Commercial skipping to cost $8 billion in TV ads this year?

We can't vouch for the number -- that's their job -- but JupiterResearch has a recently published report that gets a lot right when it comes to DVR use. They claim that 53 percent of DVR subscribers use their DVRs to skip commercials, and that if all of those households skip commercials 100 percent of the time (unlikely) cable and broadcast TV advertisers would be at risk of losing around $8 billion of the $74 billion they spend on ads in 2006. Sounds rather doom and gloom, and JupiterResearch also contradicts the idea that DVR users watch a whole lot more TV to make up for those missed ads. But luckily they manage to reach a much more reasonable solution than most: networks and advertisers should rethink programming and ad strategies to cope with the way consumers are using DVRs. Not rocket science, we know, but JupiterResearch sees some of the current efforts by the networks not only as ineffective, but as a penalty to users -- which doesn't really do anybody a lot of good.