Charles on… anything that comes along

Seen in a little snippet from Forrester Research:

The Consumer Advertising Backlash Worsens - Business View Trends, by Jim Nail: Consumers’ impatience with ad clutter on their TVs, PCs, telephones, and inboxes accelerated between 2002 and 2004, spurring behaviors that block these annoyances. Women and young adults remain slightly more open to ads, especially entertaining ads or ones for new products.

If ad-blocking behaviors slash media companies’ ad revenues, will consumers make up the difference out of their own pocket? No. The amount consumers are willing to pay for ad-free TV amounts to only one-tenth of TV ad revenues.

Of course, this is talking about the US, where advertising (of all sorts) is much more intrusive than in the UK; in the UK when the BBC showed “24 Hours”, in which each hour-long episode was meant to happen in real time, they only lasted 50 minutes. Ten minutes of ads per hour? No thanks. In the UK, of course, there’s the BBC which provides four TV channels ad-free, plus numerous radio channels and a huge web presence, all ad-free too, and thus free from commercial pressures.

I’m often very glad of the BBC for showing us just how things can be. It’s about the closest to an ideal world one gets.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Last week's Independent article: why ".xxx" won't be a workable red-light district on the Net (15 June 2005; score: 23.04%)
• Microsoft Live (and some reactions), Steve Jobs un-biographied, and this Amoeba won't duplicate! (3 November 2005; score: 22.38%)
• Once more, with feeling: Boot Camp won't move Mac users to Windows (17 April 2006; score: 21.71%)