Netflix, once a pioneer of ad-free viewing that offered a break from traditional TV norms, is now contemplating launching free ad-supported versions of its service in markets like Europe and Asia, Bloomberg reported.
The plans to offer a free ad-supported tier, albeit in select markets, suggests that pivot towards monetizing user data, in other words — making users and not the extensive library of award-winning shows a product, might be well in the pipeline.
the ads are minimally intrusive — that is, highly relevant and engaging — they should not detract from the overall user experience
In what universe do ads, no matter how “relevant and engaging”, ever not detract from the overall experience?
I hate ads, but sometimes prime puts 2 minutes of ads at the beginning of a show or a movie and then no ads, I’m ok-ish with this, much better than imdb or tubi that play the same commercial every 15 minutes
If I start a stream and it shows that it will have several breaks I stop it and get it from the high seas
I wish they wouldn’t do that. If i have to hear about Southern New Hampshire University again I’m gonna hurt somebody.
If I agree to free thing and have to watch ads, aight fine.
But at least make them different man, i hate that they play the same one over and over again. It does not make me want to buy your product.
I was sitting in a diner the other day and one of their TV’s was apparently, for lack of a better word, tuned to that Samsung TV Plus service. I watched it play the same Kia ad four times, back to back. Not in separate commercial breaks. All in one commercial break where the same ad was played four times consecutively.
Just like you, I have to say they found no success in making me want to buy a Kia.
But you are telling us about kia, so maybe it did work
Quick! Name a cheap import!
Especially in shows not edited for commercials. They just throw them in the middle somewhere so the show gets cut mid-sentence. It’s ridiculous. If you want to show me ads after that episode, then fine. But killing the entire pacing of the show for your ads in a service people are paying for already? that’s just infuriating.
Fuck, these days even in shows that are edited for commercials, they’ll ignore those breaks and just put ads wherever they feel like it
Engaging is the last thing I want from an ad
You engage with the skip button
When is interrupting my viewing experience to show me an ad ever actually relevant?
Honest answer? Kids toys ads. The kids love the ads more than the show sometimes.
It sucks for parents though. Gets expensive.
That shit should be illegal.
Those ads that are now inserted during the program on us tv shows are annoying as fuck Banner at the bottom or side… Goddamnit.
Always does but some implementations are better than others and bills still need to get paid. Network TV can’t force you to watch ads before beginning your program, but streaming can. I’m irritated that Prime has ads even though I pay for it but at least the way they handle them (only before the program starts) is acceptable to me. Interrupting a program to show ads the way YouTube does is horrible customer experience. What’s crazy to me is the way network tv shows have gone from 22 minutes in a 30 minute block to 17-19 minutes.
When the content isn’t that good to begin with?
Perhaps to people who are used to watching ad infested cable and don’t pay for ad-free streaming. So it’s not that ads aren’t detracting from the experience but that some folks are used to it. Getting those folks is growth. Number go up.
I just wish they could bundle all the subscriptions into packages or bundles and I could watch the shows at pre-determined times.
Stop it. Executives don’t understand sarcasm and you’ve doomed us all!
It’s okay.
Executives got were they are by being smart and making good decisions, not by listening to idiots on the internet.
They could even provide an electronic box (for a nominal fee, or course) that shows me a menu of all the shows and movies that are available and what times they are going to play. That way I wouldn’t have to search through a bunch of streaming services. It could all just be in one place.
Why not sell a book that has that information at grocery stores?
Maybe they could add some kind of auto scrolling view that informs what is playing at those times? That’d be handy, sometimes I can’t find anything to watch.
I’d probably end up watching that more than I watch the shows.
Cool thing about this is they could assemble these bundles into parallel live streams we could simply flick between to find what we prefer to watch. If they run into a problem of people flicking away when ads run then just align the ads to run at the same time on each “channel” if I can call them that ?
They could bundle in my idea of having a telephone in your house, not a cell phone more like a land phone
Tech bros reinvent broadcast TV.
Told people this years ago when pewdie pie became a millionaire selling ads. Like that was the time to wake up and hate every single one of these content creators for selling out and making the internet the hellscape this is. But no we Revere and emulate these people.
This is a bit unnecessarily tough on independent content creators… what exactly do you expect them to do? Make no money from their content? How would they be able to make a living?
I’m a big fan of Patreon.
Sure, Patreon is great, but Patreon alone is not enough for most creators to make a living, considering how hard it is to get people to commit to monthly subscriptions.
But why do they need to make a living creating content.
We should go back to hobbyist sharing videos of their hobby and interest for the love of it instead of a guy trying to make money by jumping into trendy hobbies and creating bland generic content until the algorithm picks them.
It would reduce so much noise online and the stuff we would be left with would be people who have the best content. It would eliminate the drama and toxic crap for views.
There are certainly hobbyists making good content. Most of the great content is from people making a living off it. They have time and resources to devote to doing deep dives into subjects that hobbyists just generally don’t. The bigger problem as far as filling the internet with crap goes is all the react content and people making clips of other people’s stuff that adds nothing to it and whatever YouTube shorts are supposed to be.
Patreon alone is not enough for most creators to make a living
I’ve seen a number of content creators argue otherwise. From the “Hello from the Magic Tavern” sketch comedy group to the “Scenes from the Multiverse” Cartoonist to the various musicians cranking out indie tunes on Bandcamp, the refrain I consistently here is that direct patronage offers significantly better returns than ad-supported payments on bigger media platforms.
Indie creators generally have an easier time of securing monthly subscriptions because they’re more boutique and have closer connections to the audience. And you don’t need an enormous audience to bring in a reliable income. While YouTubers need to get into the hundreds of thousands of subscribers to see any kind of productive ROI, Patreon artists can justify the expense of their work on an audience in the hundreds. They can go entirely indie with an audience in the thousands.
Most creators can’t afford to go fully indie, but the margins are so much better relative to the audience size with direct payments. Even just $2/viewer/episode pays vastly more than what a streaming service offers.
Would you put blame on doctors for contributing to the opioid?
I see it the same. Every one bares responsibility. And even though a big chunk is on the pharma and media companies. There is still the pusher
Would you put blame on doctors for contributing to the opioid?
I’m gonna assume by “contributing to the opioid” you mean over-prescribing pain medication for the commission? If so, that comparison is so far-fetched that it’s completely meaningless. You’re really going to compare that with independent creators having skippable ad reads that have to be clearly marked as such on content you get for free?
Mind explains what is far fetched about it?
There was an opioid crisis where drug makers sold pills to the public that the public did not need and they used doctors to sell them.
There is an advertising epidemic where industry is working to push ads into every space we listen, look or experience and they are using content creators to justify it
Both have a large well funded industry. Both require an interface between public and the industry to sell their product. Both push products to people who don’t need them by using these interfaces to bullshit, lie and leverage their authority to sell the product. And in one case we blame the interface in the other we say " they aren’t responsible they are just making money" so why?
Who reveres and emulates PewDiePie lol
Too fucking many. But replace him with any of them. Speed, H2, Moist, donkey something. We use to have to walk uphill both ways in the snow to see content.
Like that was the time to wake up and hate every single one of these content creators for selling out
And then what? Stop consuming their content?
Sure, or accept that you participating in that industry will always lead to this stuff.
What do people want here. In what world do you think you can separate the two things. Monetizing content through ads and marketing and a world where ads and marketing are not capitalized on.
We all had to stop this decades ago when it was a tiny little part of the internet. You can’t kill it once its tendrils are in every corner its grown into Fafnir
You all have to get better at listening to the crazy ranting of random strangers with hair triggers and obsess over things you don’t care about. Otherwise the future is bleek
What’s even crazier is kids today will never realize the freedom that the first few decades of the internet was when the topic of information scarcity was supposed to end.
We were all so against the idea that capitalist and opportunistic people could artificially create scarcity to make us all pay more. They did it through monopolies on industry’s that choked out smaller competitors. The internet was a new frontier that was supposed to reject that. We could digitally copy and share everything. Hero’s shot up and built all kinds of amazing tools and things. Then it got popular and we recreated the same scarcity issues within decades. Everything trapped behind walls and monetized. Instead of open courseware at Berkeley we favored monthly subscriptions to udemy.
This is the average 6 year olds dream right now. A life where they can emulate a NASCAR fender and live that twitch life just like their heroes Pewdie and Moist and whatever else. Those kids grow up with that mentality and end up shaping a new generation pulling away from what all this could have been.
Yes
With my NAS, plex and Usenet I reinvented streaming. It’s awesome.
Im the one that was paying for Netflix for my family, but the password crack down motivated me to learn how to build a server and go full arrs. They had a good thing going, but now that $26 a month will be used to buy hdds.
What I fears is that its a matter of time before entertainment industry figures out a way to stop those services. I’ve even begun to see discussions that open source may be struggling to remain relevant. Whose taking over for the power houses from early days. So much talent out there. But I really worry the community will shrink over time because we all raiser a generation on the concept of monetization rather than open collaboration. I look out on the internet and the loudest voices are artists and content creators. Both groups who push the fuck you pay me mentality that I believe was not what we all had originally on the internet and it makes me so worried to think how that will only grow if there is no push back.
This is step 86 in the plan. Step 87 is make people pay for the previously free service
Didn’t they already had a paid and with ads tier?
Growth hacking. Shake loose more market share with the “FREE!!” version and then the frog boil
“The enshittifucation will continue until profits improve.” --CEOs of Publicly Traded Companies
It’s almost like all these CEOs and MBAs are just shooting in the dark because of the $$$ in their eyes, but the fact remains that the market is no longer responding favorably to their absolute need for year-over-year growth.
It isn’t? You might be looking at a different market.
“Free ad-supported” makes you no different than a hundred other garbage-tier streaming services.
And in 2 years they’ll move to 3 tiers, free with ads, paid with slightly less ads and even more expensive than before but no ads…
And eventually they’ll just pull the no ads version altogether.
Jokes on them - all of my content is both free and ad free. 🏴☠️🦜🏴☠️
Just like cable!
I’ll take “Organizations that made it to the top by doing something different, only to fall under leadership that doesn’t understand what made them successful and descend into ruins” for 200, Alex.
Seriously, Jeopardy team - this is a rich category:
- Netflix advertisements.
- Zoom mandates staff return to offices.
- Microsoft forgets what the “P” in “PC” stands for.
- Toys R Us implements a shitty holiday gift returns policy.
- Sears decides to sacrifice reputation for quarterly stock price gains.
- Walgreens decides bottom-of-the-barrel incompetent pharmacists can uphold their “get it all done in one visit” secret sauce.
- Radio Shack decides that once-every-two-years cellphone contract sales are the future for holding passionate electronics hobbyists’ loyalty.
Netflix can’t do what got them to the top.
Fuck everything about the changes they’ve made for the last several years, but they were always going to hit a wall when content owners put their content on their own platforms.
Netflix can’t do what got them to the top.
They can’t grow that way but they could easily hold on and remain profitable, popular and successful.
They were well on their way to enjoying “Kleenex” or “Oreo” stable market success, but their leadership and shareholders apparently aren’t satisfied with winning.
The entire source of their growth was “you can get almost anything you want to watch for one low monthly cost”. They no longer have rights to any of that content, and for most of it didn’t even get an opportunity to make a bid.
It’s the equivalent of Oreo shipping 3 Oreos in a big box for 3x the price. But also they had to change their recipe because they didn’t own the old one.
Oreo was originally a ripoff so it makes sense.
Ewweew hydrox
If they aren’t going to charge for access otherwise then I don’t think being ad supported is such a bad thing. Much more honest than subscription pricing and ads in my opinion.
yeah, imo it’s either ads or paid. not both. both is scummy
My Plex share doesn’t care lol
The way the industry is pulling the screws tighter and tighter is just ugly to watch, and it’s hard not to be caught out.
Streaming is just cable
There is one benefit, at least for now. You aren’t locked into long term contracts like cable has/had.
Imo that’s pretty much the only benefit these days. But I’m also waiting for those 1 year, 2 year, etc “deals” where they offer $1/mo off or something
Don’t they already do that? I swear I saw a streaming service that offered 20% off the price if you agreed to pay 2 years in advance or something like that. That is already a thing on SaaS subscriptions.
I know Hulu has an annual billing option where they won’t prorate your bill if you cancel mid term, but I don’t know if there are any that just flat out won’t let you cancel.
I expect to see this soon as a way of combatting people who join one for a month or two, binge, then switch to another provider.
It might not come in the form of contracts at first, maybe they will just jack up the price of month to month high enough that people will voluntarily buy into a contract or yearly pre-purchase.
Trust me, there is always a way to make more money if you’re OK with being anti-consumer. It’s just a matter of time.
Not until we’re having to sit through upwards of 20 minutes on ads per “1 hour” episode
The difference is that my ad blocker is quick and painless to set up, where TiVo involved some capital and planning.
Didn’t some cable companies get all butthurt that you could fast forward through the recorded commercials?
but more more inconvenient since now you have about ten different apps instead of everything in the same place.
The advertising ouroboros continues to devour itself
Enshittification? ✔️
I won’t support any streaming service that has a sub+ad tier. Ads with no sub or sub no ads, anything else is incredibly greedy and the same as cable TV.
Doesn’t this already exist or did I imagine it?
I thought they introduced it years ago
Edit: oh I read again, this time it’s free
Then:
Pay + adNow:
Free to watch + ads
