Amazon Doubles Prime Video Ads Per Hour
Amazon Doubles Prime Video Ads Per Hour
Yeah, people create stuff online without getting paid all the time. We literally built the Internet that way. Go back to the early days forums, blogs, dumb memes, personal websites, fan videos none of that was about money. People made stuff just to share it, to be part of something, or just because they wanted to.
It’s only after financial incentives got introduced ads, sponsorships, “influencer” money that everything started getting worse. Suddenly it’s all algorithm-chasing. Everyone’s copying each other, following trends, tweaking thumbnails, timing posts. The content got way more polished, surebut also way more boring. It’s all the same stuff over and over.
So yeah, people deserve to get paid if that’s what they want. But pretending like people only create if they’re paid is just wrong. Humans naturally create. Always have. We write songs, we draw, we tell jokes. Money didn’t start that, it ruined it. It made it a job. It made it about likes and reach and SEO. It turned the internet into a shopping mall.
Now everything online feels fake. Safe. Recycled. All because the moment you attach money to something, people start optimizing for profit instead of originality. That’s the trade-off.
Just a matter of time until you can’t chose what to watch on the lowest tier, you have to follow their playlist of what you should watch.
And we have come full circle back to broadcast TV
I’m old, so many may not relate. I remember when the big selling point of this newfangled “cable TV” thing was zero ads. Can you imagine that?
Yeah, I have Prime for the savings on shipping. Got the Kodi addon for watching Prime, never used it except to watch The Expanse a few years ago. Would have been fucking enraged if I had seen ads cut into that. Fuck am I paying for?!
I grew up in the 70’s and had cable TV as soon as long as I could remember and it was the exact same broadcasts people that lived in DC or Baltimore got, we just got them from cable since the mountains we lived in prevented any OTA from getting through. And I am pretty sure I wasn’t alone with my cable TV.
In 1968, 6.4% of Americans had cable television. The number increased to 7.5% in 1978. By 1988, 52.8% of all households were using cable. The number further increased to 62.4% in 1994. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television)
I think one could argue they invented cable TV so that more people could see ads, not to stop showing ads.
What? Not everyone lives in or near a metro area. Some people live in valleys or mountains where an OTA signal doesn’t reach. I should know that is where I grew up.
Plus if you read up on the history of cable TV you will find that it was invented for just those reasons.
“At the outset, cable systems only served smaller communities without television stations of their own, and which could not easily receive signals from stations in cities because of distance or hilly terrain”
It isn’t that hard to read up on it and understand the history. Instead I guess just downvote because you don’t like the answer.
I think about this all the time. Kids today have no experience of the media without ads. Like we had commercials, but imagine Mr. Rogers stopping his show every 5 mins to sell you athletic greens and test boosters.
This image has a totally different context today then when it was first created
Fucking weird, isn’t it? Another rant would be about where is all the advertising money coming from?! Imagining being a buyer, I’d have to wonder how well my spend would be profiting.
A couple of decades ago I played around with being a salesman. Top advice was to try this ad, try that ad, compare results. Surely these people are finding revenue from spending on these ads? It just seems impossible to me that there’s profit for all of these cockroaches.
I prefer the obvious product placement in old movies, tv shows. How funny it is to see product placement all over the place on the kitchen shelves of Seinfeld, the sugar cookie of Honey I Shrunk the Kids.
The list could go on.
I don’t know about Seinfeld, but I know in Friends, they used look-alike, but not real products.
It’s not Sprite, it’s Sprita. Same logo (for the time), but not the same.
It wasn’t skittles, it was skitles.
You see where I’m going with this. They wanted the feel of a real apartment, without the legal trouble from using real products.
Actually for my kids at least it’s different. They’re so used to ad blocked YouTube and ad-free Netflix. That when the adblocker fails for whatever reason they get first delighted to see something new and very soon after annoyed at having to see that shit all the time and cry for someone to help them.
We watch regular TV so little. The other day we didn’t have internet for several hours, maybe a few days. That’s when we discovered that the TV is actually too far away to reach the cable of the satellite dish.
imagine Mr. Rogers stopping his show every 5 mins to sell you athletic greens and test boosters.
Or imagine the Flintstones advertising cigarettes to kids in the middle of the show.
Or comedy shows named after the sponsoring toothpaste company with sponsor breaks throughout.
Sure it’s gotten really bad lately, but mass media has always been rife with obnoxious advertising, both in-your-face and subliminal. The early days of Netflix streaming were really the anomaly as far as access to non-pirated ad-free media. The broadcast TV generation had their coping mechanisms with the mute button and eventually DVRs, but “media without ads” has basically never been a thing.
Why not? Because I don’t care about ads in a service that’s just thrown in as a bonus to a service I already pay for and would still pay for even if they got rid of it?
What’s that got to do with freedom?