"Useful" ads?! Oxymoron.
Think about it. When you watch TV, most of each hour is ads day in, day out. How many are "useful" to YOU? Even THEORETICALLY?
Even the ads for stuff that's useful to me are a waste of my time because if it's useful, I've already got it! So 99.999% of the ad time that hits me is a pure waste of my time and that of the advertiser.
Indeed, when I get hit with ads for ANY gender-specific product (tampons, makeup), there's a 50% chance it's no use to me and it's guaranteed to be no use to about 50% of the viewers 100% of the time.
So, I suppose targetted ads solve that issue, but so does NO ADs! Because frankly, even if they remove the the ads that are DEFINITELY NEVER of any use to me, then even if that doubled, tripled, quadrulped, hell increased the number that were applicable by 10x, then still far greater than 99% would be a waste of my time.
Ads are spam. Even the 'targetted' ads are almost never of any interest. So ads might be useful?
Well, technially yes, but in 1 in 1000 cases. So for every 30sec that's of use, they stole 500 hours of your life. Three weeks. And that doesn't even include the fact that once you've seen that hypothetical useful 30sec ONCE, you never need to see it again, but in reality, they'll hit you with it over and over and OVER. So, even the hypothetical 30 useful seconds per 1000 ads is diluted by the fact they're repeat it when it too is no longer useful.
Useful ads? I can do without. If something's "useful" enough for me to need to know about, don't worry, I'll find out about it. Maybe from El Reg......