This study investigates how zapping behavior is affected by television-viewing motives, classified into two broad categories: goal-directed instrumental motives and process-oriented ritualistic motives. We examine how such an impact varies among individuals with different degrees of advertising skepticism, opinion leadership, ongoing search, program involvement, and advertising involvement. By combining the television-viewing information of 1,162 individuals from April 2017 to March 2018 with survey data, we empirically analyze the effect of motivation on viewers’ zapping likelihood. The results suggest that zapping probability is lower when television-viewing is driven by instrumental motives than by ritualistic motives. The negative impact of instrumental motivations is more evident for individuals with higher ongoing search tendencies. By contrast, individuals who are more skeptical toward advertisements, have higher opinion leadership, or have higher program involvement are less vulnerable to such viewing motivations. We discuss the implications of these findings for devising an effective advertisement placement strategy.