Advertising will not take “no” for an answer.

by Fred

The Register reports that Hulu has had just about enough of this ad blocking stuff, so they’ve taken to nudging visitors with this:

Somewhat oddly, it reminds me of a kitchen in a house I once lived in. The cabinets, due to their unique physics involving air pressure, always had one door ajar. I’d close a door and one elsewhere would peek open. I think of advertising the same way, a system that must stay balanced. Advertising blocked in one medium will escape into another, otherwise there’s no way to monetize the content except for paying for it directly, and as the crowd who felt MP3s should be free for all proved, that’s not our natural preference.

This battle to strip advertising from content was fought on the battlefield of television years ago with a feature called “commercial advance” featured in a product from ReplayTV. Today, of course, we cannot eliminate commercials from our programming, though we can fast-forward through them, absorbing them as Johnny Five absorbed world history in the film “Short Circuit.”