from the aspirin-commercials-give-me-headaches dept.
From the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/19/business/media/netflix-amazon-disney-ads.html
The two titans of the video streaming wars — Netflix and Disney+ — have long resisted commercials, showing a reluctance to have premium series like "Stranger Things" or "The Mandalorian" run alongside commercials hawking dish soap, soda and medications.
"No advertising coming onto Netflix — period," Reed Hastings, one of Netflix's co-chief executives, said several years ago, a point of view he repeated for some time. "We don't believe that the consumer experience would be a particularly good one if we had advertising on Disney+," Christine McCarthy, Disney's chief financial officer, said in late 2020.
But now, the streamers are starting to come around on Madison Avenue.
After announcing financial results for a difficult quarter, in which Netflix lost subscribers for the first time in a decade, Mr. Hastings told investors on Tuesday that the company planned to look into a lower-priced tier supported by ads "over the next year or two."
[Ed: If you have problems loading the page, you can try this link]
(Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Friday April 22 2022, @02:44PM (6 children)
Netflix plans to start charging for password sharing, and customers aren't happy [npr.org]
Netflix Estimates More Than 100 Million Non-Paying Households Use Shared Passwords [variety.com]
Netflix may clamp down on password sharing. Here’s what that means [cnn.com]
Netflix warns of crackdown on password sharing: Here’s what it means for viewers [today.com]
Maybe Netflix's Problem is Its Shows, Not Password Sharing [thestreet.com]
A few ads are just the tip of the iceberg.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ikanreed on Friday April 22 2022, @03:52PM (3 children)
Every tech company built on eternal exponential growth suddenly finding there's a market cap for their product and they can't just keep getting free money forever sucks shit. Because their conclusion isn't "let's adapt to the new reality and find a way to make steady amounts of money growing at the same rate as the economy overall" it's "let's squeeze our customers, employees, and governments until things are back to 'normal'"
I don't know if they know that it almost always backfires, or if they do and it gets ignored by MBAs and accountants going "WE MUST DO SOMETHING"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 22 2022, @04:44PM
The MBAs bring innovation in the advertising sphere. Who'd a thunk they would cram adverts absolutely everywhere, like weeds, like suffocating algal blooms gorged on the toxic run-off of garish sitcoms, killing all life and replacing it with a fermenting ocean of brightly colored poison. Wait, what were we talking about?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by NateMich on Friday April 22 2022, @04:46PM (1 child)
Every company is expected to eternally grow, not just tech companies. It's one of the reasons so many industries are hated by Wall Street. Look at auto companies (besides Tesla). They have a long product cycle, expensive R&D, and never see more than slow growth in a limited market.
Wall Street hates that kind of company.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 22 2022, @05:02PM
Break it up, sell the parts. Innovation is what it's all about. Innovation, and parasitism.
(Score: 2) by Revek on Friday April 22 2022, @05:16PM
The trouble is most likely its not increasing. The long held myth that if revenue isn't increasing its decreasing makes many companies decline.
This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 22 2022, @07:11PM
The lack of PR (i.e. media bribe) budget is really hurting.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Snospar on Friday April 22 2022, @03:21PM (6 children)
If those greedy fuckers think I'm going to pay to watch ads they should prepare for disappointment. I can easily live without Netflix, Prime, NowTV, Disney+ and all the rest and will be cancelling my subscriptions as soon as they start their advertising barrage. Send a message loud and clear - I'm not paying to have my time taken away from me; it's the most precious thing I have!
Huge thanks to all the Soylent volunteers without whom this community (and this post) would not be possible.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 22 2022, @03:58PM
You are not alone. Netflix, prime, and others have been training viewers to binge shows without commercial interruptions for almost twenty years now. That's a whole generation. So trying to turn streaming into cable will backfire.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday April 22 2022, @04:37PM
Ala Hulu and Hulu Plus. I've avoided them for years, because my entertainment doesn't need advertisements.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 22 2022, @05:01PM (2 children)
Oh are they ever ready to boil your frog....
See, your streaming service won't change, not one little bit. They'll just offer a lower cost service which includes ads - expanding their market and their overall income "without impacting current subscribers." Then, years later, they'll bump up prices wherever they can without losing too many customers. And again. And again. And, before your kids have advanced from elementary school to high school, they've got the advertising based streaming service up at the price that the ad-free service used to be at, and the ad free service is out in 1%er nosebleed range at 3x or more of what it used to be. Hopefully they won't be screwing with the content selection options, this time.
If you're too young to remember, they did this before when they transitioned from mailed discs to streaming, but that time they did a lot of the inflation via restructuring of the available content catalogs. Streaming started cheaper with a limited catalog - your disc subscription option "didn't change" at first. But, eventually, the content selection available on disc did dwindle, the prices did rise, and I think eventually they started streaming significant content that wasn't available on disc so you really needed the combo subscription if you wanted everything on offer.
In the end prices are always just about as high as the market will bear, and cost of product is just about as low as the service provider can get away with. Think competition keeps that margin thin? Think again: Netflix was estimated to spend about $17 billion on content last year and is expected to spend about $19 billion in 2022. This with about 221 million paid subscribers, so, on average, subscribers are paying $86 per year for Netflix to produce their own content. I don't know about you, but I didn't sign up for Netflix (in 1997) with the expectation that over 50% of my subscription fees were going to be spent on internal content development by Netflix. I certainly don't derive over 50% of my enjoyment of the service from content they create.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 22 2022, @05:04PM (1 child)
Son, why do you hate America?
(Score: 4, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 22 2022, @05:31PM
Because everybody else has a bigger slice of free pork than I do.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Revek on Friday April 22 2022, @06:43PM
Agreed, its why I don't have hulu.
This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
(Score: 4, Insightful) by cmdrklarg on Friday April 22 2022, @03:57PM (5 children)
The instant that my paid Netflix sub starts showing ads is when I will cancel. If they want to have an ad-supported tier that's fine, but don't be stupid by getting greedy.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Freeman on Friday April 22 2022, @04:28PM (1 child)
Even a cheaper ad-supported tier would be kicking themselves in the head. The entire point of Netflix is no commercials. The moment they add commercials is the moment in time they slide down that slippery slope. Sure, the ad-supported tier may be cheaper, but how much will that push the "Premium" version up in price? It is a move that is not in favor the customers. It's a pure out and out money grab.
We currently have Netflix, Prime, and Disney+. Netflix and Disney+ don't have commercials. Prime is my least favorite to watch. Part of the reason we have it is for the free shipping with some use as an entertainment platform. We are soon to ditch Disney+, because wife is done with them. Also, from a technical standpoint Disney+ sucks. When you go to skip through a section or browse the video, it is slow and awful. Missed something, well, guess you're going to wait for the next few seconds or so just for the thing to figure out what you just wanted. I've not noticed any issues with Prime in that regard, but I abhor their "let's play a preview of random show", before they play the video you want to watch. That's almost enough for me to dump them in and of itself. We've had Netflix since they were a DVD service, now we pretty much just stream whatever they have available. Probably need to return that final DVD and dump the rental part of the service.
In Short: Commercials are what customers have been trying to avoid for years. Inserting commercials in previously commercial-free entertainment will not please lots of their customers.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 22 2022, @05:13PM
Commercials are what _some_ customers (myself and household included) have been avoiding with Netflix since the late 1990s.
It's only in the last few years that we regularly get access to Netflix, D+, etc. when we travel - in the past it was always (advert ridden) cable TV. My mom & her brother built and rent cabins in the mountains, and their customers just about universally demanded cable service in the cabin to have an "enjoyable stay." I don't know when (or even if) ad free streaming services surpassed cable TV in income. Cable TV has been trying to bundle itself with out internet service since about 2004 - even offering a lower monthly bill if we would just take a cable box (which I did, and put on the shelf in the garage, and returned still in its shrink wrap 2 years later when the promotional price advantage was silently ended...)
Bottom line, it seems that the majority of the population isn't as advert-abhorrent as we are, and as a global service provider it is the responsibility of the company (to the shareholders) to deliver the maximum possible profits, or at least a rate of return which usually exceeds a market basket average, and after two decades of ear-popping rises in Netflix paid subscriber levels, I think they're finally starting to feel the market saturation ceiling pushing back on them for their current business model.
Personally, I would rather that the Netflix parent organization keep offering ad-free streaming and that they start an entirely different brand (could be under the same parent company / trading symbol even) to take advantage of the advertising tolerant market. But, I think they tried something like that back around the start of streaming and it bit them hard, then they gave it up. The value of a brand name is astonishingly high.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 22 2022, @05:05PM (2 children)
Netflix should definitely go with ads since that will allow for another up and coming streaming service without commercials to blossom and take all their customers. Commercial free content is what we've been waiting for since paid cable TV first arrived. The next Netfllix better ramp up infrastructure now and prepare for the flood of customers migrating to them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 22 2022, @06:13PM (1 child)
In the 1970's, there were no ads in cable TV-only channels like HBO. You paid for cable, not the advertisers. Then in the 80s, the bastards got greedy and, one by one, the channels started adding ads. Not so many at first, to ease the shock, to soon where we are now where they run just as many ads as free, over the air TV.
This has happened before and will happen again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 23 2022, @07:52AM
Movies are unwatchable on cable - the time interval between 5 minute blocks of adverts gets to about a 1:1 ratio for the last 30 minutes (1 hour) of the movie.
(Score: -1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 22 2022, @04:03PM (4 children)
I rather agree with Elon. If your content begins to broadly pander to a fringe minority, then general audiences will switch off. The looks on their faces approximate how your family's do when you start talking about tech minutiae.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 22 2022, @04:19PM (3 children)
That's the thing, original content was inevitable because of the greedy content owners and exclusivity agreements. What wasn't inevitable was how specific some of the original content is. If they add ads, that means content has to be limited to what advertisers are willing to be associated with. Do, woke stuff maybe, but anything too daring probably not.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 22 2022, @05:05PM (2 children)
I don't see a whole lot of sponsors for a show featuring a talking vagina
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 22 2022, @06:41PM
I'll tune in for a guy doing testicle tanning though. I can get my "fair and balanced" news from him as well.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 22 2022, @08:12PM
Exactly! [nypost.com]
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 22 2022, @04:24PM
Seem to be the most common. Wonder where they get the money to run so many commercials, could they all be overcharging? Seems like the massive spend on advertising is at odds with claims of low rates.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 22 2022, @05:16PM
Three words, actually: "No advertisements here", or if you prefer "Fuck you, Netflix".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 22 2022, @07:17PM (4 children)
lol. you pay youtube NOT to show ads. now you pay netflix to show ads?
somebody already said it. first a cheap w/ add tier, then "oh but shareholders are complaining" (again), then *bump* ads to next tier but still have a meor expensive tier without ads culminating in a ad free tier nobody can/wants-to afford. "sneaky, sneaky netflix" (new documentary on netflix).
srsly, 'tis a shitty time for regular people (energy price, war, disease) and it's not really the right time to make fundamental changes to a company philosophy. the fossil fuels aren't changing. i don't see them sponsoring fuel for you if you put a ad-sticker on your car for a week ... to buy more of the stuff that's making the problems in the first place?
also i don't see the benefit of adding ads to netflix that will help in any way with the above problems and i am not sure what ad format netflix can bring to the table that other ad outlets can't serve up already.
more good shows and improve convenience and a honest eye on the reality of the market. also f#ck shareholders. srsly, netflix already got all the money from sellign shares, right, why would they care in the least if people holding them decide they have become worthless? shareholders are a drain on a company profit. why would you make decisions to keep a company profit hemorrhaging leak ... leaking? isn't it time to think about the people really investing in netflix, who are buying their "product"?
if people tomorrow decide a computer generated token is worth 5 dollars isn't it the same like people deciding that they want to pay 10000 dollars or 0.1 cents for a "share" of netflix?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by cmdrklarg on Friday April 22 2022, @09:17PM (3 children)
Nope. I run Firefox with uBlock Origin. No ads on YouTube. Except of course the in-video sponsored shout-outs the authors include, but I can fast-forward through those if I don't want to look at them.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 23 2022, @05:56AM (2 children)
There's even a browser add-on which uses crowd-sourced timestamps of when the sponsor shout outs begin and in in a youtube video and automatically skips you past them. SponsorBlock I think it's called.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 23 2022, @09:32PM
I find the whole concept of SponsorBlock ironic. The number one complaint I hear about advertising is the tracking and profile building aspect. And now you have people that dislike the appearance of advertising so much that they opt into the very same tracking to avoid them.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by cmdrklarg on Monday April 25 2022, @05:53PM
Interesting... but I won't begrudge a content creator hawking an ad from a paid sponsor; usually the ad is at least topically relevant and the product may be of interest.
Third party ad companies can just fuck right off, however.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by choose another one on Friday April 22 2022, @07:52PM (2 children)
TFA makes little mention of this, but Amazon has already lead the way.
Amazon has always stocked _far_ more paid streaming content than is free with Prime, always.
In fact there were times when the UI made it quite difficult to search/browse only the free/included Prime content (it's better at the moment).
But NOW there is whole 'nother set of content: yup, "ad-supported".
That's right, even if you have Prime, NOW, alongside the "prime" flagged stuff and the "£/$" flagged stuff, there is "Ads" stuff.
Currently looking at my watchlists it's mostly what was "pay-extra" content becoming "ads" content.
Well, if you've got Prime that looks like a win right?
WON'T LAST.
I fully expect the Prime "free / included" content pile to shrink, and more and more to become "ads" (or choice of "ads" or "pay to rent").
C'est la vie. I care not (much) - my profits on Amazon shares will keep me in movie viewing for longer than I am likely to live. Still wish I'd bet the farm/house when I bought instead of the few grand I had spare, but hindsight is 20/20 investing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 22 2022, @07:59PM (1 child)
I'm sorry, I admit it, I rewatched Babylon 5 on IMDbTV (within Prime) and it spews ads at you. Weird that they think someone watching Babylon 5 gives a shit about Stephen Fry's podcast about how the brain works but due to my use of adblockers (like pihole) they just had that one ad on repeat. It was sort of like Japanese water torture by the end.
Still, at least I got to see Babylon 5 again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 23 2022, @12:56AM
So what did you think of Stephen Fry's podcast??
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 22 2022, @08:42PM
Any White person who funds the anti-white jews at netflix or disney is committing a race crime. Justice is coming! Get on the White side while you still can.
(Score: 2) by RedGreen on Friday April 22 2022, @09:01PM
for the win. A nice bonus point is if they had stupid adds when they were running on a streaming site they are removed before upload. I tried to watch that garbage on Amazon with a free prime account just over Christmas last year, the constant Ads turned me off and cost them that subscription being allowed to roll over into a paying account. And that disconnect they do at random seemingly stopping the stream with something to click on to continue watching that more than pissed me off as well.
Those people are not attacking Tesla dealerships. They are tourists showing love. I learned that on Jan. 6, 2021.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Saturday April 23 2022, @03:03AM
There ain't no such thing as a permanently ad-free media platform. It has literally never happened. Sooner or later, some executive says "Hey, we could sell ads, make some more money, and think about what we could do with all that cash." And supposedly ad-free services like PBS aren't immune - why do you think major corporations are so keen to "donate" substantial sums of cash and are eager to ensure that they're listed as sponsors at the end of the program? You might think that you avoid the ad breaks so you're immune, but you'd be wrong, because corporations pay good money to have their products mentioned or used in the middle of a program segment. Like, remember not that long ago when every late-night host was constantly making jokes about Peletons like nobody had exercise bikes before then? What do you think that was, really?
That's going to be the way of things so long as money makes the world go round.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by looorg on Saturday April 23 2022, @09:49AM
Not sure a compliment in the subscriber structure of ads will do much for them. Eventually you'll just pay for not having as many ads or the right ads. Just watch "normal" tv how many ads they creep in there now. Banners, bottom banners, popups etc.
Didn't Netflix start out as a mail dvd company? Send movies discs via post, get back, send more etc. Then revamped into a service explicitly for "quality" programming without ads. Now they want to bring in the ads?
They seem to have adapted the usual tv-entertainment logic of creating lots of shows and see what sticks and what doesn't instantly stick gets cancelled or ended. Not sure that is quality programming then.
They are also searching the world for shows to subtitle and put on the service. If you are fine with subtitles and people speaking languages you don't understand there are some interesting things there. I have seen a few french and spanish shows that was good. But once you have seen them you have seen them.
So once you are done why sub? I have seen the show, I don't plan to watch them again.
Without a new megahit show ala Game of Thrones etc it's probably not a surprise they are starting to fall in the subs.
Also there is now, compared to the start, to much competition starting to kick in. To many services that have like one or two show each. Each pulling people around. So they might sub for the next great show but once done there is no reason to stick around. It might not matter much they have an archive of movies and tv-shows going back eons. It's not really a seller once you seen them once.