There is usually at least an effort to put the ads in at less disruptive times.
One thing I have noticed is that there is a greater concentration of ad breaks in the second half of a show. Maybe because if you made it that far you’re likely to make it all the way to the end?
Yeah, that’s kinda where I’m at. The exploitative practices of tech companies are certainly something to be decried, but I’m not sure the commodification of my time is the best answer. Turning ever more parts of life into enclosed resources is the entire problem, doing yet more of that won’t help. Going down that road just leads into the unhappy wasteland of ruthless optimization: is your time really best spent cooking a meal, or should you just get takeout to maximize your time budget? Are you really getting your time’s worth out of this evening spent with friends, or is there a higher expected return elsewhere?
Plus, even if you accept that time can be quantified in monetary terms, it’s clear that there’s no simple relationship between them. If one second equals one dollar, for instance, then I could see myself parting with ~11.6 days of my life time to get its equivalent. But there’s no way in hell I’d give up 31.7 years to make a billion. So what’s the value of a minute of ad-time? That’d probably just be pissed away somewhere else anyhow. And I think if we’re honest, that’s how most time is spent in the end. And that’s fine—it’s just the business of living life.
There are some distinct differences between the US experience and that in the UK.
Most of the TV we watch is OTA. Some (BBC) are ad-free anyway, and the rest are commercial. Apart from the evening news, we record almost everything so that when we watch it, we can skip over the ads. Although we have Prime, we rarely stream their films.
Commercial TV has strict rules about how much advertising they can insert. “In any given hour of television there should be no more than 12 minutes of advertising. TV ad breaks can’t be longer than three minutes and 50 seconds. For short TV shows (those that last 21-44 minutes), only one ad break is allowed.”
This is apart from the strict rules about content (No ads for prescription drugs for example).
I get what you’re saying. Precisely calculating the value of your time is difficult and even somewhat contextual. Your time costs you more doing something you hate rather than something you’d just rather not do, for example. Running an exact calculation like this all the time may be counterintuitive for a lot of people. So let me see if I can approach this from a slightly different angle that I think is completely consistent with my original point.
I can’t say how you, or any particular person, is making their decision individually. But I can say what I think is a mistake that many people make. It’s hard or uncomfortable to quantify your own time, so you keep it out of the calculation at all, which implicitly values it at 0. You may not want to decide if your leisure time or even your netflix watching time is worth $6.91 per hour or $40 per hour or any other specific number, but I think we can all agree that the quality of that time cannot be worth nothing to you. And yet, if you do not factor in the value of your own time, attention, and enjoyment, and you count them as effectively zero, you’re doing yourself a disservice and getting the wrong result.
The $9 you save by taking the ad free tier of netflix is a concrete, explicit cost. The $0 you’re paying for google instead of $5 for Kagi is also an explicitly named cost. That’s money that’s not coming out of your bank at the end of the month. That’s easy to see the cost. How much involuntary interruption of watching your shows, what is that worth in comparison? It’s hard to say. But hard to say does not mean it shouldn’t be part of the calculation. And you can realize that it’s disproportionate - that it’s clearly wrong - without putting an exact number on your own time’s value. We all know that a nickel an hour is too little, for example, even if we can’t decide what value exactly we want to use.
The fact that google has degraded their results over the last 10 years on purpose because they realized giving users the best result the could back then was costing them money. A user that got the best result right away wasn’t engaging with their website for very long or viewing many ads. And they realized their immediate optimal results, their incentives, were actually to give the user worse service so the user spent more time searching and interacting with their site – that’s also a real cost for the individual and for society in aggregate. That has real costs in your time, your exposure to manipulative tactics, the amount of data you’re leaking to google, and the actual quality of the information you’re receiving. If you could go back and pay $5 a month for google to stay 2018 google, helpful, generally on your side, working as well as they could, would you? Or would you accept that google is worse now and gives you worse results so that you could keep the cost free? I would suggest that if your immediate answer is “easy. free” you’re not really making a calculated choice, you’re answering based on what’s familiar. You’re privileging pure monetary costs, even a small one, over any other factor because that’s what the tech industry has done to our expectations of pricing and services.
You’re not only paying netflix or google or f2p games in money. You’re paying them in time, frustration, enjoyment, quality of information, etc. You’re also “paying” them, in a sense, in distorted incentives and that collectively affects all of us. My overall message is to ask people to notice this and factor them into the decisions you make rather than implicitly not factor them into the decision at all because they’re hard to quantify. You’re paying them not only in your immediate attention, but also in the way that you shape society going forward. Because this chronic miscalculation by huge swaths of the population is what even allows companies to enshittify. It’s one side of the calculations they use to drive their own behavior. If we all value our time and frustration and attention and our desire for quality results too low, then we are creating an incentive for companies to give us products and services that are worse for us. How it’s worse for all of us is difficult to give an exact value to, but we clearly see the negative effects of billions of individuals collectively undervaluing factors other than pure explicit monetary costs.
So you may not want to calculate an exact value for your time, attention, enjoyment, privacy, etc. Fine. But still, count them. In some way. Because if you don’t, you’re implicitly valuing them at zero, and then trading them all for any monetary cost, or for “free” seems rational and serving your own interests when it really is not.
Great post. Agree completely.
It’s a variant on a theme similar to a different comment I often make a bout B&M retail:
We don’t get the service we (collectively) deserve. We get the service we (collectively) demand.
Busy Saturday at Home Depot and long lines at the two staffed registers with 6 closed registers? Leave your cart and walk out. And make noise on social media about having done so. When it hits their bottom line, they’ll change things. And not an instant before. So hit their bottom line. Or put up with shitty service. There is no middle way.
Avoiding ads doesn’t have anything to do with what I think my time is worth in dollars and cents, but with how I ration my (not unlimited) leisure time.
The problem is the opposite sort of demand - there’s no shortage of people who will complain about the two open registers and six closed ones but will still shop there if it’s the store with the lowest price. Because apparently the couple of dollars they save is worth waiting on the long lines and if people aren’t willing to pay for the service, the company isn’t going to provide it. You can almost always find somewhere to buy whatever you’re buying at Home Depot that doesn’t have long lines , but it might cost a little more. Lots of people won’t pay more, even if they can afford it.
I disagree - because I’ve seen people value money above all else for as long as I can remember , way before the tech industry was able to do anything to our expectations.
The idea that Google search is absolutely horrible is more a meme. No, it’s not as good as it used to be. But it’s good enough for what I use it for 99% of the time. When it isn’t, I may pull out a few other ways to search, but the idea of paying for it makes no sense to me. Worse case scenario? I can just not learn that thing and move on.
This monetary method of evaluation fails in part because it doesn’t distinguish between necessity and luxury. Luxuries cost more, but, in terms of value, are worth less.
Google search is MASSIVELY worse and it’s not a meme and in fact I barely ever hear anyone talking about how bad google has declined and I have no idea why other people aren’t talking about it. I know, with 100% certainty, my success rates for specific questions have gone from like 90% in the first 1 or 2 results to well under 40%. Even my spend 3 minutes looking through multiple pages of results success rate is probably below 70%. I use Claude to do most my google searches now because google is so awful. But I don’t like having to use 10-20x the energy for what should be a trivial problem that we already solved.
You consider internet search to be a luxury in 2026? Something you could just.. get by with not doing anymore?
That is a convenience issue, not a time based issue.
And this situation is going to be quite rare, as it would be likely lines would already be that long before I start. In the rare case where it gets bad after I’m there, it still is likely that it would be more inconvenient (even if it would take less time) to have to go find the stuff elsewhere and then pay more. And that’s without your suggestion to go complain and make a big stink, which takes so much energy.
Time itself just isn’t that important. And even when I’m thinking about inconvenience, I’m not comparing it to some numerical value. I’m comparing like to like: the inconvenience of staying in line and getting the object vs the inconvenience of leaving and not getting it.
I leave when I don’t care that much about the item, or when it would be convenient to get later–e.g. I’ll be back for it. Or, well, while I’m bored waiting I find it online and order it. Even though, in both cases, this means it takes me longer to get it.
To be clear, I said “worst case scenario”, when dealing with the 1% of times I don’t find what I’m looking for. The free products out there are good enough.
But, yeah, of course it’s a luxury. It’s not food. It’s not shelter. I would very much not enjoy going without, but I could manage. The vast, vast majority of the time I’m just looking something up because I’m curious.
BTW, I just went though my entire month’s search history, and there’s maybe one time I could say I didn’t find what I was looking for, and that was only because there were multiple answers and I found the wrong one. (What does ND stand for in filming?) I genuinely wonder what it is that people are searching for that they have so much trouble finding.
Error codes is a big one. I used to be able to google “[software] error code 3947” and immediately get a forum result of someone who had that same problem and someone who explained what it was and offered the fix. Then I’d get the official product’s support page about that error code. Now google offers me “here’s the home page of [software] and he’s an SEO-optimized page where AI generated a tier ranking of [software] against its competitors” with no actual reference to my error code in sight. 2018 google would’ve given me the answer in 2 seconds. 2026 won’t find it at all.
Google won’t view the old web, google ignores forums, google rates highly SEO-optimized sources of AI generated summaries of other sites that are rarely useful. Google takes you to the home page of a service you’re asking for all the time when you have a much more specific question that might need to actually search their documentation instead.
You can basically only ask the most basic questions of google now and it’ll direct you to the home page of a site that deals with that issue. It misses a LOT when there’s a source that I know would have the information I’m looking for but that I don’t know the exact page I’m looking for. It often just misses it entirely. It’s barely better than the sort of category lists that yahoo had in like 1996.
When I search for anything even remotely specific on google now, I get 2 pages of bad results, get irritated, then go to Claude and ask him to find me the information. He then spends 20x the electricity reading through dozens of links until he finally finds the information buried somewhere on page 6 of a google search. Kagi isn’t better than 2018 google at searching specifically but it’s leaps and bounds better than 2026 google and that’s even just looking at as a search engine and ignoring that it’s not building a massive invasive privacy-violating database on you as a user and trying to force you to look at ads. Perplexity is also way better than google (google forces the AI search stuff on you, badly, perplexity integrates it intelligently) but that doesn’t solve the “20x the energy cost to do what was once a solved problem” factor. Kagi does that since it’s a traditional index based search with optional AI summaries you don’t have to use.
I’m with @BigT here and she articulated it better than I could have. Google works fine for my probably limited use case. I don’t mind the tracking although I can see why a lot of people do.
As I said, I’ll try the other one again in a few days. I have a few free(!) searches left.
When I first came to SDMB I was a guest (non-paying). Then they introduced ads and I was so annoyed I became a paying member and ads went away for me. Then I think they went away for everyone. I think–correct me if I am wrong. I know I am not paying anymore. In fact, I don’t know how we survive.
I notice that everyone is either a guest or a charter member; no just plain members.
Added: Whoops; I see I appear just as Member.
the membership/payment system didn’t survive the discourse change from vbulletin I don’t think. they just preserved whatever people were at the time of the switchover in terms of title. FWIW, I never regretted the $13/year or whatever it was to support the SDMB. It deserved to be supported.
I don’t know what pays for this site. I think the moderators probably sell drugs
I paid back when they asked more to support the site than to avoid ads.
How much money your time is worth depends on your circumstances. At my age (and yours, no doubt) I’m willing to pay to get more time, having relatively more money than time left. The only reason we still have satellite is so we can record programs and local news and skip through the ads. My wife likes local weather and not much else on the news programs, so we record her favorite one and skip to the weather parts. We recorded the Kentucky Derby and Preakness to get to the race and away from the deep background features on horses who were going to lose.
I watched old Alfred Hitchcock’s on Roku. They were from the late 1950s, and had ad breaks, but Roku seemed to insert ads at odd times and did not insert one between the acts where I think one usually went.
I am always doing a jigsaw puzzle while watching so I just concentrate on that, and don’t worry about the ads too much.
As for doing other things during ad breaks, during the good old days when broadcast TV was king there was an urban legend about water pressure spiking low during ads during the Superbowl, when a large portion of the American public flushed at the same time.
I’m with @SenorBeef , 2026 Google drives me nuts, and frequently doesn’t return what I’m looking for, or gives an unsourced AI summary that i don’t trust. (And I’ve determined that a few of those are wrong, so i don’t think i should trust them.) If kagi is as good as 2018 Google, it’s probably worth it for me to buy it.
I don’t mind short ad breaks in shows, because i probably want a few breaks anyway, and i just mute the TV. But i seem to have mostly purchased ad-free services. That’s partly because YouTube content creators have told me they get more money from the paid subscribers, and i would like to support them.
As for Home Depot, the solution isn’t to step out of line or make a fuss, the solution is to go to one of the two hardware stores in the area with slightly higher prices and better service. And if they don’t have the item, order it online from Home Depot, and avoid dealing with the lines. It’s not as if I’m going to get much service by going in person.
(The local hardware stores are smaller and have fewer items, but they both have excellent service. Anything they carry, I’ll go to one of them.)
I don’t think it’s quite that good. I don’t want to make it sound like it’s the flawless perfect search engine. But it’s better than 2026 google. and it has unique features like focusing on “old internet” searches (smaller niche blogs, lesser known sites, and such instead of to giant tech companies) and forum-focused searches. You can can do things like custom weightings for sites (return more results from X site, less from Y site.) It does a much better job at avoiding all the low content bullshit that gets to the top of google’s results by gearing SEO towards google’s system. And all the no ads, no tracking stuff. you get 100 free searches to decide if you like it.
And it’s just good to support underdogs that are trying to do things the right way (selling you the best service they can, not manipulating you, no ads, not harvesting your data, etc). The more people support services like that, the more the business model becomes viable, and the more honest businesses we’ll have where the business’s product design lines up with the user’s benefit.
Edit: To be fair, the 2018 internet was a better place than the 2026 internet too. There was far fewer low effort highly optimized SEO slop that provided no value to the internet than there are now. It was easier to be a good search engine when the signal to noise ratio was higher. You could say that google should get the benefit of the doubt on this one because they’re struggling with the same problem, except google invited this on themselves by actually marketing themselves towards these SEO companies and teaching them how to best ruin google search.
I made google’s AI generate a deep research report about if and why google’s search has declined over the last decade. Gemini does solid work on these research reports and has no problem bashing google. (yes, I could’ve used Claude. The report would’ve been better probably. But it’s funnier using Gemini)
My point isn’t that it’s difficult to assign a monetary value to time, it’s that it isn’t always appropriate. Take a forest: you can validly view it as a source of lumber, and if you do so, considerations of optimizing your lumber extraction make sense. But if I tell you I spent a day in the forest, and you ask me how much lumber I’ve harvested, I haven’t made inauspicious use of the forest if that number is zero, I simply haven’t engaged with the forest under the logic of extraction and production. I just went to the forest, with that being its own end. Applying commodifying logic to each and every activity always defers the ultimate end of such an activity to the realization of some proximate material or immaterial gain, thus devaluing the activity itself to a mere means to that end.
It’s the same with time. It makes sense to view time as a commodity in cases where I want to receive compensation for putting my time under the control of ends that are not my own, as in when I’m working for some employer. But that doesn’t mean that I should always view time through that lens. When I’m watching Netflix, what I’m doing with my time is like just being in the forest—I’m just letting time pass. Things and experiences happen to me during that time, and that’s what I’m there for, not the potential of converting that time into monetary value. Sure, I prefer the experience of watching my show or movie to that of watching ads, but not because the latter decreases the monetary value I place upon my time—in fact, placing such a value on that sort of time, and thus, making time and the lived experience that goes along with it a mere means to the end of monetary gains, would be a much greater devaluation of time to me.
So to me at least, the argument that I should pay more for a service because not doing so devalues my time starts from the false premise that time should always have some equivalent monetary value. That doesn’t mean, of course, that there are no incentives for me to pay for the higher tier, just that this particular one doesn’t really work. If Kagi offers a substantially better service than Google (which I agree has been enshittified to a great extent), that might be a sufficient motivation to give them money, independently of the ‘time-costs’ of Google. (Although the alternatives I’ve tried so far, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia, haven’t really provided a substantial improvement.)
Hmm, I’m not sure I see that. Rather, it seems to me that this is also just feeding the machine. If you pay for a ‘f2p’ game in order to receive a better experience, then you’re just proving that this sort of tactics works: that you’re susceptible to being annoyed into creating a higher profit for the company. So if we’re all collectively doing that, we’re just reinforcing the structures that have brought us here in the first place. In the end, they’re counting on enough people forking over enough dough as to keep their scheme afloat (the economy can’t run on ads alone; at some point, somebody has to spend money). If ‘getting badgered into forking over more money’ wasn’t a winning strategy, nobody would do it; thus, by actually forking over more money, it seems you’re rather reinforcing than countering that strategy.