Craig's List Founder: Allow Viewers to Rate Commercials

AdJab points to a post by Craig's List founder Craig Newmark in which Newmark says current.tv, the new Al Gore, community-created, viewer voted content cable channel, should make commercials part of it's communal approach by allowing viewers to give thumbs up or thumbs down to commercials.

While this might be a fair indication of whether or not a spot proverbially "resonates" with the viewer, the system lacks one important element: why. Why are the ads voted off or blessed as acceptable content. As Newmark writes in his post, "The devil's in the details..." and developing a system like this that would truly deliver feedback marketers need in an abuse-free manner is, certainly, a tall order.

TiVo already knows how many people skip ads on its system and, perhaps, they already know which ads are being skipped. On the web, it's easily known what works and what doesn't but, without additional metrics gleaned from further research, it's all just trial and error. Trial and error is fine on the web where banners are a dime a dozen but it's not so fine when dealing with six figure television production costs.