LOS ANGELES — One of the rewards of watching TV online is not having to sit through as many commercials. Now the networks are chipping away at that little luxury.
CBS shows twice as many ads per show on its website as it did last year. The CW network shows four times as many. Dozens of shows from major cable networks now carry as many ads online as they do on TV. More shows will follow soon.
The online audience is still small compared with television, but it’s growing. Networks hope that by showing more ads, they can make about as much money per viewer online as they do on the tube.
It’s a change from the early days of online video. When ABC started putting full episodes of its shows online in 2006, fans could zip through the hour-long dramas “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives” in about 45 minutes. One short ad played a few times per show.
Limiting commercials kept people from going to unauthorized websites to watch pirated copies of shows. It also helped networks reach new audiences in college dorms and teenage bedrooms.
Now, as online audiences grow, networks see an opportunity to make more money.
Watching your shows on a computer, of course, means being forced to watch the ads. On the tube, digital video recorders allow you to fast-forward through them. For many people, the convenience of watching whenever, wherever makes going online worth it.
Kate Hooper, a 24-year-old nanny from Los Angeles, often travels for work. On a recent trip to Hawaii, booting up her laptop was the only way to catch her favorite CW show, “Gossip Girl.”
“I usually just put up with it and I’ll take a break or go get food or something while the commercials are playing,” Hooper said.
CBS now shows about two or three ads per break online, up from one a year ago. CBS can charge higher rates than TV partly because online ads can do more — allow viewers to click to a website for more information, for instance.
Networks still make far more money from TV than from the Internet, largely because online audiences are still comparatively small.
Networks also get a piece of the monthly bills that viewers pay to satellite or cable companies for TV subscriptions.
Americans on average spent about 160 hours a month in front of the tube in early 2010 and only seven watching video on a computer or phone, according to the latest data available from Nielsen Co.
But online video is growing fast. According to online ad firm FreeWheel Media Inc., people watched 9 billion online videos from clients such as Fox, CBS and Turner in the last three months of 2010, an increase of about 50 percent from the previous quarter.
ZenithOptimedia expects online video ad revenue in the U.S. to grow 22 percent this year to $3.3 billion, compared with just 5 percent growth for all TV ads to $59.4 billion.
For the networks, there’s a side benefit to the growth of online ads. If Internet viewers watch shows with exactly the same ads as their TV counterparts, they will be counted in Nielsen’s regular TV audience ratings.
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