Hulu is A/B testing ads in the pause screen — I hate it
500 words, 2 minute read
I’m watching Shōgun, a brilliant TV show about war, language, and culture. They have a screen explaining the historical premise. I pause to read it, but I can’t.
I can’t read it because “Dave” is in the way?? What the hell is this?!?
Ads are actually good for society, but not this one
I very rarely see meaningful criticism of ads in mainstream discourse. Most criticism is of the form “ads are evil, burn it all down”. This is silly. The reason people who hate ads aren’t making any progress is because ads are actually good for civilization. If you ever succeed in destroying ads, people are going to reinvent it, bottom up, by running around yelling in the street. You know, like we used to:
So, I don’t hate ads, quite the opposite. I love ads in the same way I love stop signs & traffic lights. I know they serve an important function in society, and sometimes there’s too much, and sometimes there’s too little.
I’m criticizing it because I care, because I want it to get better. Criticizing things you love makes them better.
Ads that break UX are bad. Ads that improve it are good
These pause screen ads make my experience of watching a TV show worse. This is bad for me, the consumer. It’s also bad for the company. AND it’s bad for the advertiser (now I’m frustrated, that’s not the emotional experience you want for your ad!) It also completely breaks some old media? Like, y’know how Big Bang Theory had these “story cards” at the end that flashed for 1 second, and you could pause to read it?
Well, now you can’t because the erectile dysfunction ads block the screen.
There is one A/B test Hulu made that I actually loved: it asked me what ad I wanted. It showed me two Nintendo ads and asked me to pick. This is a win-win for everyone:
I get to pick what I want to watch
advertisers get an incredibly valuable signal: what I want to see more of
I saw an ad recently that explained why some generic drugs are just as effective as the brand named ones, it explained the concept of an “active ingredient”. That’s amazing, I want more stuff like that! You can teach consumers genuinely useful things in your ads. The only people this hurts are companies with bad products that profit off of unsavvy consumer choices. No one is going to weep for these companies.
Conclusion
Some ads are absolutely good, some ads are terrible. We should praise the good ones & criticize the bad ones.
I hope someone makes a blog / column or something critiquing ads and letting us know of new stuff like this that’s happening before it becomes widespread. I’ll keep doing this until someone more competent takes over.
I’ve realized that consumers have a LOT more agency here than they realize. Companies *really* don’t want to do things that hurt their brands. If they can figure out a way to make a lot money AND make people happy, they will absolutely do it, and they’ll outcompete companies that aren’t doing this.
I’ll leave you with Hank Green’s spicy take on ad blockers, which I agree with. Ad blockers are not the solution to this problem.
Recent example, here's an ad that was inserted INLINE in the response of an LLM: https://substack.com/@omarshehata/note/c-70829541
This is extremely bad from a UX perspective (very confusing what is an ad). It's the problem Google has where people click on ads thinking they are search results. This makes money for Google short term, but loses them a LOT of money long term
This sort of thing should be discussed because either (1) companies just change their mind and prioritize long term profit, as has happened here. I don't see these ads in LLMs (2) they remain stubborn, but other companies/services outcompete them
1. Hulu doesn't seem to understand that people pause shows to examine a scene more closely, and not just for bathroom/discussion breaks where occluding the frame would be okay. And/or companies are struggling to drive profits upward, to the point that they aren't being thoughtful. It reminds me of the Netflix show Manic. (Seen it?) In the present-day alternate-reality dystopia, a person can get paid to allow a human AdBuddy to follow them around, rambling about products.
2. You could extend the definition of an advertisement further - flowers use bright colors to advertise their nectar to pollinators. Plant roots secrete specific exudates into soil which "informs" bacteria about what nutrients they need synthesized. It's all interconnection, info-sharing, stimuli & responses!
3. Of course, my orientation toward all this is: I'd be surprised if we spend much time at all on screens by the late 2030s, so pop-up ads are a temporary inconvenience.