4 ms·

This definitely happened for cable TV and satellite radio— both started life as a paid, ad-free alternative, but the promise of a premium market that moneyed in

This definitely happened for cable TV and satellite radio— both started life as a paid, ad-free alternative, but the promise of a premium market that moneyed individuals had paid to escape to was just too enticing. To a lesser extent you see it with magazines too, especially in the fashion space, where brands don't want to be in a "free" magazine, so the magazine has to charge a cover price, but they practically give away subscriptions since the cover price is not where they're making money.

btown 5y ago
And even for streaming services, the rationale is "we can still call it ad-free, if the only preroll ads we run are for our own shows!" - which doesn't make them any less an advertisement! If anything, it's the most measurable of (non-interactive) video ads, since the viewer's future engagement with the advertised show (correcting for the baseline expected viewership among subscribers not shown that ad) can be attributed to the advertisement itself. And if retention can then be attributed to engagement, there's a monetary value for that ad space, which goes back to the grandparent post's sentiment: "someone will pay more to put an ad there."
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  > And even for streaming services, the rationale is "we can still call it ad-free, if the only preroll ads we run are for our own shows!" - which doesn't make them any less an advertisement! I don't think I can agree with this. While I don't like pre-roll mini-trailers (or even full trailers), the fact that I've chosen to pay for the service is a pretty strong hint that I'd like to know what offerings they have. The obvious alternative is to provide me with good discovery tools so that I never miss anything myself. I prefer that, but I don't think that the pre-rolls really violate a "no advertising" model. It's certainly better than NPR/PBS's interpretation of "no advertising", which I was told in the 90s is essentially just "no quality adjectives".
  - AJ007 5y ago
    What you see over time is that as products mature, they add advertising and then saturate it. The reason is filling your product with ads kills retention, so you can’t do this early on. The interesting part to this is that once the competition is heavily saturated with ads, having no ads gives you a distinctive edge over them. The thing that interests me the most is how ads can significantly degrade the quality of the product itself. This is really apparent with Amazon, where their ad platform not only pushed up the visibility of very low quality products but also made their seller ecosystem dependent on them. Amazon’s search results are their content, which are now ads. In order to outbid competitors, you need to increase your margins, which you do by selling a shittier product. I suspect we will see a similar thing happen to Apple’s App Store over time.
    - JadeNB 5y ago
      > I suspect we will see a similar thing happen to Apple’s App Store over time. Already the terrible curation makes it hard to find any quality content in Apple's App Store. (I'll never understand why it's so hard to get a search for the exact name of an app to return that app first.) I shudder to imagine how bad it could be if they were incentivised to make it bad.
      - btown 5y ago
        I've always suspected, but never can confirm, that this incentivization is already the case: the reason why app search seems so bad is because revenue trumps any other aspect of relevance, and spammy apps generate more revenue out of unsuspecting users.
        JadeNB 5y ago
        I thought the same as I was typing it, but I was going for "never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence". It wasn't that Apple App Store search quality gradually declined, as you would expect from a slide towards evil; as far as I know, it was terrible right out of the gate.
- slacka 5y ago
  > streaming services, the rationale is "we can still call it ad-free, if the only preroll ads we run are for our own shows!" At least on my services, they are just short trailers, never annoying ads like Progressive's. And if I'm not interested, there's always a Skip button. I'm paying for this service, I want to know what upcoming shows are coming. I don't mind if this helps with their internal metrics. Now I do object to the actual 5-10 min of ads I subjected to in the movie theater.
  - JadeNB 5y ago
    > At least on my services, they are just short trailers, never annoying ads like Progressive's. And if I'm not interested, there's always a Skip button. I'm paying for this service, I want to know what upcoming shows are coming. I don't mind if this helps with their internal metrics. Amazon Prime paid channel subscriptions don't let you skip the previews for that channel. (At least, that is true for Paramount+.)
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  > "we can still call it ad-free, if the only preroll ads we run are for our own shows!" Preroll ads are only there because they haven't found advertisers willing to pay them enough yet. It does mean they have the infrastructure there, waiting and ready, and ad / data engineers getting data from ad viewership and rudimentary conversion numbers, which they can then use to sell ads. It'll be there soon.
  - mikepurvis 5y ago
    They're also experimenting with a free tier: https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/09/21/netflix-introduces-free-tier-but-you-probably-cant-sign-up-for-it/ https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/09/21/netflix-introduces-...
vel0city 5y ago
> This definitely happened for cable TV I keep seeing this, but in the US this isn't really true. Cable TV was originally sold as a way to get all the surrounding broadcast TV stations in to your home with near perfect signal quality without needing an antenna. This meant you would get all the ads those broadcast networks aired. Sure, cable networks did not inject additional ads, but there were still ads. It took a while before premium cable-only channels arrived, some of which touted being ad-free. But even then many of those premium channels had advertising from the beginning. Ads were on cable TV since the get go.
- rbobby 5y ago
  ... and more channels. In the dawn of time, also known as my childhood, there were 2 channels. Then 3. TV's had dials and it was my job, like so many other youngest children, to turn them. Then cable came and there were a lot of channels. So many channels you needed the newspaper's TV schedule to figure out what to watch. No more flipping between 2 or 3 channels hoping for something better. Planned viewing had arrived. No more sitting by the TV, spinning through channels, and getting clouted for spinning to fast because you'll break it! And finally, freeing children everywhere from the tyranny of the dial, remote control! No longer chained to the TV, children could return to lounging on the comfy family room chesterfields. Never forget that cable, and the TV remotes it spawned, freed millions of children from spinning TV dials!
  - croutonwagon 5y ago
    I remember when we got a fancy TV with a…wired…remote. It was amazing. Of course the wire was about 2 feet too short. So it was still my job to sit on the floor and in the middle of the room to be the “wireless” portion of the remote. But still, was so much better than having to walk up every 5 minutes (my dad loved making me flip channels during commercials, even though often commercials were often synced between abc, nbc, and cbs). But then came PBS
    - rbobby 5y ago
      > So it was still my job to sit on the floor and in the middle of the room to be the “wireless” portion of the remote Those were the days (the archie bunker theme) :)
AniseAbyss 5y ago
And it didn't happen with Netflix. There's a market for subscriptions. Unfortunately you have to provide a really fucking great product. And most of these companies don't.
- LinAGKar 5y ago
  Not yet, but some other streaming services have added ads to the paid service, and made the ad-free version more expensive (Hulu, HBO, C More)

btown 5y ago

And even for streaming services, the rationale is "we can still call it ad-free, if the only preroll ads we run are for our own shows!" - which doesn't make them any less an advertisement! If anything, it's the most measurable of (non-interactive) video ads, since the viewer's future engagement with the advertised show (correcting for the baseline expected viewership among subscribers not shown that ad) can be attributed to the advertisement itself. And if retention can then be attributed to engagement, there's a monetary value for that ad space, which goes back to the grandparent post's sentiment: "someone will pay more to put an ad there."

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
> And even for streaming services, the rationale is "we can still call it ad-free, if the only preroll ads we run are for our own shows!" - which doesn't make them any less an advertisement! I don't think I can agree with this. While I don't like pre-roll mini-trailers (or even full trailers), the fact that I've chosen to pay for the service is a pretty strong hint that I'd like to know what offerings they have. The obvious alternative is to provide me with good discovery tools so that I never miss anything myself. I prefer that, but I don't think that the pre-rolls really violate a "no advertising" model. It's certainly better than NPR/PBS's interpretation of "no advertising", which I was told in the 90s is essentially just "no quality adjectives".
- AJ007 5y ago
  What you see over time is that as products mature, they add advertising and then saturate it. The reason is filling your product with ads kills retention, so you can’t do this early on. The interesting part to this is that once the competition is heavily saturated with ads, having no ads gives you a distinctive edge over them. The thing that interests me the most is how ads can significantly degrade the quality of the product itself. This is really apparent with Amazon, where their ad platform not only pushed up the visibility of very low quality products but also made their seller ecosystem dependent on them. Amazon’s search results are their content, which are now ads. In order to outbid competitors, you need to increase your margins, which you do by selling a shittier product. I suspect we will see a similar thing happen to Apple’s App Store over time.
  - JadeNB 5y ago
    > I suspect we will see a similar thing happen to Apple’s App Store over time. Already the terrible curation makes it hard to find any quality content in Apple's App Store. (I'll never understand why it's so hard to get a search for the exact name of an app to return that app first.) I shudder to imagine how bad it could be if they were incentivised to make it bad.
    - btown 5y ago
      I've always suspected, but never can confirm, that this incentivization is already the case: the reason why app search seems so bad is because revenue trumps any other aspect of relevance, and spammy apps generate more revenue out of unsuspecting users.
      - JadeNB 5y ago
        I thought the same as I was typing it, but I was going for "never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence". It wasn't that Apple App Store search quality gradually declined, as you would expect from a slide towards evil; as far as I know, it was terrible right out of the gate.
slacka 5y ago
> streaming services, the rationale is "we can still call it ad-free, if the only preroll ads we run are for our own shows!" At least on my services, they are just short trailers, never annoying ads like Progressive's. And if I'm not interested, there's always a Skip button. I'm paying for this service, I want to know what upcoming shows are coming. I don't mind if this helps with their internal metrics. Now I do object to the actual 5-10 min of ads I subjected to in the movie theater.
- JadeNB 5y ago
  > At least on my services, they are just short trailers, never annoying ads like Progressive's. And if I'm not interested, there's always a Skip button. I'm paying for this service, I want to know what upcoming shows are coming. I don't mind if this helps with their internal metrics. Amazon Prime paid channel subscriptions don't let you skip the previews for that channel. (At least, that is true for Paramount+.)
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
> "we can still call it ad-free, if the only preroll ads we run are for our own shows!" Preroll ads are only there because they haven't found advertisers willing to pay them enough yet. It does mean they have the infrastructure there, waiting and ready, and ad / data engineers getting data from ad viewership and rudimentary conversion numbers, which they can then use to sell ads. It'll be there soon.
- mikepurvis 5y ago
  They're also experimenting with a free tier: https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/09/21/netflix-introduces-free-tier-but-you-probably-cant-sign-up-for-it/ https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/09/21/netflix-introduces-...

vel0city 5y ago

> This definitely happened for cable TV I keep seeing this, but in the US this isn't really true. Cable TV was originally sold as a way to get all the surrounding broadcast TV stations in to your home with near perfect signal quality without needing an antenna. This meant you would get all the ads those broadcast networks aired. Sure, cable networks did not inject additional ads, but there were still ads. It took a while before premium cable-only channels arrived, some of which touted being ad-free. But even then many of those premium channels had advertising from the beginning. Ads were on cable TV since the get go.

rbobby 5y ago
... and more channels. In the dawn of time, also known as my childhood, there were 2 channels. Then 3. TV's had dials and it was my job, like so many other youngest children, to turn them. Then cable came and there were a lot of channels. So many channels you needed the newspaper's TV schedule to figure out what to watch. No more flipping between 2 or 3 channels hoping for something better. Planned viewing had arrived. No more sitting by the TV, spinning through channels, and getting clouted for spinning to fast because you'll break it! And finally, freeing children everywhere from the tyranny of the dial, remote control! No longer chained to the TV, children could return to lounging on the comfy family room chesterfields. Never forget that cable, and the TV remotes it spawned, freed millions of children from spinning TV dials!
- croutonwagon 5y ago
  I remember when we got a fancy TV with a…wired…remote. It was amazing. Of course the wire was about 2 feet too short. So it was still my job to sit on the floor and in the middle of the room to be the “wireless” portion of the remote. But still, was so much better than having to walk up every 5 minutes (my dad loved making me flip channels during commercials, even though often commercials were often synced between abc, nbc, and cbs). But then came PBS
  - rbobby 5y ago
    > So it was still my job to sit on the floor and in the middle of the room to be the “wireless” portion of the remote Those were the days (the archie bunker theme) :)

AniseAbyss 5y ago

And it didn't happen with Netflix. There's a market for subscriptions. Unfortunately you have to provide a really fucking great product. And most of these companies don't.

LinAGKar 5y ago
Not yet, but some other streaming services have added ads to the paid service, and made the ad-free version more expensive (Hulu, HBO, C More)