NFL.com Sinks To New Low: Forces You To Watch 5 Ads For 5 Mins. Of Video

Regular visitors to NFL.com are probably familiar with the site’s love of auto-play video and video advertising in general. Not only do many NFL.com news stories include an auto-play video — one that is often, at best, tangentially related to the topic — but those clips are almost always preceded by pre-roll ads that you can not pause or mute (without muting your computer’s speakers). Yesterday, the site sunk to a new low, forcing fans of one regular NFL.com feature to sit through 5 separate GEICO ads just to watch a few minutes of video.

This week, NFL.com appears to have revamped its page for the Shek Report, a weekly video feature in which wiseacre football commentator Dave Dameshek shames five different players or teams or fans or sometimes even himself for their behavior during the previous week.

Until, you maybe had to sit through one pre-roll ad to watch the 4-5 minutes of Shek’s mirthful mockery of the game many of us hold close to our hearts. But this week, visitors to NFL.com found that the Report for Week One of the NFL season had been broken up into five separate clips, ranging from 36 seconds to 89 seconds — and that each of these clips was preceded by a full and unstoppable 30-second commercial for GEICO.

So if you want to get Dameshek’s 39-second take on Panthers kicker Graham Gano continuing to practice on the field while a marching band surrounded him, you’ve got to wait through one of GEICO’s insufferable “Did you know…” ads for almost the same amount of time.

Interestingly enough, when I threw a virtual brown paper bag of shame in Dameshek’s direction last night, his response was to favorite the Tweet, perhaps implying that he’s no fan of the idea of watching five insurance ads just to hear a few minutes of a grumpy Steelers fan grumbling about Tony Romo.

by Chris Morran via Consumerist