Adult Swim’s site has modified their video player in a way that makes it impossible to mute the sound without turning it all the way down. In other words, you can’t just turn the sound off during a commercial while you answer email, play solitaire, or take a piss. Also, the commercials are twice as loud as the show.
This is a bad idea. Bad like Hulu charging for access. Internet advertising (like all advertising) is tolerated, at best, but is generally ignored as much as possible. Making advertising harder to ignore does not endear your customers — it makes them hate you. You get paid for each advertising “impression”, which simply requires that the ad is delivered. You can’t force people to absorb advertising. An attempt to do so drives your traffic to YouTube and torrents. It’s not an accident that the Pirate Bay helped spawn a viable political party.
I don’t own a television and will never again pay for cable or satellite programming. I’ve mentioned before that I support advertising-funded online alternatives, but when the advertising is obtrusive I drop the source. When it comes to blogs, I have a zero-tolerance policy: Display one opt-out ad obstructing the content I came for and I’ll never return. If there’s a bookmark, I delete it. And I’ll certainly never link to the site again.
I’ll give Adult Swim a while to figure this out, but if it’s not fixed soon they’ve lost a very loyal net-viewer. I’ll still watch the shows online, just elsewhere.
Why media companies have to learn the Napster lesson over and over again is a mystery to me. Printed newspapers and magazines are dying for obvious reasons — and they deserve to. So are their subscription-based online incarnations. Time and Newsweek are as thin as the Watchtower pamphlets stuffed in my mailbox. A combination of weak content and advertising-fatigue has driven their readers online. DVRs are increasingly turning the act of watching television into a time-shifted, ad-skipping experience. Online, at least, you can still interrupt the viewing experience with advertising, but only to the extent viewers will put up with it. Mess with the experience enough and the viewers go away, but often still have access to the product through less commercial venues.
Consumers tolerate advertising within certain limits. When the boundaries are crossed they either stop consuming the product or look for an alternative. When the product is digitized intellectual property, there’s ALWAYS an advertising-free alternative.
It’s time to either adapt or die, media-people. Walking backwards and hoping the former status quo reasserts itself is suicidally stupid.
Tags: advertising, Pirate Party
What browser and version of Flash are you using? The volume should lower according to the bar you select.
Jeff: The volume goes up and down just fine, my complaint is that it can’t be automatically muted with a single click. The commercial segments are much louder than the show volume and rather than ALT+TABbing to the Adult Swim window and temporarily muting the sound I have to actually adjust the volume all the way down, then dial it up to its previous level again when the show returns.
When watching more than one program back-to-back it becomes especially irritating. Just keeping the commercial volume consistent with the programming would help enormously.
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