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Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

I turned on my television and none of the programs were organic. Instead all the content was controlled by my cable provider. I'm beginning to suspect that they just put on those shows to make money off the advertising.

It's rather simple.

When you type terms into the search box, just imagine the words, "Please show me advertisements for " in front of it.

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of course, but once you get to a point 50 minutes out of every hour is a commercial, and only 10 minutes is an actual TV show... you start to see a breakdown in the whole business model. Perhaps Google has reached the point where they will soon start experiencing a breakdown that forces them to show more 'content' and less 'ads'. However since the general public cant easily tell what links are paid and what are true searches anymore (and perhaps they dont really even care), maybe this business model will go on for a long time.

That has always puzzled me - why does pay TV have ads within the programs. I can understand outside the programs to round out to half-hour slots, but handing over money to get shows with ads inside them? I just don't understand why people go for these things.

Cable TV didn't have that many ads when it started out. They increased the amount as it became more stablished and more people started beeing invested in it (at least thats the impression I get in my country).

The organic search results are the loss-leader.

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