Stephen Greco's Blog: Over a Cocktail or Two - Posts Tagged "television-advertising"
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May I veer from books for a moment?
I was born in 1950 and grew up watching TV. For decades we accepted the intrusion of commercials into programming, and sometimes even welcome them when they were particularly clever. And the ratio of commercials to programming stayed relatively stable for a long time. Then media business models and consumer behavior started changing radically—we can go into specifics of all at that another time—and today, in 2025, all but expensive, so-called “premium” TV has made itself unwatchable. Commercials are too intrusive.
When you look into the television channels with the highest ad loads, here is what you learn. Channels with the highest ad loads per hour are:
1. A&E Group: 17 minutes and 49 seconds.
2. ABC: 17 minutes and 36 seconds.
3. Viacom (Spike, MTV, BET, Comedy Central): 17 minutes and 26 seconds.
4. Discovery Communications: 17 minutes and 14 seconds.
5. Fox Television Network: Approximately 15 minutes in 2015.
6. TBS: 15 minutes and 31 seconds in 2015.
7. TruTV: 15 minutes and 17 seconds in 2015.
8. NBC Universal: 14 minutes and 41 seconds.
9. Warner Media: 14 minutes and 32 seconds.
10. CBS: 14 minutes and 11 seconds.
See? A quarter to a third of every TV hour is now consumed by commercials (as opposed to 6 to 9 minutes per hour, pre-1960). Viewers find this intolerable, and even media executives—unable to invent anything beyond the “pay more” model—must find it quietly humiliating. To make matters worse, the figures above—the most recent that are publicly available— come from uneven reporting periods, some as recent as 2019, others from as far back as 2015. The trend, however, is clear: as ad loads have ballooned to unbearable levels, television has betrayed not only its audience, but also the actors, writers, directors, and producers whose work is chopped up and buried beneath an avalanche of commercial interruption. And even when audiences remain tuned in, they’ve learned to tune out—mentally armoring themselves against the nonstop assault.
Yet the tools to measure this erosion of impact have all but vanished. That’s because firms like Nielsen and iSpot stopped reporting ad loads by individual channel after 2016, shifting instead to vague, platform-level averages. The detailed data still exists—but it’s been sequestered behind expensive paywalls and sold only to industry insiders. Why? Because “minutes-per-hour” metrics have become politically toxic: networks with bloated ad loads don’t want to appear greedy, and those with leaner loads don’t want to look like they’re losing the game. Meanwhile, the newer metrics—those designed to convince advertisers that consumers are still absorbing and responding to commercial messages—are little more than wishful thinking dressed in data. No one is seriously tracking the collapse of advertising’s actual impact on the consumer mind, let alone the diminishing resonance of good storytelling or well-reported news. What was once a vital cultural medium has quietly set itself on fire. And for anyone not paying extra to escape the flames, the experience of watching television continues its slow, dispiriting decline.
I was born in 1950 and grew up watching TV. For decades we accepted the intrusion of commercials into programming, and sometimes even welcome them when they were particularly clever. And the ratio of commercials to programming stayed relatively stable for a long time. Then media business models and consumer behavior started changing radically—we can go into specifics of all at that another time—and today, in 2025, all but expensive, so-called “premium” TV has made itself unwatchable. Commercials are too intrusive.
When you look into the television channels with the highest ad loads, here is what you learn. Channels with the highest ad loads per hour are:
1. A&E Group: 17 minutes and 49 seconds.
2. ABC: 17 minutes and 36 seconds.
3. Viacom (Spike, MTV, BET, Comedy Central): 17 minutes and 26 seconds.
4. Discovery Communications: 17 minutes and 14 seconds.
5. Fox Television Network: Approximately 15 minutes in 2015.
6. TBS: 15 minutes and 31 seconds in 2015.
7. TruTV: 15 minutes and 17 seconds in 2015.
8. NBC Universal: 14 minutes and 41 seconds.
9. Warner Media: 14 minutes and 32 seconds.
10. CBS: 14 minutes and 11 seconds.
See? A quarter to a third of every TV hour is now consumed by commercials (as opposed to 6 to 9 minutes per hour, pre-1960). Viewers find this intolerable, and even media executives—unable to invent anything beyond the “pay more” model—must find it quietly humiliating. To make matters worse, the figures above—the most recent that are publicly available— come from uneven reporting periods, some as recent as 2019, others from as far back as 2015. The trend, however, is clear: as ad loads have ballooned to unbearable levels, television has betrayed not only its audience, but also the actors, writers, directors, and producers whose work is chopped up and buried beneath an avalanche of commercial interruption. And even when audiences remain tuned in, they’ve learned to tune out—mentally armoring themselves against the nonstop assault.
Yet the tools to measure this erosion of impact have all but vanished. That’s because firms like Nielsen and iSpot stopped reporting ad loads by individual channel after 2016, shifting instead to vague, platform-level averages. The detailed data still exists—but it’s been sequestered behind expensive paywalls and sold only to industry insiders. Why? Because “minutes-per-hour” metrics have become politically toxic: networks with bloated ad loads don’t want to appear greedy, and those with leaner loads don’t want to look like they’re losing the game. Meanwhile, the newer metrics—those designed to convince advertisers that consumers are still absorbing and responding to commercial messages—are little more than wishful thinking dressed in data. No one is seriously tracking the collapse of advertising’s actual impact on the consumer mind, let alone the diminishing resonance of good storytelling or well-reported news. What was once a vital cultural medium has quietly set itself on fire. And for anyone not paying extra to escape the flames, the experience of watching television continues its slow, dispiriting decline.
Over a Cocktail or Two
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