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Everyone's experience changes when a company begins to consider ad revenue. How those changes shake out is hard to predict. It's not a stretch to suggest that
by buffington 5y ago
Everyone's experience changes when a company begins to consider ad revenue.
How those changes shake out is hard to predict. It's not a stretch to suggest that even little things change for everyone though. Adding ad revenue changes how a company thinks about nearly everything, whether they're aware of it or not, and ultimately the end user suffers.
For example, Netflix would likely start trying to tweak content discovery in a way that benefits advertisers. Rather than show me content that matches my historical interests, they show me content that optimizes ad revenue as well. It's unlikely they'd maintain two different "ad-free" and "ad-full" recommendation algorithms.
Motivated by pressure from advertisers, Netflix might be less inclined to produce or provide content that made advertisers uncomfortable or benefitted an advertiser's competitors.
When producing content, they now have two bosses: subscribers, and advertisers. Both have entirely different expectations. Those expectations push Netflix into making compromises, and rarely do those compromises produce outcomes that are better than if they only focused on making one side happy.
- zck 5y agoThis is a fair critique! It's just more nuanced than "I don't want to watch shows with ads".
- formerkrogeremp 5y agoAnd we'll being going to piracy if we had to watch ads on top of paying a monthly fee. This would be ridiculous. There's advertising almost everywhere else. Why do we need more advertising?
- blooalien 5y agoPretty sure the advertising industry won't be happy until every human on the planet is required by law to tolerate 24/7 advertising beamed directly into their brains.
- jeegsy 5y ago> It's just more nuanced than "I don't want to watch shows with ads". Nevertheless valid I think. In subscribing to Netflix (or continuing to do so in my case) the absence of ads has to be one of the considerations.
- c0nducktr 5y agoI'd wager most people here are aware of what happens when advertising enters the conversation.
- mr3martinis 5y agoWell put. Not to mention that once the platform and business support ads, it's a slippery slope. No ads on the top tier quickly becomes "We'll just show limited ads to the top tier to make up this quarter's shortfall," and so on from there.
- manmal 5y agoJust adding one thing: Some Netflix productions already contain product placements. The Tinder Swindler is a giant Google + Apple ad.
- maguay 5y agoMany Korean series on Netflix (including ones branded as Netflix Originals, though they may only show that outside of their home region) that are set in the modern day include product placement, as of course do plenty of Hollywood feature films included on Netflix. Now, presumably, Netflix doesn't take a cut of those today. Wouldn't be a stretch to imagine using product placement to offset the cost of producing Netflix Originals in the future, though.