. putting off work and keeping yourself healthy for shows or endless scrolling isn’t okay IMO.
Owning a "TV" is really irrelevant. I know plenty of people that only own a iPhone. Yet they watch hours of Netflix, AppleTV, YouTube on it.
If you don't watch anything on whatever you're using to post your messages to HN then fine but if you do then you're still "watching TV" for all intents and purposes.
He he, the only reason I have a TV in the first place (plus two in storage) is because my dad keeps replacing his (because of some tiny new feature) and I find it a waste to throw out a perfectly good panel.
It used to be synchronous broadcast on a schedule, on a channel chosen from a small selection. If you watched TV, you could be reasonably expected to talk about the thing that was on last night.
With on demand, scheduled releases etc. it's much less well defined. If you only watch movies on Netflix, it's probably not "TV" as a cultural artifact, but if you're watching the latest Star Wars or Marvel series on Disney, then probably you are, despite there being little difference in technology.
There's TV the device and TV the specific way and content to watch. Of friends our age, precisely zero have the latter. The device about half have I think. Which is very different from our parents generation, where everyone has both.
Yeah, maybe I'm closer to your parents' generation, maybe broadcast TV is still better enough in the UK that it's worth watching — I still do. Obviously, I recognise your point about younger people watching less broadcast.
I don't have "TV" in the sense that I can't watch e.g. live sports. But I have a couple large screens in the house that I can use to stream e.g. Netflix (or I can just watch it on a tablet or PC). I'm not sure it's really that pedantic. "No I won't be watching the game because I don't have TV." (Though if you had YouTube TV, that's getting into pedantic territory.)
Right, if your response to "are you watching the game?" is "no, I can't watch it", fair enough. My scorn is more reserved for people who willingly volunteer the "I don't have a TV" information as some kind of 'badge of honour', yet they watch five hours of Netflix on their laptop every evening.
Especially when they do have a TV. In the Us at least TV refers to those large screens the broadcast system is referred to as cable or satellite, which it is true very few people have these days.
Oh I agree. For me it was a purely financial decision of "Should I keep paying $100/month for this service I haven't used in weeks or should I put some of it towards another streaming service or two?" And, while I'd like to have it every now and then for live sports, that's not worth $1000/year to me.
Where is the "pedantic technicality" though? Looks more like a continuum to me.
Consider, here are some activities I do, which of them are you sure is "watching TV" and which aren't? Is it such a clear bright line?
* I watch "Only Connect" - a very difficult BBC Two quiz show - on the iPlayer web site. There aren't any adverts of course because it's the BBC, but this was made to be shown on a broadcast TV channel even if I haven't watched it that way for years.
* I watch the Two Ronnies "Mastermind" sketch on Youtube. Once again this was made to be shown on broadcast TV, decades ago, as part of an episodic show - but now this is just one sketch
* I re-watch the final sale decision scene from The Big Short on Youtube. The Big Short is a movie, this was never made for broadcast TV, and all I'm watching is one clip from a much longer work.
* I watch previews of a friend's review of the entire Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. Most of these were movies. (but there is a TV series) and he doesn't include clips but he does talk about them. This will eventually be a Youtube video, but I'm watching the preview.
* I watch an SC2 AI Arena playback of a match that happened recently between two AIs. It's video, at least by the time it reaches me, but it was never intended to be broadcast anywhere, many of these videos are never watched by anyone they're generated automatically so why not.
* I play a video game with an FMV cut scene, such as Command & Conquer: Red Alert.
* I play another video game with a cut scene but it's in-engine using the game's 3D assets, such as GTA3.
* I join a Teams call with colleagues to discuss progress on our main Project
* I watch a rather hypnotic screensaver of overlapping fractal shapes.
* I read a web page with some simple animated multi-step tutorials. Is it important whether they're animated with Javascript, GIFs or MPEG video?
I guess the specific "pedantic technicality" I was thinking of was the "I watch Netflix on a big screen in the corner of my room, but I don't have TV". I get why, in a very limited number of scenarios, that might be useful or interesting information, but a huge amount of the time it isn't.
See, I think the pedantic technicality is the other way around -- that is, saying "Well you're watching this movie on Netflix on a big screen, so that counts as TV." It feels a bit like mocking someone for claiming that the New York Times isn't a novel when they're both things you read off folded paper in your living room. When people say that watching Netflix on a big screen in the corner of their room isn't TV, they're using 'TV' to refer to a medium defined by a fixed programme of highly-scheduled and localized broadcasts. I think that's a much more useful definition than "TV is what you watch on a big screen in your room", because that medium has very unique and distinct features, frequently contains very different types of content, shapes its content differently, and is often consumed very differently. Why isn't going to the movies or playing Charlie Got My Finger on your phone counted as watching TV? Is it the screen size? The location? Or the difference between playing a specific video you've requested and tuning into a schedule of programs being broadcast to the entire region?
Is the difference between making a website using Wordpress and building one using React/Node etc just a pedantic technicality on account of both groups building websites? No of course not, they are two very different processes that are only tangentially related.
I watch tv shows on streaming services with no commercials, on demand when I want to, and only when it’s an ‘event’ where we plan to focus on the story being delivered. My father watches broadcast television, flipping channels regularly, leaves the commercials on half the time, and always has the tv blaring in the background the entire time we are at his house even for hours at a time and during a holiday gathering.
You can be negative and try to classify the difference between us as a pedantic technicality or you can join the conversation about this interesting and seemingly generational difference in what it means to “watch tv”.
If I listen to podcast videos (in car or video hidden), do I still watch TV or listen to radio? And if those are niche podcasts that wouldn’t make it to broadcast services.
It's amazing how normalized tv watching is for some people. It's as expected as the sun rising or setting. My kid broke the family tv out of anger 4-5 years ago. We simply never replaced it as a natural consequence. We also stopped watching broadcast television sometime shortly after Lost's imfamously poor ending.
There are some situations where I come in contact with televisions today. They make me feel frustrated because they sap away my attention. I read more, I do hobbies, and I spend more time with people and have better relationships. It feels like an easy trade-off.
i’ve gotten scolded by my parents for not wanting to watch TV with them. my dad and siblings usually insisted on having the TV on while eating dinner, much to my mom’s frustration.
i remember one time specifically when my family was all watching “House” (super popular TV show on FOX back in 2004-ish?). I think I wanted to use my laptop or something; don’t remember. My parents got really mad at me, insisting that I watch with them. Ended up doing so, begrudgingly. I get why they did that (family time) but I didn’t like that our family time was spent in front of a screen.
> There are some situations where I come in contact with televisions today. They make me feel frustrated because they sap away my attention.
YES! I can hate watching TV and be angrily fixated on it when at a bar at the same time. My wife doesn’t get it lol
Sorry, I find this funny though I can relate. Not wanting to spend "family time" in front of a screen when your preferred alternative is to work/play in front of a screen.
i don’t watch TV on my own accord. usually with my wife (when she wants to watch something) or when i’m forced to while at a bar or restaurant (many bars, especially around here in southwest Texas, have MANY TVs, almost all of them tuned to some variant of sportsball). when i travel by myself, the tv in the hotel room never turns on, for example.
sorry if this comes off as me being vain; I never tell anyone and having a soapbox to finally talk about it is awesome!
i’ve only been to Europe once so far (Barcelona) and restaurants and bars without TV was one of my favorite things ever. this experience only exists in big cities.
however, netflix, hulu, and youtube premium probably think differently of me lol (i pay for these services but my wife consumes them)
I watch movies pretty much only at local film festivals. Pre-corona it was 2-3 movies twice a year since my city has sweet spring and late fall festivals. During corona festivals moved online and I watched a movie from each festival on laptop. Hopefully masks-in-cinemas will be over by the time spring festival rolls in!
Last series I followed was Breaking Bad. Used to torrent it and watch on laptop screen.
> But if you don't turn your TV on at all, I have to ask - where do you watch Netflix et al?
I watch video content on my 15.6" laptop with a retina display. The picture is subjectively larger, brighter, and sharper than on a TV because it's closer to my eyes. It's like in a movie theater but with lots of privacy. So I prefer it this way. I would turn on a TV only if I'd want to watch something with another person, I guess.
> But if you don't turn your TV on at all, I have to ask - where do you watch Netflix et al? Or you simply don't?
Don't even own a TV. I own a projector / home cinema. I think it beats the shit out of a TV big times. I much prefer the "feel" of a projector compared to these 4K TVs or whatnots. When we turn the projector on, it's to really watch something, not as background noise.
Same for me, but it's still in the continuum of TV watching like the other person said. I don't have TV the device, or broadcast receiving capability, but I still watch TV shows not that much unlike the normal definition of TV use.
Mid-40s, British family, living in the US since the 80s. We had the TV on most afternoons/evenings, lots of evening news, then sitcoms. But, it went off for dinner (as a family at the kitchen table), off for homework, off at bed (and no TV in rooms), and definitely off if guests were visiting (and not there for a big game).
Same here. My mother always used to have TV on as a background when I was a kid, but I never had one after I moved out. Now TV a running TV completely destroys my ability to concentrate on anything else and I am also utterly disgusted by all the ads.
My family is also Spanish/catalan and the TV is always off, only turned on when seeing something together.
Mi wife family, just some km away, they have the TV on during all they long, it freaks me out.
My toddler is the one that shuts it down for them, because he 'can not hear them' if TV is on.
I spent my entire childhood in the USA. Every friends house seemed to have different TV habits. No TV at all, TV always on, TV on but commercials muted. I don’t think it’s a cultural phenomenon at all.
Back when I would take group trips and maybe have a roommate in a hotel room, one of the things that would annoy me was when they'd make a beeline to the TV and turn it on as background. My brother pretty much does the same thing in his house. It is very rare that I turn a hotel TV on unless there's some specific sports game I want to watch.
I find the difference most amusing during special events, eg. new years eve, even with similar-ish cultures.
In slovenia, NY eve means a few movies on some channels, maybe even a movie marathon (home alone 1-5, etc.), and on one channel, from about 23h->00:30 the next day/year some "funny" show, with a few songs, a host+guests talking about stuff and a countdown. So basically stuff that you have to watch and listen to in whole.
In serbia for example, the show lasts for 6h+, and it's basically 99.9% music, except for a joke or two inbetween songs and a countdown with happy wishes for new year, and it's designed to be played "in the background", where noone really cares about the show, unless it's a song they really really like and turn the volume even higher. example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZ9-w8qlpEY
It is interesting to me that TV off is the norm (for me and people I know) except! If there is a live sporting event on that someone cares about, then it would be rude not to have it on and is expected. Weird. Makes no sense at all, humans are weird.
As awful and prevalent as TV commercials have become the only thing I can think of with more commercials in between content are YouTube left on in the background and radio.
With YouTube some body decided during the pandemic to cram commercials in the middle of videos now, so music sets are ruined and all comedic timing as well. Anything I plan to watch more than once I use ytdlp because of the huge number of ads they've started cramming in to the start middle and end.
In the car the radio is only bearable if you have atleast three stations in your area that play genres that are enjoyable or you get lucky and you happen to be in the car when a live DJ is on, usually at some point during the rush hour commute or a weekend night.
I use TVs as though they're aquariums... on for background ambience, and an audio-visual "optional distraction". I mostly keep it on Turner classic movies as they have no ads. I'm more likely to be interested, or at least pleased, by whatever I happen to engage with.
Spaniard here and I confirm. TV always on even at a low volume is a given no matter the circumstances. I think we’d all feel weird if that background noise wasn’t there. I’ve always imagined it’s the same everywhere in the world, but perhaps I’m wrong.
Black Mirror V2.0
At the end of the 15min break, you must pass a quick exam about the products in the ads if you want to continue watching your sports game.
That was common practice United States as well until it was made illegal around a decade ago with the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act. However that only applies to TV and I believe we're now living with the same problem all over again with streaming platforms - when I stream a YouTube video to my TV it definitely seems like the interstitial ads are louder than the content.
They increase the volume of the adverts in comparison to the show. Often it is not subtle. Aside from the abysmal and declining information density of TV, it's a key reason I've not had antenna/cable for almost two decades now. The big screen is just a big monitor.
Its not increased that has been illegal for a long time. They found a way around it though and of course nothing is being done. Its called dynamic range compression. Basically they cram the entire ad at the maximum legal volume level so it sounds lounder.
Yes I did hear something about passing some limiting law, not sure when.
Of course, as you mention, they can just peg the sound levels in across all frequency bands on all tracks in the ad, and yes, it does sound louder that way.
Of course, if they actually want to get people's attention so they try to listen, they should whisper.
The comment isn't blaming communism though. There's a meme that goes like "In the world, <completely normal thing>, In Soviet Russia, <the opposite of it>". So here it would go, "In the world, you watch the TV. In Soviet Russia, the TV watches you." Except that it wouldn't just be in Soviet Russia.
I just did a search for mountain dew | mt dew | mtn dew | xbox patent/meme and i have discovered that the internet is broken. Couldn't find it. Weird, DDG uses bing, so maybe that's why it isn't the first result...
found this using andisearch which was linked around yesterday. It's a sony patent, and it has a person say "McDonald's!" to end a McDonald's ad on a TV.
We'll need a pi-hole like device, which does presence-detection to cut off electricity to the TV when you're not in the room, assuming that remains legal.
The other day at midnight I was woken up by an Amber Alert for a somewhat nearby town. It's not possible to disable these notifications in this country, as far as I know.
There's at least one potentially positive use of that.
In an ideal world, broadcasters would use this data to become aware of which ads are so loathsome that they drive away viewers.
Ad revenue is a win. But if a particular ad (more than others) causes people to leave the room or change channels, the following ads will get less views, and that could be a loss.
If you actually know when that happens, you could charge advertisers extra if their commercials are too annoying. Or just not even air those ads.
It is horrible but definitely not exclusive to Sony.
Microsoft's Kinect, the always-on 3D camera/mic that could have been used to read people's facial expressions while watching ads. I'm glad it failed.
Google speakers which have a microphone array they use to measure the shape and size of your room. Definitely only for acoustic purposes of course...
And some people pay money for that, which makes me fear this might become standard in all kinds of devices. Those things aren't even that great in terms of features. In movies like "I, robot" the machine overlords were at least useful for cooking.
So you think having a camera on the TV is worse than having a device with a camera and a bunch of others sensors with you at all times?
Orwell couldn't imagine a portable device, so obviously it's the TVs with cameras that are bad... not any of the actual devices used for mass survelliance.
I would actually love a good raspberry pi/webcam setup in my living room for comfy video calls. Sadly I don’t trust any of the standard commercial offerings (smart tvs are the least trustworthy devices I know; home assistants and Facebook devices don’t even count as devices since they’re pure spyware).
I am always amazed, amongst the shrinking group of people who still watch broadcast TV, how many of them don't reflexively hit Mute when the ads come on.
Went around to friends’ place for dinner the other month and they had TV news and ads blaring in the background the entire time, no one paying attention. I can’t stand TV or radio ads and it was like chalkboard fingernails all evening.
When you are not exposed to ads constantly it become clear just how obnoxious they are.
I think advertisers have been dialing up the attention grabbing features over the years, and those constantly exposed don’t notice. Those who haven’t been watching now experience being exposed to the equivalent of ten babies crying for your attention. It’s truly and attack on your senses and sanity, but you have to remove yourself from it for a time to see how bad it is.
Id dream of a raspberry pie plugin that has a mic & IR transmitter that just listens to ads or any semblance of it and just hits mute the moment the confidence interval goes beyond 90% based on the rise in ampltitude. False positives would be straining though, and finding the moment to un-mute is also a bit difficult perhaps. But given that all ads have their loudness dialed up to 11 in relation to the actual program, it might be easy enough to just listen to a large drop in amplitude across the frequency spectrum to hit un-mute. This can be completely off-the-grid with incidental updates if so desired.
Could even put some federated learning into the bag for a slight dystopian flavour - and that sweet VC allure - to also listen to people hitting mute & unmute as a semi-reliable labelling feature. Just sample the time window recording of the frequency spectrum and it may be good enough already.
It wouldn't be foolproof but just good enough I guess. I'd be willing to pay 200$ for a ad silencing IR transmitter with >90% recall.
The apparent rise in amplitude is horribly annoying; but I understand that actually increasing the volume during ad-breaks is forbidden (at least in the UK). Instead, they tailor the audio spectrum to create psycho-acoustically the impression of increased loudness.
Automated ad-filtering on broadcast TV seems to be a hard problem. Some filters look for the channel logo screen at the start and end of the ad-break; but (a) you have to set up each channel; (b) "sponsors" now book slots at the start and end of the break, before and after the channel-logo screen.
The best solution I've found is to record anything I want to watch in advance; then to skip forward 5 minutes when the break starts, and FF/RW if I land in the wrong place. I'm a bit surprised that so many people seem to be buying big-screen TVs, but apparently not STBs with hard-disk recorders.
I used to have a DVR that would auto skip commercials on recorded shows but that was probably using metadata. It was annoying that it didn’t do the same live.
AI could come to help: a powerful enough dedicated hardware could decode HDMI signals, match the audio/video with the known fingerprint of an ad, substitute it with say a tropical beach or some mountains with a soft jazz music background and a small countdown in a corner "ads end in: mm:ss", then resume the program at the predicted end. The fingerprint would be taken by the users by pushing a button to mark each spot start and end so that the AI can recognize it and upload to a central server that would aggregate all data. The system should have a buffer long enough to allow watchers to rewind to the exact start and end of the spot, and to allow the AI to analyze the data before showing it to the watchers, however a very long buffer could be even more handy to wait for the entire program to end, then process it so that every ad is removed and the program joined back together with no interruptions.
Doable? Yes, but would need a lot of work and some money for the hardware. Probably also overkill since pretty much all programs are already available ads free on decentralized torrent swarms.
Sinilarly, this is the only “AR” I ever want in my life: glasses that detect billboards/subway/bus ads and either “magic erase” them or just replace them with images of my choice.
You don't need AI for that. 20 years ago my neighbors had a small device that would automatically mute the TV whenever the ads started playing and unmuted when they finished. No idea how it worked but for sure it didn't have a fancy neural network inside.
That device sensed the higher average sound levels at which ads are usually broadcasted, and it's also easy to build. The problem is those ads that have or start with lower sound levels which would be impossible to spot without matching them with a known audio/video pattern.
One approach that occurred to me is to take advantage of the fact that same ads are played in different TV shows.
Suppose you record hundreds or thousands of hours of TV video/audio, then compare it to your program guide data.
In theory, you should be able to detect that some segments of the video/audio correlate very strongly with what show you're watching (occurring only there), whereas other segments of video/audio appear all over the place in different programs.
And use fingerprinting to avoid having to store/transmit all that video/audio data.
This is not that different from what Shazam does with music recognition, although their job is easier because their audio data is naturally segmented into songs, whereas for ad detection you have to find segments. But I bet there are algorithms to efficiently find common sub-sequences (maybe from DNA bioinformatics?).
Once you have fingerprints of commercials, you distribute a database of these to viewers, and their device uses it to detect commercials while watching.
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For programs that air more than once, you could invert this and look for segments of video/audio that are common between the airings. The rest is more likely to be commercials, especially if you've got a movie that airs on different networks.
Or if you can see a show/movie through on-demand, maybe you'll get different commercials on repeated viewings.
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Another approach is facial recognition. If you see Flo from Progressive, it's probably an ad. You can maybe even recognize new, unknown ads this way.
If you want to go really crazy, mine IMDB for TV/movie titles, the cast that appear in each, and their photos, then recognize non-ad video footage based on who you know is supposed to be in that episode.
Would be pretty easy to do in this eastern EU country. We have laws that require stations to separate ads from content, so there is always a short animation announcing the start and end of ads.
Id also want a visual "mute" where the picture shrinks to tiny square in a corner of the screen whilst the main screen is either blank or shows something pleasant and relaxing
90% of active ad watching in the US is probably from tourists watching with morbid fascination. I know it’s one of the things I do when bored in a hotel room.
Oh, no these things are hilarious. They actually name all the possible individual side effects (some of which sound much worse than the original condition) but it's done in a voiceover that's played at like 2x the original speed.
And they inevitably end with "or death". I'm guessing they choose to list every vaguely possible side effect for CYA purposes, while simultaneously obscuring the actual risk profile by withholding information on the frequency of any given side effect.
It's like pestering users with alerts. After a certain point, you can't really blame someone for tuning them out and just clicking OK.
No, amusingly, it's a regulation thing. Health products are urged to list all negative outcomes seen in the experimental group, which can lead to some amusing outcomes
(Hard to find a nice source for this because there's a metaphor going around now about covid vaccines and lightning, but I saw it around more at the time. If anyone is better at search engines with date filtering or has a super reputable link, please share it below)
I'm probably one of them. Sometimes when I'm very bored I spend some minutes watching the ads from foreign channels. Every country does them slightly different.
I had no broadcast TV for 25 years until a few years ago. Whenever I encountered TV watchers, I was also amazed that they didn't mute ads, but I still found the interruption extremely irritating.
Now, here in The Netherlands with my KPN TV-over-fiber connection, I can skip around in a show, but I can't skip over ads on many channels. The device sometimes doesn't even let me mute during an ad! I can independently mute or switch video inputs, so it's basically forcing me to either hear or see an ad.
I haven't done it my entire life. When I was a kid, TVs didn't have mute buttons or remote controls.
Therefore, I got very good at mentally tuning ads out. I can watch an ad 100 times yet not be able to tell you what they said, what happened in it, or what product it's for.
Sometimes I mute now, but only when the ad is top 10% annoying. It's often easier to just tune out the ads than to remember to unmute.
I think to be a mute-ant you had to come of age in the 80s/90s after the remote and cable but before DVR and steaming. My wife didn’t have cable so can’t mute to save her life.
Never done the mute thing, but would record everything with a humax recorder, and just start viewing late. This way you can just skip the ads completely. Unfortunately this doesn’t work with tv apps on the Apple TV. So mostly stopped watching tv. Ads completely ruin tv watching.
My grandad used to do this! I thought he was the only one.
My mother had a really obnoxious attitude towards the television. Probably because of this I don't have a TV at all and am always suprised by the amount of people who immediately notice when they visit my house.
Which means you either need to pay active attention to the muted ads—something that sounds worse than having them on in the background, imo—or you run a risk of missing part of whatever film/tv show you're watching—again, I'd rather just make the sacrifice of having the ads on and not paying attention to them.
Back when I used to travel for business I would watch the tv sometimes in the hotel. I just watched the ads, because they had the high production value. While a 30-minute (really 22 minutes) show might cost $3MM an episode, a 30 second ad could easily cost a million to make. And in that 30 seconds was a perfect short story: a crisis, a bit of character development, then a resolution and a denouement. I could watch a bunch of them, usually about products I’d never seen before, and skip the crappy show.
how about the dentist office, playing a traditional over-the-air radio station featuring your favorite Sting song and an ad for car audio system, instead of an ad-free streaming service.
Ads, in whatever medium, are fundamentally bad UX. Not to mention utterly without value and a waste of precious human attention.
It is always breathtaking to consider how much has been built on the back of advertising, I guess because there is no better option.
But always remember that it is fundamentally bad UX: content providers forcing consumers to do something unpleasant, that they would rather not do, in exchange for the content.
Nobel Peace Prize to the person or organization who figures out the business model to take us beyond this absurd paradigm.
> Ads, in whatever medium, are fundamentally bad UX.
I'm gonna take that sentence to it's logical conclusion and rebut it with "I like that restaurants have signs, and I appreciate when I can see the menu from the outside"
I suppose it's the original "if you're not paying, you're the product". Ads can be an excellent UX for the actual users of the service - the advertisers.
I often sit through ads when watching sports on TV because I can’t be bothered to reach for the remote to mute it. However, when I watch YouTube on my phone, I instantly mute the device and look away as soon as an ad plays. After a few seconds I look back at the device so I can hit the skip button. It always seems like a waste of bandwidth for them to play ads to me, but I assume my behavior isn’t in the majority.
I’ve been bored and started using my phone a few times. As soon as an ad starts. I stop the app, start it again. Or just watch it in the thumbnail with cc.
I like watching YouTube stuff on my iPad to fall asleep, but at times the ads can make that real difficult, and I have yet to find a way to block them on the tablet.
PiHole allegedly helps with that, but afaik PiHole is only a DNS blacklister, and I already have blocked Google adservers troguh my router, tho that does not seem to help with ads in the YouTube mobile/tablet app.
I know AdGuard[0] claims to have the ability of blocking YouTube ads in Safari, but I also believe it's behind an IAP. Alternatively, an Invidious instance[1] will play videos without ads. It doesn't work for music videos (thanks DRM!), and I believe you have to set the video quality to DASH in Invidious's settings for Safari to be able to play it. Not as convenient as YouTube, sure, but if you hate ads enough I think it's worth it.
Man that sounded like a lots of work for watching YouTube.
I watch YouTube usually because I have something else to do, and I needed something to make a sound + be my timer. If an ad starts to play, it will not effect my main task. 5 or 10 seconds later the Skip button displays, I click/tap on it and continue my task, and the ad will be forgotten almost instantly.
I don't think those ad makers knows how ads actually work: you only have certain amount of seconds to convert a client. After that, the ad will be forgotten. People who interested in your product will sign on after few encounters with the ad. And for those who didn't sign on, they don't care and pushing more ads will simply annoy them and makes them hate your product.
For example, those 5 seconds TikTok ads are low quality and extremely annoying (, making me believe that ByteDance is using the strategy to downgrade the user experience of YouTube. Very clever indeed), I'll never sign on no matter how many times it plays.
For me personally, I like to take my time to read the detail about a product, those video ads just can't cut it. The text + picture based ads displayed by Reddit catches me better.
I use YouTube not as app, but in the browser on my mobile. There I have an AdBlock Plugin setup.
Without that YouTube is unusable for me anymore. It's not about the video ads at all. Ads are part of the modern design of YouTube and are difficult to differentiate from, f.e. the comments, which are hidden by default - wtf?
I'm surprised that streaming boxes don't pause the stream when no one is looking, so the consumer has to watch the ads to continue play. This could be marketed as a feature.
I'm always fearful of posting my tech nightmares on HN because so many people here work in industries that exist just to fry brains with ads. Probably most are rolling their eyes saying "We're not that evil." But somebody is thinking "Hmmm."
The purpose of patents is to encourage the complete disclosure of inventions so they can be used & improved later by others (or even worked around with better inventions now), in return for temporary exclusive rights. Patenting evil inventions might be a way to advertise and accelerate the proliferation of evil ideas…
It kind of gives the lawmakers a head start. If you release some evil product today, then you're going to use all of your money to fight any regulation or legal disputes. But if the idea exists and there's only the threat of it being used, then none of those fights happen, but people will still ask their lawmakers to ban it. And they have decades to get it done.
Imagine if I had patented "System for using the Internet to distribute misinformation regarding respiratory viruses, so as to maximize deaths during a pandemic." Facebook would show up later and already be illegal, and a lot less people would have died of COVID.
I doubt the example in your second paragraph is remotely plausible. But I can see how someone might come up with a better example.
Btw, violating a patent isn't illegal in the criminal sense of murder being illegal. As far as I know patents are more about civil liability, and you'd have to sue Facebook for damages, don't you?
That would make doing business quite a lot more expensive for Facebook, of course. But wouldn't ban what they are doing outright.
Yeah. It’s like Google explaining how they help us by having “relevant ads”. The only ad that’s relevant to me is the one that I don’t see. I must be in a minority though, considered how successful ad businesses are.
I think you’re in the majority with the rest of us. Like you I hate most ads, and I suspect most people do too.
That said, one way to look at it from an advertiser’s perspective is that if you spend money on anything, then relevant ads must exist, and they will continue to try to find them. If they can’t find them, they’ll still continue to spam us with irrelevant ads because they still work a little; statistically, a few people will buy the product for every million people who see the ad.
I spend money, and I even sometimes spend significant amounts of time trying to figure out what to buy when I need something I don’t know a lot about. I also spend far more time than I want to trying to ignore ads I don’t care about on the internet and YouTube, just like I used to with TV.
Those are two separate time sucks, and I’d love to have ads at least be teaching me impartial information about whatever it is I’m shopping for, and help me figure out what I need. It would save me time if I could merge ad watching time with shopping research time. Google and advertisers would love that too. But the level of invasive privacy compromise that would bring would be a million times worse than the bad situation we already have, I’m not willing to accept it.
Back when magazines were printed on paper there were whole genres of magazines that 95+% ads with essentially no articles at all. Fashion, and, in the 90s, computing were examples of this. There were lots of them on the newsstand.
And “advertorial” is not a web-era idea; the travel, sports, entertainment etc sections of the newspaper, and most of local television news, looked like news but were essentially all paid content one way or another.
In the Czech Republic, one of the major TV broadcasters now leads a dispute against the IPTV providers, requesting them to disallow the customers skipping ads when watching past programs from the archive. Some of the providers now disallow fast forward for the channels, others are implementing a streaming-like feature where you can navigate as you like, but the receiver will insert appropriate ads automatically. (And one of the biggest providers removed the broadcaster completely for the time.)
Oh, Switzerland is already there. Beginning with 2022 IPTV providers are advised to reduce replay functionality to 7 days and you can't skip all ads anymore. [1]
I wonder whether this will be the beginning of the end of the classic TV.
The questions can be personalized according to where you live, age, number of kids you have, credit history, etc. And a slightly smart AI can ask them in a way that's hard to look up. It just needs to be hard enough that your best solution is to actually watch the ad.
"The viewing behaviors may include the viewer [108] watching an item of linear video content, or watching a combination of items of linear video content. Additionally, the viewing behavior may include an action performable by the viewer [108] and detectable by one or more sensors [106], such as a depth camera."
"However, in some embodiments, physical awards may be granted. Such physical awards may include coupons, products, etc., given to the user. To grant a physical award, an entity associated with the user-viewing goal, such as a user-viewing goal creator, may be notified in order to grant the award. In other embodiments, a remote computing device which stores user profile information, such as the digital media delivery service, may be notified to grant the award."
> a user is watching a television program which is interrupted by an ad. The ad instructs the user to say the word “McDonald’s” (MCD) to speed things along.
They should use it the other way around, if people are not watching, muting or fast forwarding they’re not interested in what your selling. No need to force your ad to them. But you could ask for a discount on the cost of showing the ad, just like with paying for the actual clicks on a web-ad.
Oh, there is a need, alright. If they claim they're not interested, it's time to shift strategies[1]. After all, nobody's immune to advertising[2]. I'm sure there are more relevant studies that prove even ad-averse individuals are still susceptible to them. It's just a matter of finding the right _kind_ of advertising to reach them. Doing this effectively is what gets you promoted in adtech.
I don't imagine you're the first to think of this. It's a sign of a healthy market it hasn't been tried, probably because subscription streaming, with minimal ads (not "no ads" if you include skippable previews as an ad, which I do), is a good deal and if ad-only streamers (like Roku, I guess?) implemented the feature they'd get even less audience than they have now. You'd have to be pretty desperate if that small amount of money could make a difference. It feels like the move a monopoly would make to squeeze the absolute last drop of value out of the position.
(It seems to be a battle of content, with all sides fighting for all that long-term MRR, and no-one really has a monopoly on great content. Which is actually pretty great! Of course local stations don't have great content because their sample size is too small.)
Only a very small fraction of people would even try to bypass it like that. It would still be a big improvement to reducing the rate of ads displayed to no one.
Everyone always brings this patent up while forgetting that large companies will literally patent every single idea that comes up just in case. Doesn't mean it's ever going to actually happen. See also: Amazon's Wage Cage (though, looking at Amazon, they might actually do that one)
> I could very well see a future where we are forced to watch/acknowledge ads before the actual content continues.
I wonder if skipping YouTube ads is already used in a similar way?
Pressing that small "skip" button is a user interaction that acknowledges the users attention to the ad, and there is usually a minimum time the ad has to run before it can even be triggered.
So having an ad run for 5-10 seconds, with a manual skip, might possibly be a more impactful "impression" then the ads just running trough, without a skip, as most likely nobody is paying attention to them in the very first place.
I have suspected this for a while now. It's also a chance to advertise subliminally to sleeping people, sometimes if you don't skip the ad it will play what we used to call an infomercial. In practice it just punishes people that lost the remote, or are unable to easily move.
> NOTICE: Termux is broken on Android 12. Android OS will kill any (phantom) processes greater than 32 (limit is for all apps combined) and also kill any processes using excessive CPU. You may get [Process completed (signal 9) - press Enter] message in the terminal without actually exiting the shell process yourself.
What do you mean by direct access? You'll need to build a separate app to access these things because they are only accessible via APIs that are only exposed in the java land. But you can build an Android app right on your Android phone. AIDE allows you to do just that, and I believe you can install the raw SDK in Termux and use it as well.
In other words, you can use an Android phone on its own, unmodified, to program it to do arbitrary things. Yes it's awkward and yes you have to jump through some hoops to get it set up. Nevertheless, this fits my definition of a general-purpose computing device.
You could technically do the same on iOS. The only problem here is that Apple would never approve an app that gives a user this much control over their own device. It's not a technical issue, but rather an organizational one.
"Parsing music metadata is actually really fast, it's the process of getting a file handle from the android system thats the real bottleneck. MediaStore is a system-level daemon, so it doesn't have that restriction, but I do. This is why Vanilla and VLC take so long to load media, not because the metadata indexer is slow but because reading files is slow. Google prefers this as it furthers their quest to kill the filesystem, so there's nothing I can do about it."
Android has around two thirds of market share worldwide iirc, and up to 90% in some countries. The Default HN Country (US) is pretty much an outlier with its 50/50 split.
I think we're reaching the end of that road. Look at Denuvo, sure it's still hackable but takes several magnitudes more time and effort than in the past. Eventually we'll reach a point where consumers have no choice but to comply
We've got anti-AdBlock tech, mandatory tracking consent for site usage, and even mobile games with mandatory ads that don't progress if the device volume is too low. Many people on HN would even support the first two. I think the lack of existence of this tech is not due to ethics concerns, but due to it being noticeable in the TV return window, rather than patched in years later like many smart TV's most obnoxious ad slots.
under-screen selfie cameras on phones will eventually take us there
put 4 or 6 cameras and analyze your gaze to figure out what part of screen you are paying attention to and if your pupils dilate when you see a product/model picture
I wonder if some UI and navigation can become interactive based on gaze too
obviously it will be ruined just like pop-ups and modals
Which begs the question, have advertisers ever actually measured effect scientifically, and whether the arms race of acquiring eyeballs for no net position change will collapse.
I’ve worked places that have paused ads for a few months to see what happens only to see nothing happen and stop their advertising spend. In both those places, revenue started declining within a year. So I imagine advertising has such a delayed effect that it’s unmeasurable.
Clever quotes are often repeated. That doesn't make them true for every context though.
When John Wanamaker said what he said I think he was talking about print ads for department stores in an era before ad metrics, large scale market research, etc. It was probably true then to be fair, but that doesn't make it useful now, or applicable to all advertising. For example, if I used this quote when I was talking about Internet adverts I'd just be wrong. It's trivial to track the effectiveness of an online ad
A lot of tech people have this rather Dilbert-esque view of marketing. In practice any halfway sophisticated marketing/advertising/paid search/etc. is a lot more quantitative and data-driven than they probably think.
Then take half of your advertising spend and redirect it into market research. (I.e. add on the bottom of your purchase receipts, email marketing blasts, etc, something like "$10 coupon if you tell us something about yourself"; where "something about yourself" = "which if any of these advertising campaigns did you actually see.")
You can put a phone number on your infomercial and measure how many calls / conversions you get from people calling that number shortly after the ad plays.
YouTube is a strange outlier in that they still tolerate adblockers despite them being very easy to block (at least in the 99% case), so I don't think they'll be the first to implement this.
I mainly watch streaming content with no ads. Whenever I do watch something over regular channel ( ex. my wife wanting to watch something thats not streamed ) the ads disgust me and the interruptions are super annoying, it just reminds me why i dont watch broadcast tv anymore and re-inforces my behavior.
I actually have fond memories of fun, musical or funny ads and watching them. We went down the wrond path somewhere, almost like we're stuck trying to optimize a local optima.
In that sentence, What’s the subject of the verb “plummeted”? Is “purchase rates” both acting as an object and a subject? I’m confused and can’t parse your comment.
The greatest invention on a television surely has to be the mute button on the infrared remote control. When commercials are muted then you realize how stupid they generally are and how they think people are idiots.
For this research, the co-authors worked with TVision
Insights, a TV performance metrics company that
developed innovative technology to passively monitor
who’s in the room and whether they’re actually looking
at what’s on the TV screen,
while respecting viewer privacy.
Sure... the whole setup is very privacy respecting.
"Research" like this makes me wonder how the subject of economics ever entered the halls of academe. While writing this I'm wondering if the Frankfurt school of thought or Chomsky might have explained this actually already.
If I were a kid and my parents signed up for something like that, I’d set up a “fake human” so the camera would think someone was always watching. Or sit off to the side.
I think this is common knowledge. Its always puzzled me why advertisers expect the unbelievably detailed metrics and proof of effectiveness for online ads and only want to pay pennies. Yet they are happy to toss millions into the void for TV advertisements. I guess since there is no way to know if the ads work its just "we've always done it that way.
So according to a statistics website, on Google, says the television industry is going to profit 80+ billions dollars but Cornell says the ads play to mostly empty rooms.
It should be.. A 1/3 of ads played for TVision's audience plays to an empty room.
A lot of this is due to many services doing autoplay with no way to turn it off (YouTubeTV, ESPN+ on Roku, etc). There's a utility to autoplay for the consumer when they are binge watching a particular series. But when autoplay is picking random other shows to "simulate linear TV" then really its the service scamming advertisers taking advantage of this playing ads to an empty room effect just to get more impressions. I don't understand how advertisers don't bust them for it.
Advertisers measure outcomes, not raw impressions. Because everything is auction based there's a natural market correction based on this, so impressions could e.g. be worth 1/3 less come bidding time.
So what? 99% of print ads go to trashcans unread. That's factored in by everyone buying those as well.
If anything the numbers should be "better" for TV these days: As when I was a kid, ad breaks were toilet and toothbrush breaks and I barely watched through any of them. These days modern midrolls are designed to be too short for that, but just long enough to be bearable.
Tangentially related - there’s a certain sublimity to watching cable tv commercials in 2022. I’m completely converted to streaming, so the only time I see tv commercials is at my parents house. And in that context, I find myself enjoying them? Perhaps it’s nostalgia - they remind me of media when I was growing up. There’s also an element of escapism. Everybody in commercials is beautiful and happy. And then there’s the hyper capitalism Alice-in-wonderland spectacle of it all. Commercials are strange and ridiculous. I enjoy the absurdity of it.
I don’t miss cable television commercials. But they provide a unique lens into how strange it is to be a person at all.
Ads in print have always been a better experience than ads in most other media.
Newspapers typically get / got most of their revenue from ads, more than from subscription or selling papers.
An example I heard a few years ago (don't quote me on the actual numbers): the Economist makes about 10 dollars on ads for every issue they sell. Almost no one would opt to buy a version of the print Economist that costs 10 dollars more to avoid the ads.
In contrast, broadcast TV makes about 20 cents on one viewer watching for an hour. Quite a few people would be willing to pay 20 cents to skip ads for an hour.
In that sense of (hypothetical) willingness to pay, ads in print are more economically efficient than ads in broadcast TV.
I mean, with broadcast TV, ads play regardless, and they play to everyone - to receivers that aren’t even turned on, or are tuned to a different channel. That seems little different to having the ad make it through but only to a TV in an empty room to me.
> tracked ad viewership using tools that, instead of just monitoring the television, measured actual viewer presence in the room, and focal attention on the screen
I love the commercials on Japanese TV. They are art. Visually captivating, well-produced, and and also often feature famous actors or other celebrities.
I think you answered your own question. A lot of people want the ability to watch sports. (And, while they're paying for it anyway many like the TV as background.)
It's not a flex when you "avoid ads" (which you don't, what are the Netflix/Prime/Disney etc home pages except ads for more tv consumption) by committing to $60 per month of streaming.
Lol... look at me, I'm an independent thinker who isn't subject to corporate influence of "vacuous nonsense"! Well, except for Google, Amazon, Disney and Netflix.
a) there's some quality content on Netflix, Amazon, Disney. Even youtube has hidden gems, although you definitely have to dig or be in the know. If you choose to watch vacuous nonsense on n those platforms, that's your choice
b) and related is that the key word you left out there was "uninvited". I'm quite happy to watch vacuous nonsense when I choose. Sometimes that's what I'm in the mood for. It feels different when it's rammed down your throat
Basically, you're conflating two separate but often adjacent things - mainstream content and corporate advertising. The whole point of streaming is that you can have the first without having the second which is kind of unprecedented in recent entertainment history.
If your meta-point was to prove how cool you are because you eschew the mainstream then... congrats?
I rather like previews/trailers as long as there aren't too many of them.
Paying to avoid ads and get more interesting programming seems like a perfectly valid flex. I'd probably do it more broadly if I could. Content costs money to produce. Someone has to pay for it somehow. And I pay less for streaming today than I paid for my cable TV subscription.
I think the advertising industry is well on its way to obsolescence in many ways. I pay zero attention to TV or YouTube commercials (I either skip them or am not watching linear TV in most of the time), adblock everything, and just look for something more interesting the moment I come across an ad.
(and I seldom go back to anything, site, app or TV channel, that doesn't let me skip ads.)
Then again I'm not in the US and am not a football fan (which I suspect is one of the drivers behind the timing of this article), but I believe we now have, worldwide, two entire generations of people who mentally blank out any form of advertising they come across. It just doesn't register unless it's fun or goes viral, and even then people recognize it for the outright manipulation that it really is.
I wonder always whether the ad buyers genuinely believe that someone is up there to watch an ad, or actually even with extremely low return ratio per money spent they still manage to get measurable more sales in return.
Maybe few times in my life I was remotely considering buying something because of an ad, while 99,99% of them make me switch channels, or mute the TV/radio until they end. I'm ad blind on social media, not to mention I use ad-blockers wherever I can.
To me it's like buying thin air, and how this market is able to get serious companies spent millions on it is beyond me.
Because contrary to your assumption, it does work. Not everyone behaves like you. And simply hearing about a brand influences our collective decisions, even if no single ad convinces you.
yeah I think ads can also serve as a reminder. for example I'll typically get a pizza once a month. if i see a little caesars ad on tv it will remind me 'oh yeah I like pizza and havent one in awhile' so the task moves closer to the front of the queue. I may not end up going to little caesars specifically to get my pizza fix but I might..
