The American World Cup Introduced Ad Breaks–and Everyone Hates It | Hacker News Reader

The American World Cup Introduced Ad Breaks–and Everyone Hates It

wsj.com

88 pointsimpish920833 comments

You guys have no idea how bad things can get.

As an average IPL game of T20 cricket viewer can tell you.

Basically every over consists of 6 balls bowled, times 40(each team gets 20 overs)

And ads are sold on each ball, so 240 ad slots for sale, these are overlay ads, so basically the feed gets reduced to 70% of the screen and you see an ad for the remaning 30% typically for 5 secs.

On top of this after each over(6 balls), you get full screen targeted ads for 30 secs before the nexy over starts. This targeted ad is exclusively sold for your demographic account. Your friend or a family member will see a completely different sst of targeted ads.

A wicket(batter got out)? You dont need to watch a replay of how it happened here is 30 secs of more ads in the middle of the over while the new batsman walks on to the field. I wish this was sarcasm.

And on top of all this, you get a full 2min 30sec "strategic timeout" in between each innings to guess what? Run more ads.

And all of this just in the span of just over 3 hours start to finish.

Rinse and Repeat.

Ive held a long belief that sports fans are a main demographic that has allowed enshittification of tv to happen. Without you guys eating this up and asking for more where would we be?

We’d have, say, 20 or 30 seasons of shows that are well past their prime, because the ad breaks are really profitable. Grey’s Anatomy and The Simpsons come to mind.

sports fans like me are just so loyal. we're perfectly exploitable haha

American sitcoms ? It is funny, laugh. /s

> You guys have no idea how bad things can get.

Speak for yourself. /s After seeing "sitcoms" where an unseen audience "laughs" at the "funny" parts, i think there is still room for improvement. We can have some "crying" when it is a sad scene. And of course, all of these, unskipable.

This is probably the most disruptive change that has been introduced to the sport. Every world cup has introduced something new, such as yellow / red cards, 3 points for victory, goal line technology, VAR, and so on. This year there is a time limit until you must perform a throw-in, among other things. But also these "hydration breaks". I think they have crossed a line. It is so obviously not for the benefit of the game itself.

It's clear that "hydration breaks" are only for the ads, because up until now players had no problem drinking during one of the match interruptions like corner kick, free kick etc

I have always joked the Super Bowl was a long commercial with football breaks in between.

Guess they're going for soccer this time too.

Wow, I have no idea how accurate it is, NFL is not in my country, but google says there is about 11-16 minutes of actual play??

    Commercials, 45 – 60 mins
    "Standing Around" & Stoppages, 65 – 75 mins
    The Halftime Show, 25 – 30 mins
    Replays & Commentary, 15 – 20 mins
    Actual Football Action - The ball is live and in play, 11 – 16 mins

versus what it says about AFL,

    Actual Football Action - The ball is live and in play, 80 mins
    "Time-Off" Stoppages, 30 – 40 mins
    Commercials, ~15 mins
    Scheduled Breaks, 32 mins

Wonder how that effects the social dynamic of watching games, I imagine you have more time to "shoot the breeze" during an NFL game. It's also not apples to apples comparison as my understanding of NFL is that it's probably shorter but more packed intervals, setup -> crunch, setup -> crunch. AFL can have a bit of back and forth to it maybe.

Also this says nothing of on-ground and around-ground ads which I always found depressing, which I guess must exist in all sports.

A game is 60 minutes, broken into 15 minute quarters. The play starts, the clock starts. The televised game is almost 3x that, but at least most of that is actually part of the game flow. Each play is basically a 15 second sprint.

Oh boy, I was taken to see an NFL American Football game live.

The amount of "dead time" was so vast it must have taken over 3/4s of the game.

The stat you read is flat out inaccurate. There are 60 minutes where the clock is running, and the vast majority of that is with the ball live and in play. I would say something like 45+ minutes out of the 60. Also, in fairness I've been to a couple of NFL games, and the commercial breaks tend to happen when the game clock is paused by the flow of the game anyway (team calls timeout, referees are reviewing a play, and so on). It's uncommon for the game at the stadium to be stopped waiting for the broadcasters to show their commercials.

> The stat you read is flat out inaccurate. There are 60 minutes where the clock is running, and the vast majority of that is with the ball live and in play.

You are completely wrong. I know that's what your intuition feels like from watching games, but if you actually get a stopwatch out and clock it, you'll see it's much closer to op than what you posted. Very close in fact.

If you don't believe it, find a actual game and time it. I did this on a game.

For example from the 8min mark to the 2min warning (6 mins of clock time) there were only 2m15s of action. Only 37.5% of the clock time was action. And that was an extremely conservative time. It was the 4th quarter, had multiple scoring plays, and multiple timeouts - essentially everything possible to do to stop the clock and still it maxed out at < 38% of the clock was actual game time. If you instead do this for a full game (not the end of the 4th quarter), and especially games that aren't close and you'll see it's way less. Definitely not what you're expecting.

Football is a tiny amount of "action time" as compared to "clock time".

Imagine the in-person experience. While the long stoppages for the benefit of TV advertisers are taking place, absolutely nothing is happening in the stadium. Untelevised sports offer a far superior in person experience in the US, but most people don't even think about this entertainment option.

The math alone doesn't do it justice anyway because the context switch is terrible. Why can't I just think about the play that just unfolded and discuss with others? Basketball has the same clock mechanics too and it is nowhere near as tainted with ads.

For reference, soccer matches have traditionally been 45 min half, 15 min commercials, 45 min second half.

American football is unwatchable to me for that reason. It’s so stop-start. 30 seconds of play followed by 3 mins of ads. It’s just insane. Feels like the entire game was designed around maximizing commercial sales heh

I became a baseball fan when I was nine years old and that lasted for thirty years. About 4 years ago I stopped watching the games because I couldn't stand the announcers reading ads during the inning, sometimes between pitches.

I don't mind a 3-5 minute commercial break I can mute and ignore or skip with a DVR buffer. Traditional TV commercial breaks are the most benign. But I can't listen to 5-10 second micro-ads that can come at any time. The fandom has left my body.

And literally everything has a sponsor.

"Vitello on his way to the mound for a Tavis Law Mound visit".

"Matt Chapman in the Golden Gate Carpet on-deck circle."

"Don't forget, it's Taco Bell Tuesday here at Oracle Park. Every Tuesday is Taco Bell Tuesday!"

Ugh.

You forgot the official truck of the MLB and the game stats powered by Google Cloud and the instant replay brought to you by Zoom and please sir, won’t you consume some more?

The ads are so stupid too because you know absolutely no one on earth is buying some product because it is on a dugout or they named a stadium after it. "Oh I'll bank with SoFi because they payed for naming rights," Only someone in marketing would think like that. It's like they've been drinking the kool aid so long they don't know how stupid it all looks to normal people. "Kia forum, great I'll go buy a Kia!" Sorry, that isn't how any of that works. But there is so much money pumped into this marketing game that has to work right? Or else no one would do it, right? They can't all be lemmings, right? Right?

Nah, the emperor has no clothes, and everyone in that industry's job is dependent on not acknowledging that fact. Don't worry, a bunch of commenters are about to chime in and try and tell me I'm wrong, and that I will in fact go and buy that Kia because the idea was incepted in my head by the stadium rights agreement.

I've heard it explained that they don't expect direct sales, but when you need a bank and your looking at options you'll realize you've heard of sofi so it must be better than the ones you've never heard of. I don't know how that train of thought applies to things like coke ads though

This makes sense. Most people would prefer to do business with a company they know about slnce before. You need to put "I recognize this, this is familiar" into prospective customers' brains. Then later marketing can convince you it is the right choice for your savings.

It bugs me even listing on the radio when the radio announcer or talk host suddenly transitions into an advertisement.

Feels like the scenes in the Matrix when ordinary people suddenly morph into agents.

They'd stop talking, there would be a pause, and in that brief moment I was bracing myself for the lame shift into advertiser voice. Anticipating it was putting me on edge and when I realized that I knew there was no enjoyment in it left for me.

> I can mute and ignore or skip

That's the point though. They want your attention, so not getting it is a failure signal. And they'll try anything they can think of to succeed.

Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/sports/soccer/world-cup-ad-breaks-hydrat...

Wacky decision. I know they want ads but it's an endurance sport! Imagine if they chopped a sport like 10km run into quarters.

There you go giving them more ideas...

fifa is so greedy they lost out on 150 million a year in license fees from ea sports because they wanted double that and 4 years of royalties paid upfront. and eveyrone knows world cup bids are selected based off how much you bribe the officials.

TT hey sure are infusing the American capitalistic spirit into this one

World cup games are played on public broadcasting networks- communism! Which in reality means FIFA gets a nice paycheck from taxpayers. But no commercial breaks except during half time.

This lawn got its electrolytes from Gatorade. /s

Ad-merica.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com