Jason Snell’s Unsuccessful Journey Into Netflix’s Ad Tier ⇥ sixcolors.com

Jason Snell, Six Colors:

I feel sympathy for whomever Netflix is paying to tag content for the best places to insert ads. There are no clear act breaks in “Adolescence,” and the fact that it’s one continuous shot means that literally any interruption is going to be incredibly disruptive to the content of the show. It was never intended to be shown with advertising inserted mid-stream.

Netflix programmed four separate ad breaks.

In much the same way as the oner format shaped the story of “Adolescence”, ads defined TV shows. I remember how every show would use the ad breaks to create its structure. When movies were aired on broadcast TV, the addition of ad breaks felt entirely unnatural. The lack of advertising on the BBC, for example, similarly defined the storytelling format of its shows. If I were responsible for creating a show for Netflix, it would frustrate me to not know for certain whether it would be broken up by ads.

Also: my dentist’s office has TVs overhead and, today, the one above me was tuned to an Idaho Fox affiliate — not sure why; I thought we were “Canada strong” — playing “Sherri”. I have nothing against that show in particular, but I have not watched daytime TV in many years and the amount of ads shocked me. Near the end of the show, there would be minutes of ads — mostly for medical products — interspersed with short show segments: a minute-long game with an audience member; another minute-long bit with a funny family photo submitted by a viewer. These segments were not back-to-back; they were between multi-minute ad breaks which, at that point, are substantively the show. It was exhausting.