Frickin’ Ads

Got another screenshot to share with you, this one too big to cram into this page. Click here to see the screenshot.

What you’re looking at is a screen grab from a news website with an obnoxious ad for TNT’s The Librarian obscuring most of the headline and first paragraph of the article. A close option did appear after I watched the video, but clicking it only restarted the video. The square never went away at all, and if I moused over the rest of the banner, it opened to a bigger image obscuring three inches of screen.
I’m assuming it’s the result of badly-coded Flash, but it’s hard to say for sure and it’s been happening a lot lately.

The advertisers whine because consumers are constantly finding ways to get around advertising, but when they do things like this, it’s hard to imagine why. The bitching is loudest in cases of television time shifting, where people use a TiVo or similar DVR to record a show and skip the commercials when they watch them. On the Internet, it started with pop-up blockers and became programs and extensions that would just block common advertising sites, banners, and images from displaying at all.

The sites then get pissed because with people not seeing (much less clicking) the ads, they’re not getting the revenue they need. So what’s their response? Rather than getting creative and trying to find new ways to make money, they just make their ads more persistent and obnoxious. There are sites now that have two or three Flash ads on a page, in addition to the traditional banners and buttons that are visible in sidebars.

But have we dug this grave for ourselves? People have tried subscription models, but most fail (unless you’re an adult site, strangely enough). If we’re not shelling out the bucks for other revenue models, that more or less forces sites to stick with advertising. The same goes for television: we begrudgingly pay for services, like cable or satellite, but the networks make their money from (and pay for show production with) advertising. Ratings and website statistics are all about showing advertisers how many eyeballs will see their ads, not just telling the rest of us how popular their shows are.

One more example is radio. The local rock station prides itself on playing nine songs per hour. The average song is three to four minutes long, so you’re looking at 27 to 36 minutes of music, tops. This station doesn’t have a morning talk show, just a DJ who only talks for a few seconds at a time. Even the weather spots are only around 10 seconds or so. Which leaves you with 1/3 to 1/2 of programming being commercials. The satellite radio providers pride themselves on having no ads, but even that’s misleading; their talk channels, such as XM’s comedy channels, are loaded with commercials.
And so we find ourselves in a commercial culture.

Is there a better alternative? Beats me. I’m still trying to figure out how to monetize Muy Mal since folks haven’t bought merchandise yet. Heck, I get between 900 an 1000 of you through here every day, with very little to show for it.

I guess the next logical question is should I be making money from it, or is that more commercial culture talking?