How do real newspapers stack up against the mega-advertising TV from the movie Idiocracy (2006)? The answer will probably not surprise you!

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Abstract:

The 2006 movie Idiocracy depicts an extremely stupid consumerist-focused future. One of the scenes shows a character watching a TV show on a television surrounded by an unbelievably large number of intrusive ads (Figure 1).

Fig. 1: A re-creation of the TV from the movie Idiocracy. The blue area is the actual TV program, while the red area is advertising. Exactly 75% of the total screen space (red + blue areas) is ads.

But is this an unbelievable fraction of screen real-estate to dedicate to ads?

Let’s find out!

Materials & Methods:

We will take screenshots of the front page of several newspaper front pages, and calculate the following:

  • Ad content (red). I am also counting “this web site uses cookies” notifications here.
  • News content (blue). This also includes images.
  • “Uncounted” area (white / black). This includes blank space, navigational elements, and the name of the newspaper.

This isn’t a super scientific study, since the actual numbers will vary a lot depending on browser type (especially mobile vs desktop), window size, the random appearance of pop-up ads, etc.

Data:

Figures 2A through 2E show data points from some high-circulation news web sites. 

Note that the “ad ratio” below discards everything that isn’t an ad or news (whitespace and newspaper titles don’t contribute to this number, which is [ads / (ads+news)] ).

Fig. 2A: L.A. Times: 58% of content (red + blue) is ad-related.
Fig. 2B: BBC: 31% of content (red + blue) is ads.
Fig. 2C: Chicago Tribune: 58% of content (red + blue) is ads.
Fig. 2D: The New York Times: 57% of content (red + blue) is ads.
Fig. 2E: The Wall Street Journal: 61% of content (red + blue) is ads.

Conclusion:

It turns out that the Idiocracy TV is still on the high end for ad content (Figure 3); a “realistic” newspaper is only around ~60% advertising, rather than 75%. So we haven’t quite achieved the far-future consumerist dystopia of this film!

Fig. 3: Table of results. (The TV show being shown in Idiocracy—the blue area in Figure 1—is listed in the “News” column, although “non-ad content” might be more accurate.)

PROS: There’s still room to cram up to 40% more ads onto most Internet news pages!

CONS: We must soberly realize that it is not physically possible to increase web site ads to more than ~2x their current area, due to space constraints. Unless early-2000s pop-up ads make a comeback!