It’s not you: there really are more ads on TV now

William Grosso @ July 19, 2006

For some reason, I was looking at Guba. And I noticed that, back in the 1970s, hour-long television shows were longer. Take a look at the Dukes of Hazzard– each show is 49 minutes long. I can tell you from personal experience with DVDs that more recent shows are much shorter.

Wikipedia confirms it: an hour-long show is now 42 minutes.

Why is that? Production costs haven’t increased (and I’d guess that with the advent of “reality tv”, they’ve actually gone down quite a bit). Since most people don’t like commercials, including more commercials probably lowers most people’s desire to watch television.

Since there are now more alternative forms of media than ever before, you’d think that including more commercials is a sure-fire way to decrease market share. Which is probably bad for television in the long run.,
I think the answer has to do with the economics of the television industry. The fixed cost in owning a television station is pretty high, the incremental cost to broadcast to one more person is effectively zero (once you’re broadcasting, you’re broadcasting), and the value of an advertisement is roughly proportional to the number of people who watch it.

If you’re running a television station and you’re not making much money, a drop in audience share means that you have to show more commercials (because the price you can charge for commercials decreases and you have that fixed cost to cover). Which in turn leads to a lower quality product (or, at least, a lower perceived quality product), and hence to a further decrease in audience size. Unless there’s an asymptote, this sort of feedback cycle can kill an industry.

Internet-broadcasting, on the other hand, has a lower fixed cost and then additional cost for each user (the cost of the bandwidth). Losing audience share lowers your costs, and so there’s not the same (or, at least, not as strong of a) feedback cycle.

I’m not sure where this line of thinking leads, but it’s always interesting to note where thinking about the Dukes of Hazzard will lead.

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