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Comment by johnchristopher | Hacker News Reader

https://hbr.org/2010/10/defend-your-research-commercials-mak...

> The study: Leif Nelson, in collaboration with Tom Meyvis of New York University’s Stern School and Jeff Galak of Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School, showed subjects three kinds of TV shows: Taxi episodes, nature documentaries, and Bollywood programs. Some watched the shows with commercials, some without. Subjects who watched TV with commercials reported greater enjoyment—and were willing to pay more for DVD collections of shows by the same director—than subjects who watched without interruptions.

Maybe the show is good enough that people want to watch it without interruptions but the show is not good enough that people who have watched it would pay to rewatch ?

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It was actually several studies, most were conducted on ~100 American college students in 2009. The authors themselves weren't totally convinced:

> As has been shown with other positive life experiences, people predict and recollect experiences in terms of their imperfect expectations and often independent of their actual experience. As such, after having watched a show with commercial interruptions, consumers may rely on their lay beliefs and later recall that experience as aversive, which in turn will lead them to expect more aversive reactions to commercial interruptions in the future.

-- Enhancing the Television Viewing Experience through Commercial Interruption

This is probably rude, but maybe people who are happy to sit through commercials are more capable of enjoying the extremely middling (I'm being generous here) quality of most TV?

So people who dislike commercials also dislike the kind of shows that are on TV and thus aren't willing to watch more or pay for more.

Plausible explanations include (a) the study is flawed, (b) some TV is so bad the commercials are a relief, or (c) the cohort that enjoys TV with ads more are the nascent idiocracy.

Did those willing to pay more for the DVDs want the ads on the DVD? Or pay more to get without ads?

The article says the reason. A pleasurable activity being interrupted and restarted is more pleasurable due to the resumption. This makes a lot of sense to me, because I certainly enjoy a lie in more if I wake up and then go back to sleep than if I merely woke up at the later time.

I think it's a variant of the old "nothing feels good if nothing feels bad to compare it with" chestnut. You could probably replace the commercials with almost anything mildly inconvenient.

I think it really depends on the type of interruption. Most commercials are not a calm segue to take a break from the show. Advertisers purposely increase the volume because they know you're going to be stepping away and shock you with colors and a barrage of images because they know they have microseconds to get some image into your subconscious so that you can think of their product on your next commute to work.

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