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Comment by btown | Hacker News Reader

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."

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> 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".

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> "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.

They're also experimenting with a free tier:

https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/09/21/netflix-introduces-...

> 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.

> 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+.)

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