Why Advertisers are More Important than Viewers

While viewers will always be important to the world of television, advertisers will in all instances be more important than the viewers are. That’s the main reason why shows that don’t have enough total viewers get cancelled. But there’s more to it than just that. What are they? Well, I might as well get to mentioning all the ways that I can think of.

If you read any blogs of mine besides this one, you might notice that I frequently complain about tape delay after sport events. You can tell that they have to account for the long time they show whatever sports events that they air a lot of commercials with it as well. It seems like they always have to make up missing commercials at the end. That’s why on CBS after football is over, even if the show is already delayed, they air four minutes of commercials before starting the next show. FOX can have a similar problem when sports end on their network. If the show is running late, they air commercials, some of the theme song or title card, even more commercials, and only then do they start the rest show. At least when that happens, they are airing a rerun of a show.

How else are advertisers more important than viewers? Since you know that too little viewers means that shows get cancelled, that’s the main reason. But there is also the use of product placement in shows that help advertisers any way they see fit. Even shows on PBS technically have advertisers who they mention before and sometimes after the show despite them not airing breaks for shows (unless it is to sponsor your local PBS network).

Mostly live specials such as the Oscars, Tonys, Emmys, or the like mess up regular programming, but they never mess up commercials. They will always take the usual breaks that you normally see even as the program runs longer than it should be. You’d think that they could cut out commercials. But it goes over a pretty long time and they still takes breaks before the end.

I thought that I would have more to this post starting out, but I thought that I would just end the post here and not be much more. Maybe I could do more. You can’t blame advertisements for a show getting cancelled as that relates to there being far too few viewers. But you’ll see them a lot relating to sporting events and they help aggravate tape delay. Networks may screw viewers, but they’d never screw the advertisers cause they need them to survive.