system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: why does Hulu play the same ads over and over, knowing very well we'll hate them more for it?
gpt
TL;DR: You may be seeing an ad very regularly because it is a very large order that is specifically being served to your age/gender/location. The business featured in the ad will pay different fees to have their commercial run more or less often.

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Ad streaming services like Hulu, GoogleAds, or those served in mobile games work much like renting any other advertisement. The merchant who wants to place the ad will design what it looks like, sounds like, says, etc. and then pay the ad streamer to play it a certain number of times.

When you rent a billboard you pay for X-number-of-days on display. When you pay for a TV commercial or radio message you pay for X-number-of-seconds. When you pay for a GoogleAd, you pay for X-number-of-clicks. When you rent from an internet streaming service you pay for X-number-of-streams.

Say that a streamer like Hulu gets two ad orders, one is for Product A and 10 million views and the other is for Product B and 1 million views. The Product A commercial is 10x more likely to appear than Product B because they need to serve it more times to fill the larger order.

There are also a couple of other factors involved depending on the complexity of the advertising network. If the advertiser uses targeted ad placement (like Hulu and Google) then when a merchant buys an ad they can put in an extra criterion -- 10 million views by males, aged between 18 and 30, living in North America. The ad streamer will then use data related to your IP address and their own personal databases (such as your Hulu account) to make good guesses at when to play which ad.

You may be seeing an ad very regularly because it is a very large order that is specifically served to your age/gender/location.