Fox Is Planning To Cut Ads To 2 Minutes Per Hour by 2020
- Fox to cut ad load to 2 mins per hour by 2020.
- The company also plans to sell ads based on the time viewers spent watching them, instead of the total number of views.
- Similar ad load reducing measures have been taken by other companies as well, including NBC, TNT, and TBS.
With the ever-growing number of cord cutters, the cable TV industry is panicking over how to retain their user base. In the midst of the panic, Fox strategizes on reducing ads to a mere 2 mins per hour by the year 2020. The plans were announced by Joe Marchese, Fox Networks Group’s ad sales chief just last week, when he was speaking at a private event in Los Angeles.
Ed Davis, chief product officer for ad sales at Fox Networks Group also wrote about the same in an email addressed to The Wall Street Journal. Davis said, “The two minutes per hour is a real target for Fox, and also our challenge for the industry,[...]Creating a sustainable model for ad-supported storytelling will require us all to move.”
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He further went on to state that the company had tried cutting down on ad time by 75% in Fox Originals on-demand service just last year, and it had a positive impact on the FX brand. With this achievement in hand, Davis goes on to say, “We are tuning our approach with the new targeting and ad products so we can scale more widely.”
The company also shedded some light on how they plan the new ad system to work. They will charge advertisers more for the reduced inventory, and ads will be sold on accounts of the time spent on an ad by the viewers, in contrast to the total number of views.
Now, from what can be gathered from data provided by Nielsen cable TV networks, last year Fox had an average of 13 minutes of ad time per-hour on broadcast and 16 minutes of ad time per-hour on cable. So a 2 min ad load per hour is going to give consumers more than ten minutes of programming time.
It should be noted that Fox isn’t the first to consider this strategy. Just last month NBCUniversal started cutting ad load for their Saturday Night Live program. Also, Turner Network’s TNT and TBS both disclosed plans for reducing ad loads by as much as 50%.