Advertising

Maybe it’s just me, but one thing that really gets my goat is advertising. It seems to be taking over the world.

I know that the time per hour allowed for adverts on tv has increased over the years, to something like 20 minutes per hour. If you just zap through the channels, it does seem like it’s all adverts. It isn’t, of course, but it seems that way.

I used to play Words With Friends (= on-line Scrabble). It was quite fun, but got to the point where every move generated a full minute’s advert. You either sat through it all, or quit the app and started again. I gave up and stopped playing.

Facebook got worse. The adverts seemed to be covering the screen and were not relevant to me. Had they been, I would particularly avoid the companies advertising. Twitter is going down the same road.

I remember when you could get movies on tape or dvd and there was 5 or 10 minutes of advertising at the start. Disney were particularly bad. You could wind through tape, but the dvd menu system could be disabled to you were stuck with it (more or less). This seemed to have gone away, but is definitely coming back now.

YouTube is also unbearable. You get minutes of advertising at the start of a clip, then maybe more advertising in the middle.

I use a browser with a built in pop up/ad blocker. Now, I do realise there are some sites where you can’t get on without accepting ads, but they are few, if I need to I can make an exception, but so far this has not been a problem.

The advertising on sport is getting bad, too. I watch a very little cricket, a sport famous for players wearing all white. Except they all carry adverts, as do the stumps, umpires and even the grass. And a sport like Formula One exists only for the advertising opportunities.

I know advertisers know we don’t want it. That’s why there is (usually) a skip button.

Advertising is ineffective for me, and makes me turn away permanently from many sites. The websites I have produced carry not one scrap of advertising.

I am sure there are multiple companies out there who study the effectiveness of advertising, and those companies are probably doing very nicely.

But for me at least, enough is enough. I know you will say that content has to be paid for somehow, but it’s not the spirit of the Internet as I understand it.

This entry was posted in Communication, Culture. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply