Hulu Battling Ad-Blocking Software
Jun 18th, 2008 | By James Lewin | Category: Internet TV, Video
Internet TV site Hulu is fighting back at users that use ad-blocking software, warning them that they need to disable the software.
“This program is brought to you by Hulu’s advertising partners,” notes the site. “If you see this message repeatedly, you may need to disable your ad blocking software.”
The video then resumes playing after 30 seconds.
Hulu may be kicking YouTube’s ass, but the site has a bigger problem than ad-blockers - their advertising implementation is terrible.
Here’s a few reasons why:
- Before you watch the show, you have to watch a pre-roll ad.
- The ads that you see are not intelligently inserted - you’ll end up watching the same ads over and over for things that you don’t care about. My “favorite” is the feminine hygiene product spam.
- The ads are too long. 30 seconds long enough to switch to another window and check your mail, encouraging people to multitask and ignore the intrusive ads.
Instead of fighting power users, Hulu would be better off working on:
- more intelligent ad targeting software;
- providing a feedback mechanism so that users could reject ads they don’t want to see; and
- cutting down on ad length to discourage multitasking.
They can’t even seem to figure out decade of birth or gender.
Generation Z is really shaking things the [bleep] up over at the [bleeping] BofA. No [bleeping] protection! yay!
And, Monistat may help with my female dryness. Thanks Hulu, I’ll be sure to ask my “doctor.”
How about just letting us pick the types of ads we want to see and remembering that with a cookie.
I’m might want to see ads about new gadgets, upcoming movies, but not about cars or medical stuff.
Man… people even complain when they’re given free hi-res videos to watch. 30 seconds is not too long when broadcast tv is about 2 minutes. Targeted ads make sense and I’m sure Hulu is interested in moving in that direction. Their first priority was to just sell the ad space. Targetted ads will become a reality when the # of views increase and they obtain more ad partners.