I buy a lot of DVDs. Most of them are retail ie. not ex-rental, so they are designed for home use.
Why do I have to sit through adverts for bars of chocolate? If I could skip them I wouldn’t mind, but any attempt to skip them fails miserably.
One of the reasons I buy DVDs is to avoid adverts on TV and now the DVD distributors are making extra money from forcing me to watch their adverts.
I totally agree; it drives me nuts. Even worse when u can’t fast-forward thru them. I wouldn’t mind if they were in the free discs on newspapers, or in the reduced price 3-for-30 discs. Having them in full price discs is insulting!
Says the guy running adwords on his blog …
@Lee –
Huh?
To start with it’s adsense not adwords.
Secondly nobody is forcing you to either look at the ads or click on them and last time I checked it didn’t cost you anything to read my blog.
If I buy a DVD however I am paying to watch a film. I don’t mind the trailers. I can either watch them OR skip them. However the adverts that they’ve started shoving on some dvds cannot be skipped or avoided, which is what gets on my nerves
Regards
Michele
I should have gone into more detail 🙂 To me ads – in all shapes, forms and disguises – are invasive and a total waste of my time. They are far too widespread and people have just become far too accepting of them as a result.
I can block ads in my web browser, same as i can rip the vobs from disk and stream them to my set top box – thus avoiding the ads – but I shouldn’t have to do either.
My main point was that you do not give an opt out option on your ads – same as the dvd creators. I pay for my internet access, you pay for your dvds. If I choose to visit your website I must view your ads (or use workarounds). If you choose to watch that DVD, you must view the ads (or use workarounds).
Thats just my opinion of course. Lets not get into a fight over it 🙂
Ok, so how do you expect a lot of websites that you probably use on a day to day basis to survive if they don’t have advertising revenue?
(Obviously this blog would be here regardless)
This is mostly off topic, but since you asked … I don’t follow many blogs at all. Those I do follow generally have content worth reading, making them sites I would be willing to donate to if needed to keep them going. Like a mini-Renaissance, where sponsors pay for works worthy of public viewing to be produced 😛
I no longer watch TV – too many ads, too low signal to noise ratio (but do follow a few series on DVD). I rarely read newspapers – the majority expect you to pay for the privilege of reading them and are brimful of ads also. I only listen to radio because its on at work and even then I often stick on my mp3 player instead.
I rely on word of mouth and online reviews when I’m looking for recommendations to purchase things. The big problem with ads is that they are never advertising the best product for you – merely telling lies or omitting truths about a product that someone has paid more money for you see (whether you want to see it or not) above others making them totally biased and not at all having the potential buyer / future customers best interests in mind.
Ok. You’ve raised some interesting points 🙂
You would fall into the minority in terms of willingness to sponsor sites, though I can see how that would work in some instances. From looking at traffic to various sites (not just this one) a very large portion of it seems to come from people searching for specific content ie. answer to a question and once they have it they’re gone. They’re not likely to come back.
With regards to advertising – I would tend to agree with you to a point. A lot of traditional advertising is disruptive. It’s not targetted enough.
However PPC advertising has helped me quite a bit when looking for specific things eg. a vendor willing to ship to Ireland is going to advertise via Google, whereas one who isn’t is much less likely to
But are the “people searching for specific content ie. answer to a question and once they have it they’re gone. They’re not likely to come back.” likely to view/click on ads or otherwise generate revenue for you?
I may not completely understand how googles adsense works – perhaps ad networks are more than just pay per click these days ?
The random visitors tend to click on ads from what I’ve seen on sites that I manage (Bear in mind that I’m not talking about this site specifically)
There’s pay per action, pay per impression and pay per click. The “pay per action” stuff has been around for years, but Google Adsense has only started introducing it recently
Would you pay extra for dvds with no ads / skippable / opt-out ads ? 🙂
Don’t get me started on the price of DVDs!
WHat I find the most galling is that when you buy a DVD you first have to watch that incredibly horrible clip telling you DVD piracy is like kicking a granny – the *only* people that see that are people who buy DVDs legally!
I’d love to see what happened if people got stopped every shop they went into and were told “Hey, shoplifting is a crime, so don’t do it, ok?”
And the DVD ads are annoying too, and also cut out of pirate DVDs/torrented files. They’re just punishing people for keeping legal.