>>What is up with cable TV? Here I am at 3:00 AM, and all there is on TV is Paid Programming shows. I spend my money to watch entertainment but all I get is what other believe I should want. As time goes on the more it increases. I guess it does not matter for here in February, we all HAVE to subscribe to either cable or dish in order to receive any TV at all. But most if it is Paid Programming, what are we paying for. Why then do we have do we have to watch these endless commercials?
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>>Besides that; does every other commercial have to be about sex enhancement.
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>>RANT BEGIN......
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>Yeah it's been that way for a while. I simply setup several 'favorites lists' and then wack all the channels that have paid programming. Its insane too - out of 70+ channels, at some points late at night there are just a handfull of "real" channels.

Advertising is a parasite which kills hosts. Just think of it, how many media have been used to carry ads, then got disused because they were saturated by ads. When was the last time you got something meaningful in your mail, from a person with no commercial relation? Happened with radio as well - can't find a good station which won't try to sell something at least once every 15 minutes, even if it's to advertise its self or its "supporters". The movies still have a rather good ratio - you get 15 minutes of ads before it starts, and have product placement throughout the movie (or careful non-placement, i.e. out of 20 beer bottles on the table, none show labels). TV, gone. There may be a few isolated places in TV space where you have to pay several layers of subscription to get to; the rest has gone. Even the schedule channel is actually a sale channel - they used to have the top third of the screen showing some chat about upcoming shows, and the lower 2/3 rolling the schedule, and it took about two minutes to see the 100 channels. Now it's top 2/3 showing ads and it takes about 4 minutes to see all channels. And they reshuffle channels at least once a year, so I never get to forget how to operate the menu on the TV - to tune those onscreen shops out.

Newspapers used to live on their own sales, and have ads as just an extra service. Now many of them are sold at ridiculously low prices (300 pages of high print Vogue for $2 - not kidding) because they make more money on ads than they would ever make selling. So you get twenty articles, spread across sixty or eighty pages, and the rest are ads. "Wired" was a bit better, though. That's a magazine which still sells content - but on the other end of the spectrum, just look at the number of editions you get for free at the grocery's exit. All paid by ads, just take one.

Posters. Once upon a time, when local governments wanted to announce something, they'd print it and post it around the place. Now in countries and the few places in the US with pedestrian traffic, when was the last time you saw a public announcement on a poster board? Even "poster board" means something else nowadays.

The phone system has telemarketers. Cell phones may have spam SMS (don't know how far did that go, though - with recipient paying for the message as well that would provoke a lot of rage).

Any internet medium has got its own spam. Email being the most notorious case, its rules have changed so much by ads that one has to know ropes very well to get a message through. You either have to have accepted messages from each other before, or your message has to look quite innocent - avoiding any attachments, links, inserted images, dollar amounts, anything that may be considered spam - at least until we establish an email relationship. I've already had cases where old friends tried to contact me, but didn't know these rules and their messages were junked.

Ads drove most of the web (probably - I have no idea - adBlock rulez ;), to the point where starting a serious website has become pretty much impossible because your choices are
- do it less seriously, in your free time - you can't afford the time and resources it takes
- try collecting subscriptions from the visitors and get nowhere
- try building traffic and hope it will be enough to get you enough ad revenue.
The point here is that you can't sell a service on the web, because somebody else will be doing the same thing for free, hoping to attract traffic and make money on ads.

Now watch the slow slide of gaming, as in-game ads make inroads. There may really be some minority who would have them, and they may be very vocal, but once the ads take over the games...