You are Paying for Ads

You are Paying for Ads

Luke Stieritz

We all know what ads are, you see them every day. Did you know that on average a person sees 5000 ads a day (Thinking vs Feeling: Psychology of ads 3)? I think that this number is ridiculous, but you know what is even more ridiculous? The fact that almost half of those ads are seen on streaming services that you pay for (Reddit). One of the main points of paying for a streaming service is that you don’t have to watch the ads, but never fear, the future is here! Now you get to pay for the streaming services and watch ads. Irony aside, this is BS.

A satire representation of an ad

There was a point in time where if a service that you paid for started running ads, they would get so much backlash that it would ruin them. Now that practice is almost normalized, people aren’t happy about it, but they aren’t motivated enough to act. This is a problem for many reasons. First of which is that it’s simply annoying beyond belief. The number of times that I’ve been watching an emotional and serious movie or show just to be interrupted by an overused transformer sounding, gravel pounding, walking subwoofer with a voice that has more gravitas than a collapsing star and so deep that it registers on seismographs talking about the latest “thriller” is unreal.

Another huge problem with ads on paid services is that it wastes the customer’s time. For every hour of movie, there is 7 to 15 minutes of ads (Reddit). That would mean if I were to watch Dune II (A theatrical masterpiece) which has a run time of 2 hours and 45 minutes and could have an ad time of around 30 minutes, putting the total run time of the movie at 3 hours and 15 minutes. People (me included) often don’t have much time to sit down and watch a movie, let alone a movie that long. The ads just make this so much worse, making it much harder to find time to fit in a movie into an already busy schedule. All because of these no-good bottom feeding IP reading market scheming hatred seeding capitalist profit machine, fueled by the suffering of the unfortunate souls who wanted to watch an entertaining and meaningful film.

Some might argue that ads on a subscription service help lower the cost of memberships and tiers. However the amount that would be saved isn’t really worth the time that would be lost compared to a slightly more expensive subscription with no ads. One of the main reasons that this is happening on the scale that it is, is because people aren’t inconvenienced enough to actually do something about it. We as a society should fight back against the ads by making noise about it. Liberate our eyes and ears from the prison they are sleeping in! Wake up. Wake up (yes I know this sounds weird, that is my intention)!