A 30-second time slot in a medium-sized market can be purchased for as little as $5 per 1,000 viewers
Ok, that’s two cents per pair of eyeballs per 30-second spot.
The standard half-hour of television contains 22 minutes of program and 8 minutes of commercials – 6 minutes for national advertising and 2 minutes for local.
NFL football is much, much worse. My DVR experience has taught me that there’s actually 2 minutes of dead time for every 1 minute of actual football being played. That is, a regulation football game is four fifteen minute quarters. But the time slot is three hours long. You do the math.
Anyway, let’s just go with the standard ratio. That means, if you sit and watch the 30 minute sit-com, you watched 8 minutes of commercials, so that’s 32 cents they owe you.
So here’s the question: would you pay the fucking 32 cents to make the ads go away? Damn straight you would! But that’s not an option.
That really is a valid model. Suppose tv sets came with little coin slots in them, and you had to drop, let’s say a quarter to watch a half-hour’s worth.
Well, then, you might, and you might not do it then. Right?
That’s why we don’t do the pay as you go, because if you’re a broadcaster, you want to lower the barrier to entry, and people think they’re getting something for free, but what they don’t realize is they’re actually renting out parts of their brains.
Because, think about this: a 30-second spot during the 2005 Superbowl sold for $2.4 million.
Folks wouldn’t go throwing money around like that if it didn’t get results, at least some of the time.
Now think about the problem with getting decent people elected ‘cos they can’t raise the money to put up a tv campaign, and extrapolate the numbers to the national level, since president is the only truly national office we have in this country, and then consider that since the 30’s we’ve been on a track toward a stronger and stronger presidency, and then think about everything that follows from that. Yow!