In current American television programming, is there a larger percentage of time devoted to advertising than there was in previous decades?

legoguy1

Read the "Frequency" section. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_commercial#Frequency Advertisements take airtime away from programs. In the 1960s a typical hour-long American show would run for 51 minutes excluding advertisements. Today, a similar program would only be 42 minutes long; a typical 30-minute block of time now includes 22 minutes of programming with 6 minutes of national advertising and 2 minutes of local. In other words, over the course of 10 hours, American viewers will see approximately 3 hours of advertisements, twice what they would have seen in the sixties. Furthermore, if that sixties show is rerun today it may be cut by 9 minutes to make room for the extra advertisements (some modern showings of Star Trek exhibit this). [Text added from provided link -- Zb] Jun 21 09, 12:53 PM