• We lose track. Wisdom may increase with age, but short term memory does not. After you sit through 3 commercials, it’s hard to be sure if you started out watching a cooking demonstration or a historical documentary. You wind up with a half-baked lasagna and no idea how the Peloponnesian War turned out.
• We think there’s something wrong with our hearing. Commercials tend to sound 10 times louder than the video they interrupt. Wearing a hearing aid does not make this experience more pleasant.
• We have got to stop snacking. In the old days, commercials were an opportunity to go raid the refrigerator. Now, commercial breaks sometimes last for only 12 seconds so we can’t get to the kitchen and back anyway. Even if we could, why encourage post-middle age spread?
• We already stopped buying new stuff. Most commercials are not geared towards mature audiences because we’ve already got most of the stuff we need. We’re just looking for someplace to unload a half century of holiday presents and popsicle crafts brought home from summer camp. We don’t even want to mention the electronic devices that stopped working during the Reagan administration.
• Commercials just remind us of how old we are. Even if we’re comfortable with who we are, it’s a little disconcerting when you never see someone your own age unless an ad for funeral insurance comes along. It’s enough to make you suspect that you’re the last person on the planet who remembers the Reagan administration.

Skipping ads saves time and allows you to enjoy more of what you love to watch online. But imagine how awesome it’d be to “skip” through life’s most unpleasant moments. Skipping the mundane, tedious tasks we have to do each day and passing right through the necessary evils of life would be so nice! You could spend your time doing what you really want to do and eliminate the awful things you hate to do. Traffic, long lines at the grocery store, illness, arguments with the kids, and so many other experiences we’d rather not endure could be skipped with the touch of a button. Imagine the possibilities!

Skip Through Life

Here are some of the ways you could use Skip It in real life:
So, you have had a long week, and on the way home Friday afternoon, you catch a glimpse of police lights. Traffic is backed up ahead of you for as far as your eyes can see. Your dashboard has a Skip It button on it allowing you to skip ahead and get home in record time. Now you are home having dinner with your family and getting ready for Friday Movie Night. Just one of many unpleasant moments that can be eliminated with a Skip It option.

Think about the illness and pain you could avoid with a Skip It button. Feel yourself coming down with a cold? Skip it before you get that first sniffle! Going into surgery? Skip forward until you’re well on your way through recovery and never feel one bit of pain.

Do you feel some tension brewing between you and your spouse? Just press “Skip It” and voila! Crisis averted and all’s well at home. No need to argue and no tears need to be shed.

For those of you who are totally lost, once you watch this commercial, you will immediately know why we’ve named it THE Super Bowl Ad You Wish You Could Have Skipped! Unfortunately, however, SkipIt, which gives you the opportunity to skip online ads you don’t want to see, has not branched out to TV (yet). But wouldn’t it have been nice to click “Skip It” after a couple seconds of watching this train wreck of a commercial??

Other Super Bowl Ads You Wish You Could’ve Skipped

Super Bowl commercials are really the only looked-forward to commercials of the year. Most of the time, commercials provide an opportunity to get a snack, send a text, run to the restroom, flip to another show, or get the latest score of the game. For months leading up to the Super Bowl, commercials are the talk of the town—millions of Americans eagerly await what genius Doritos, Coke and Pepsi will come up with this year, as they’ve produced some of the most hugely popular Super Bowl ads in recent years.

Priceline’s “First Mission” commercial was pretty bad. It featured William Shatner, the Priceline negotiator, and Kaley Cuoco as his daughter on a pointless James Bond-esque mission that really had no point. Maybe Priceline should have left the Negotiator’s character killed off instead of reviving him for another year.

Coke’s “The Chase” is getting mixed reviews, but most people are lumping it into the “Worst Super Bowl Commercials” list as its literary (and movie) references were lost on many people. If you are not familiar with Lawrence of Arabia and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, then you may have not really gotten this Super Bowl ad, either. It fell short, even though it had lofty dreams of literary creativity (and license), and many people were left scratching their heads and thinking, “What was that all about?”

With Skip It, you can skip online ads and get back to your business for just a dime an ad. It’s easy to create an account, and you can enjoy more online entertainment in less time when you have a Skip It account. Learn more today!

Adweek’s Mike Shields writes that Aol is incentivizing users to watch videos, “The company’s budding syndication arm, AOL On, distributes content to Swagbucks, a rewards site where users earn points that can be redeemed for gift cards and coupons ($1 off Tombstone Pizza, $15 off at the Gap).”

AdExchanger ponders that  ”you could be paid to watch videos with Aol.. and then you could take those Swagbucks and potentially pay SpotXchange to SkipIt – or skip video ads. I love the ad economy!”

Read the full article: Yahoo Ad Plans of Yore; OwnerIQ’s Branded Ad Network

“There’s no doubt that the media industry has seen dramatic change in the last 15 years. Readership of traditional newspapers has plummeted. Compounding the issue, the traditional newspaper model where classifieds and ads were sold based on circulation (regardless if someone actually read the paper and saw your ad) has been absolutely decimated as advertisers have moved their dollars to more effective, more addressable advertising options.

…We continue to see a wide variety of business models created for accessing content online, making one point very clear: the future of media is paid. Publishers and content providers simply can’t afford to provide content for free without getting something in return. But as some companies are finding out, what they receive in return doesn’t always have to be money or ad dollars, it can be a user’s time or even actions like posting on a brand’s Facebook wall…SkipIt allows viewers to earn opportunities to skip video ads by liking a brand on Facebook or paying a small fee.”

To read more about how online media is trending, and how it may affect both the consumer and publisher, check out the full article.

Skipping commercials online is surprisingly simple and I wanted to take you through the process. I love old school games that have withstood the test of time and have been updated over the years. A great example of this is Tetris. I play Tetris all of the time on Tetris Friends BUT it has commercials. Sometimes I’m so focused on the game that I just can’t wait to play the next level but they’re playing a commercial. Here’s how SkipIt allows you to Skip past commercials:

1. Go to www.tetrisfriends.com

2. Click on the Marathon Tetris game

3. Before the game even begins you’ll be presented with a commercial. Check out the orange highlight below where is says “Want To Skip This Ad?”. This is what the commercial looks like and what the SkipIt invitation looks like.

Skipping Commercials on Tetris

4. All you have to do is click the question or the SkipIt logo with your mouse to skip the ad.

a. If you have a SkipIt account and you’re logged in, you’ll skip the commercial right away. Otherwise you’ll have to log in and then the commercial will be skipped
b. If you don’t have a SkipIt account you can easily create one with a Facebook, Google+ or Twitter account

How easy is that? Pretty simple, huh?

If you ever have questions about SkipIt you can always send us a help request by going to http://help.skipit.com

Spencer invented the first prototype for the microwave oven after visiting a lab where magnetrons were being tested. While standing close to the magnetrons he noticed a candy bar in his pocket was melting. He wasn’t the first to notice this phenomenon, but he was the first to dig deeper. By 1947 he had the first commercial microwave oven, but it wasn’t anything close to the machine you have sitting in your kitchen. This microwave stood 5 ½ feet tall, weighed over 750 pounds and cost an average of $5,000 each!

"Pre-heating? Hah! I think I'll just SkipIt"

It took years of tweaks and changes to get the microwave oven down to a manageable size and price for the average consumer, but by 1975 microwave oven sales surpassed that of gas ranges, and the world was hooked. So next time you stick something in the microwave for a quick heat up, remember that skipping genius Percy Spencer the microwave oven inventor who made that hot pocket possible.

The discovery of Higgs was the first step, the next is figuring out what can be done. “ If I could manipulate a Higgs field, that would be a first step in making a transporter, but the only way I know of to manipulate the Higgs field is to heat the whole thing up to such an incredible temperature that it’s not surprising you’d disappear anyway,” says Arizona State University physicist Lawrence Krauss. So the question then isn’t how do we use Higgs to disappear, but more how would it be utilized to reappear somewhere else?

These questions may be answered in time as more is discovered about the Higgs Field. Until we know more about Higgs we will still tip our hat to the ultimate time skipper!

Legend has it that she came up with the invention because her servants were always chipping her fine china. She is said to have exclaimed, “If nobody else is going to invent a dishwashing machine, I’ll do it myself!”

"Let's see if they can chip my fine china now!"

Cochrane first unveiled her “Cochrane Dishwasher” at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and won the highest prize for “best mechanical construction, durability and adaptation to its line of work.”

Some might call her response overkill, but here at SkipIt, we simply call it awesome.

Last week our team had the pleasure of presenting at the New Tech Denver Meetup alongside several other local startup tech companies.   The New Tech Denver and Boulder meetups always draw a crowd, and this one had more than 100 techies in attendance to hear the “what’s what” from emerging technologies along the Front Range.

The SkipIt team donned our comfy SkipIt t-shirts and mingled, sipped our share of beer and then settled in to listen and learn.  When it was our turn, the talented Mr. Kevin Hunt (@showtunes), joined by one of our lead engineers, Andrew Kuttig, had 5 minutes to tell the crowd all about the benefits of skipping video ads to get to their online content, how users can pay to skip or earn lots of free skips, about all the main technologies behind running SkipIt and how we’ve signed up tens of thousands of users since we launched in April 2012.

Couldn’t make it that night?  If not, check out the video:

Thanks very much to our MapQuest hosts for the use of their cool office space, and to  New Tech for allowing us to present with fellow startups like Flowth, Reflections, and Ibotta and listen to an informative Q&A session with Peter Adams from Rockies Venture Club.

We might love to skip video ads, but we won’t skip New Tech meet ups – see you all there.