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Youngsters Skip DVR Ads Less Than Seniors
Dekortage writes "Analyzing DVR viewing research, Ad Age has noted something unexpected: older DVR users are more likely to skip ads than younger DVR users. The skew is particularly apparent among men: 50% of seniors skipping all the ads, but only 20% of teens do so. Women of any age group tend to be around 35%. Ad Age hypothesizes that younger viewers 'just pay attention to other media when the ads are on TV or, worse yet, perhaps the TV is just 'background music'... I always thought that ad skipping was a major benefit of DVRs. Do you skip all the ads?"
I don't have adverts on my television channels... ;-)
.. by not watching at all! This is trite, but I stopped watching TV specifically because of advertising. If I had a DVR, I would most definitely skip them, but from the few shows I've downloaded in the past I can see they're just putting the ads in the show itself now, so... Guess I'll keep not watching TV instead.
I just really hate that everything in our society has to be about selling you something, or pushing something else into your view.
I thought tvrss.net and Miro kind of made that irrelevant these days.
Their teenage children may not feel as strongly about adverts because children of DVR buyers, unlike DVR buyers themselves, have not self-selected for wanting to skip ads.
Jusy my $0.02.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
Without my DVR I wouldn't be able to watch TV!
Also, here in the UK, they seem to have started 'turning the volume up' on adverts to really grab your attention. That, the way they treat you as mindless consumers and the whole bullshit science of 'health food' and 'beauty' products make me really appreciate my DVR.
between channel surfing and ad skipping?
Just based on personal observation, I notice most young people don't skip ads, but rather start watching another program. Their hyper short-term attention spans drive them to find new content instead of finishing the content they were originally watching. A teen will watch 10 minutes of 5 different shows in an hour, without having to use the skip button on the dvr at all.
Older people, with greater attention spans, want to continue the program they were watching, and thus use the technology to skip the ads in order to watch the entire program.
TiVo did a pretty impressive foot-in-mouth when, shortly after the Janet Jackson boob incident, they said it was the most rewound moment ever.
Ever notice how they're always rather insistent that you plug the dvr into a phone or ethernet? Dish charges $5/mo per dvr that isn't plugged in.
When I first started paying attention to TV, the commercials were between the half hour shows, or one commercial break (a word from our sponsors was the term used) halfway through an hour long show.
Then it went to commercials between the half hour shows, with one commercial halfway through at 15 minutes. An hour show would have the commercials between, and then every 20 minutes.
Then it went from two commercials between shows, and then one ever 15 minutes.
Then two every 15 minutes.
Then two every 10 minutes.
When I finally could not take anymore, and just quit watching TV altogether about 5 years ago, it was 3-4 commercials every 4-5 minutes. I tried recording a 30 minute show-pausing during the commercials, and ended up with 18 minutes of show...the other 12 minutes were commercials...over one third of the 30 minute show was commercials, not the show.
And those insidious 'infomercials'- 30 minute commercials WITH commercials...WTF?!?!?!
Enough already!
So yeah, I enjoyed being able to watch a show with only one or two SHORT commercial breaks, but I cannot enjoy the way it is now where the commercial breaks seem to be longer than the show breaks in between them.
To me it seems to have done a complete 180. It started as a way for advertisers to use a show to get a chance to show an ad or two and provide the entertainment draw to increase the audience to view those couple of ads.
Now the show is only an vehicle to drown you in commercials, the show be damned.
So now, with a DVR (with say a 200GB HDD), you're filling up over 70GB's of it with commercials, and during playback, you end up having to either hold on to the remote, or pick it up every 4 minutes to fast forward through the commercials.
No wonder most kids today have short attention spans, or just do something else and leave the TV playing in the background.
This sounds like a study done back in the early 1990's (given an $86,000 USD grant) to find out if people preferred warm or cold showers, and why. Duh!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
As a young person(21) with DVR in my room, I have to say that I don't always skip the ads.
Most often I am watching tv live, and I can only fast forward through something that has either already been aired and recorded, or is ondemand. Fortunately, the DVR will record two channels at once; either the one or two channels I specify, or the last channel I was at and the current channel I am at. This lets me watch two channels back and forth.
Sometimes I have the tv on as background, or am only somewhat paying attention to it. The second most common reason for not skipping, for me(aside from watching live), is that I simply forget that I can fast forward! I frequently wake up from some kind of mindless daze in the middle of a commercial and realize... "oh, WTF am I doing?!", then start fast forwarding. This can even happen more than once or twice in the very same program.
Yes, lowest user ID, but I'll bet you're sad you called yourself "Pestilence".
On topic: I notice that almost every ad I see contains something dishonest or adversarial.
TV ads are a good source of information for me. They tell me what not to buy. If it's on TV, it's over-priced or unnecessary, with few exceptions. Otherwise the advertiser would not be able to pay, or be willing to pay, the huge cost of TV ads.
"companies would have a lower overhead and thus could sell for less."
Unless there is perfect competition, the overhead a company has is only marginally related to the selling price.
If I can sell a widget for $100, that's what I'll ask for it, regardless of cost. If the market is buying my widgets as quickly as I can produce them, I would be stupid to reduce the price, even as efficiencies reduce costs to produce.
It's the same incorrect argument that people make that "shoplifting costs everyone more money". No, it doesn't. Shoplifting costs the store owner money, and is morally wrong. But the shop owner can't raise prices because the store next door (who has a more efficient loss prevention program) will undercut their prices.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
My ReplayTV 4000 skips adds automagically and still works after all these years (so I'm told - I let my old room-mates use it since I'm out of the country and last time I visited it was working just fine).
...
It isn't 100% reliable though, so I noticed that they will often skip back 5 seconds to see if it skipped forward too far
Max.
Disclosure: I am 50, I don't watch more than a few hours per week. I'll watch *entertaining* television ads. However, they stop being entertaining after the fifth or sixth viewing. When I see the *same* commercial 5 or 6 times in a two hour block, the advertzoids have lost my willingness to view their ad. Non-entertaining ads lose immediately. Shouting at me loses immediately. Gross repetition of the same ad loses immediately. Ads I'm really willing to watch are the ones that evolve or tell a story over a few chained commercials. I don't care if it costs them more - if they want me to watch it, they have to work harder. Frankly, I'd like to see fewer commercials per hour, or bundled at the hour marks -- and I'd be willing to tolerate product placement within a series like they used to do in the 1950s and 60s. Believe it or not that was less intrusive and actually more enticing to buy the product because you saw it used in context. (mmmmmm, Blammo's Evaporated Milk made these cookies scrumptious, don't you think, George?)