Hulu is A/B testing ads in the pause screen — I hate it

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 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.

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?

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