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Comment by rivetfasten | Hacker News Reader

"... the equivalent of a broadcast TV channel that only showed 7 minutes of actual TV content per hour, devoting the other 53 minutes to paid commercials and promotions ... Almost no one would watch such a channel."

QVC exists. That channel is ONLY ads.

Not to detract from the point, which seems to be "yes what this other guy said."

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In that case it's not really advertising, it's just information. People watch that channel when they want to see products. They're giving people exactly what they asked for.

Advertising is when you're baited into watching some fun "content" and then they interrupt it to shove ads in your face. Nobody asked for this.

Especially now that we can render TV ads in realtime on top of real-world objects, but even before, the 7 minutes of actual TV content and 53 minutes of paid commercials exists too. Better known as professional sports. Unlike QVC, a break from the ads is occasionally given when an athlete is interviewed or things like that. Although, granted, one could argue even an interview is trying to advertise the athlete's brand. Still, potentially a reprieve from having to look at advertising in the form of things like slogans and logos.

The internet equivalent of QVC would be TikTok I believe. The ads are thinly veiled, but it seems like after you go through a few chunks of content eventually it’s basically all ads disguised as content with bits of entertainment thrown in to keep you strung along. It meshes the distinction between advert and content so completely that it doesn’t really matter anymore.

Teleshopping channels are a thing, and they have more of an audience than one might guess.

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