SpikeTV Adds in Tons More Ads

I was looking through my sat-tv programming guide the other day, and I have been noticing more and more channels using weird timings on their shows, with networks often seeming to want to start and end their programs 1 minute offset from the top of the hour for some reason, perhaps to make it harder to record the next program on another channel. But cable channel SpikeTV had some pretty off numbers, and I was trying to figure out what was up.

Where I first noticed it was CSI repeats running an hour and ten minutes or an hour and twenty minutes each. Half hour shows were running closer to 40 minutes. I though perhaps they had “added scenes” or “never before seen footage” at the source of the extra time. But it turns out to be a much more self serving additional that has stretched out the programming:

They added a ton more commercials.

This evening, I was checking out a replay of one of the past Ultimate Fighter finales, flopping back and forth from the somewhat slack Washington / Dallas game. The fight in question was the Chris Lytle vs Kevin Burns fight. I hadn’t seen it originally, so it was interesting. Round 1 runs a bit long (time out for a major cup kick), maybe 5 and a half to six minutes total. Commercial break time, and the commercials run an astounding 7 minutes and 30 seconds. Second round, another maybe 6 minutes, and we are off for almost 8 more minutes of commercials. So now I have seen 12 minutes of the UFC, and 15 plus minutes of commercials. Holy crap.

During the week, they do similar with other programming, packing in huge numbers of commercials. There is a double benefit here. Not only are they packing in more paying commercials, they are also lowering their programming costs. If you add in 15 minutes extra commercials into an hour long show, you only need 4 episodes to fill a 5 hour block. 25% lower programmming costs, and increases in revenue from commercial sales.

Now for me, this shows one of two things: Either Spike is losing money hand over fist and desperately needs to increase their income and lower costs, or their ratings for most of this stuff is so low that whatever loss of viewership occurs with this commercial message pummeling is significant enough to cost them advertisers or income. Either way, it appears to be short term gains for long term pain, as people will tune out.

Anyone from Spike TV want to comment?