The depth of despair: sites that force you to watch ads before trailers — which are already ads, for movies — which have now become content. WE ARE PRODUCT.

Plenty have complained “they give too much away”; and yet people click, watch, and share new movie trailers like crazy. At The Ringer, they’ve had enough.

Stop watching trailers. I don’t mean: If it makes you mad, you should avoid it! I mean: Stop watching trailers. You’re buying a broken product. Trailers are free? No, you’re paying to see a movie, and when you watch a trailer, you are decreasing the value of your ticket. You’re cheapening the experience. Everything costs something. Trailers are ruining good movies, and they are making average movies unwatchable. They are bad and they need to be sent back to the factory.

Framing it as a consumer value proposition feels like a new angle to discuss this from, so I had to offer it up for comment.

If the thing you enjoy and pay for is the movie, why diminish that with trailers?

What would be a better way to find out about and get you excited for a movie that diminishes that joy less?

Most “best ever” Super Bowl ads are just sexy girls, according to dummies who take surveys on best ever Super Bowl ads.

The Super Bowl is getting close, which always brings back the weird habit of people who don’t care much about either team saying, “Who cares, I’ll just watch for the commercials,” which doesn’t happen during any other day of the year.

But on all those other days, people hate ads; meanwhile lower TV viewership is making it harder to sell the ads that pay for the shows. So if both are true, we can’t be far from a breaking point, in terms of actually sustaining television as a business.

How would you rather TV creators and networks get compensated?

Either: New technology makes skipping ads or changing channels impossible, so you have to watch the ads to see the show?

Or: Cable services, Hulu, and anything else you use to watch television cost double or triple what it does now, with no more ads, ever?

Not every show can make the ad the story and still be so profoundly meaningful.

Emily Nussbaum is one of the best people writing about television, and in a recent New Yorker piece on the relationship between shows and advertisers, she examines the faustian deal between creators and the brands that want into their shows.

There’s a common notion that there’s good and bad integration. The “bad” stuff is bumptious—unfunny and in your face. “Good” integration is either invisible or ironic, and it’s done by people we trust, like Stephen Colbert or Tina Fey. But it brings out my inner George Trow. To my mind, the cleverer the integration, the more harmful it is. It’s a sedative designed to make viewers feel that there’s nothing to be angry about, to admire the ad inside the story, to train us to shrug off every compromise as necessary and normal.

She acknowledges the need to pay for art somehow (“Perhaps this makes me sound like a drunken twenty-two-year-old waving a battered copy of Naomi Klein’s “No Logo.””), but on a deeper level, asks if we’ve given up too much of the art’s integrity in the process.

Do you perceive product placement as it happens? Does you perceive it as a violation? A distraction? Or an easily ignorable part of watching television?

Understanding that the creation of entertainment, and TV in particular, has to be paid for somehow, is this an acceptable trade-off?

If so, what do you think the effects are on you as a viewer?

If not, what other arrangement would you prefer between you as a viewer and the makers of television (and potentially, willing sponsors) to finance the production of the shows you enjoy?