Remember when there was 3 commercials between programs?
I’m not THAT old. I do remember when there was about one or two minutes of commercials every 15 minutes, with a couple of extra between shows. I’d have to check the numbers, but I think they’ve gone from about 47 minutes of programming an hour to about 42 minutes over the last 15 or 20 years.
Of course, in the real old days, the advertisers owned the content, so it was in their interests to keep the eyes on the screen.
Of course, even more annoying than the 18 minutes of commercials are the pop up ads that take the bottom third of the screen (increasingly with distracting animations) DURING the programming, for other shows on that company’s network.
And it’s not like they can actually sell that additional advertising time. They frequently have to take a big chunk of it for promotionals from the network. Idiots are too drugged out to realize they wouldn’t have to interrupt that much if they weren’t interrupting that much.