This NYT article, about people (like me) who record TV shows (usually on DVRs, though I currently use a DVD recorder and timer) is from 2009, but was just brought to my attention:
Against almost every expectation, nearly half of all people watching delayed shows are still slouching on their couches watching messages about movies, cars and beer. According to Nielsen, 46 percent of viewers 18 to 49 years old for all four networks taken together are watching the commercials during playback, up slightly from last year. Why would people pass on the opportunity to skip through to the next chunk of program content?
The most basic reason, according to Brad Adgate, the senior vice president for research at Horizon Media, a media buying firm, is that the behavior that has underpinned television since its invention still persists to a larger degree than expected.
“It’s still a passive activity,” he said.
“Against almost every expectation” is a great way to put it. I would not have dreamed in a million years the percentage would be that high. What are these people thinking?!? Other than the obvious fact that watching commercials is annoying, they are a huge time suck. If you are like the average person and watch 35 hours of TV per week (though I suspect those who use DVRs watch even more), about 11 hours of that is commercials! Over a year’s time that’s nearly 600 hours of commercial viewing–as if you spent over three months out of every year watching commercials as a full time job, 40 hours per week.
Even if you wouldn’t rather have that extra time to do something else (read a book, have a conversation, play tennis, take a walk, play a game with your kids, surf the Internet, canoodle with your sweetheart), and you’d rather spend that same amount of time vegging out in front of the TV, skipping commercials would at least allow you to watch more shows in the same amount of time. Let’s say your 35 hours a week are composed of ten half hour shows (news or comedies) and thirty one hour shows (dramas, dramedies, newsmagazines). If you skip commercials, you could add a dozen more of the one hour shows and a half dozen more half hour shows in the same amount of time. It just strikes me as a no-brainer.
“No brainer”…hmm…it would sure be interesting to do an IQ test on the two groups (those who skip commercials and those who do not). As shocked as I am that there are so many people not skipping, It’d be even more surprising to me if there weren’t a significantly lower average IQ in the non-skipping group.
And that 46% is a very interesting proportion. Stunningly large though it is, it’s nevertheless still a minority. In a binary choice election, 46% is the mark of a soundly defeated loser. I have a vague, difficult to pin down feeling that a proportion like this would be difficult to maintain in society in a stable way. I just think eventually, the group that sits still for the commercials will decline to a more believable number (less than 20% and perhaps less than 10%). The NYT article says the number had actually increased from ’08 to ’09, though; could it actually be heading for the majority? I just can’t see it. As DVRs get more popular, it will become more frequent that friends or relatives with DVRs visit other DVR households. Surely the non-skippers will be met with incredulity from the skippers, and will be shamed into changing their ways (what counterargument could the non-skippers possibly mount?).
This might also be a generational thing. I can imagine the 35-49 portion of that group, those who have become used to watching commercials for decades, being set in their ways and not be as comfortable thinking of grabbing a remote and hitting a button when the commercials pop up. Although maybe young people find the ads entertaining, as in the Super Bowl? Who knows. I’m open to suggestions here as I still find this puzzling even after chewing on it for a while.
Hi! I’m going to delurk here. I just wanted to add that, although I don’t watch 35 hours of tv a week (more like 2-4), I do DVR–and (although I find commercials supremely annoying), I DON’T forward the commercials. This is because for some reason my DVR doesn’t like to forward thru commercials, and often after sitting thru fast forward frames for a few minutes, if I press ‘play,’ it will start showing from the beginning of the commercial break again. Over and over. A few tricks sometimes work, but overall it’s not worth the bother, because it happens so frequently.
=)
In defense of a DVRd commercial watcher….
I wonder how many others have this same problem?
Welcome out of lurkdom, Melissa!
That sounds pretty frustrating–I officially exempt you from the scorn I heaped upon non-skippers in my post. If this is a common problem, you might be on to something. (And in any event, with your amount of TV watching, you’re only watching maybe an hour of commercials a week at most–much more tolerable than the average 11 hours.)
I’ve had several different models of DVR, as well as the fairly similar situation I have now with my DVD recorder (similar in terms of dealing with commercials during playback; the DVRs were far superiour in most other respects). Probably the best was the one that had one button to instantly skip forward 30 seconds and another next to it that would instantly jump back 7 seconds. So click-click-click a few times, see that I’ve gone too far, then click the back button a time or two to finish out the commercial break, with the whole process taking less than ten seconds. Second best was the one that fast-forwarded like a DVD player, but then when you saw the break was over and hit “play”, automatically jumped back a few seconds (the very smart design idea clearly being that people’s reactions are always going to be too late to stop exactly where they want to). My DVD recorder has a 30 second skip, but it doesn’t jump forward instantly; rather, it does it in fast-forward scanning mode so you see the commercial go by in about three seconds. You can hit it up to six times and watch the seconds add up on the screen, so I usually go for the full 180 and then play it by ear when that finishes. Usually I go too far and have to rewind which is slightly awkward. If I’ve skipped more than three minutes of commercials, sometimes I’ll just stop skipping and let the break play out, figuring there can’t be too many left and in any case I’ve already “knocked down” a bunch of them. So technically I do watch some commercials!
I work relentlessly to avoid advertisements. I do not have any form of regular T.V. service, I listen predominantly to NPR or Itunes, and I run fairly aggressive ad-blocking software on my computer. Add in Netflix for most movie watching and the occasional series (we just finished the HBO John Adams mini-series for example) I’d like to believe that I am exposed to less advertising than the vast majority of the non-Amish American population.
“Non-Amish”–good one!
Thanks for the exemption 😉
I liked the “non Amish” reference too! funny!
Huh?? What’s boggling me here is the statistic that the average amount of time spent watching TV is 35 hours per week! People spend an average of 5 hours per day watching TV? What the hell is on TV that’s worth watching for that amount of time? Frankly, the fact that those average people don’t fast-forward through commercials is the least of my worries about them.
Where did that statistic come from? Please tell me it’s an error.
I doubt it–I watch about that if you include news and sports, way more if you include movies.
Okay–for those under 45, it’s less.