Netflix Tells Employees Ads May Come by the End of 2022 | Hacker News Reader

Netflix Tells Employees Ads May Come by the End of 2022

nytimes.com

12 pointsel_duderino12 comments

If Ads are not optional I will end my subscription and will do my best to encourage others to do the same. I’m a long time Netflix fan. Please don’t ruin Netflix. Ad free or RIP IMO.

I only pay for Netflix because it is ad free. I would simply go back to torrenting everything and tossing it on a hard drive attached to the tv.

But what if they just added a new tier that was $5 cheaper and you could still keep subscribing to your current tier at the same price with no ads?

Well, that would only mean they raised subscriptions last month to then add a "new" low price with ads. In reality, they increased prices for everyone and added back the original plan with ads.

I'd say my confidence in Netflix would be diminished.

More software than ever for automation at any step of this you choose.

“Lower-priced”? Haha, nope. Anything with ads should be free. The idea of paying—and still being harassed with garbage—is so sociopathically stupid that only a marketer would imagine anyone falling for it. I hope they fail.

And it goes without saying that if ads start showing up in my current plan, I’d drop Netflix that very day.

My overall sense is that people are approaching a breaking point with ads, subs, and overly extractive monetization schemes. I expect more of an attrition situation than an inflection point, but the results—piracy, aggressive ad-blocking, and simply spending less on greedily priced apps and services—will not be pleasant for the marketing and media industries.

Netflix is charging $10 a month at the moment. If it can't generate $10 of revenue per user by showing adverts then what do you expect them to do?

I expect them to not do business that is unprofitable. If they want to show $5 worth of ads a month to a $5 subscription, that's their perogative. But they will show a lot more. I won't be one of the $5 subscribers, because I don't believe I should be paying for a service just to be double dipped and shown ads too. It's why I don't have cable, it's why I don't use Hulu. If $10 a month is not profitable then yeah, Netflix needs to raise prices.

But don't raise prices and give me an inferior, shittier product. I deal with enough of that for shit I can't control.

Even though we use a tier that shouldn't get ads, I'm still debating whether Netflix is worth it any more. I've hardly used it in ages, there's only one or two series that I know on it that's left that I want to finish...

The only thing keeping me as a subscriber is that our immediate family shares it (parents and grown-up children, between four households). If they cracked down on password sharing, I think we'd unsubscribe and nobody would subscribe on their own. So they'd just lose money, because none of us would sign back up individually.

There is no way I wouldn't unsubscribe if this comes to pass. Ridiculous.

I don't love ad supported models but I think this makes a lot of sense, especially given Netflix needs to drive much of their growth outside the US and Europe and places like Africa, LATAM are going to be much more price sensitive (and at least in the case of Africa which I'm a bit more familiar with, consumers will have more time on their hands) although the balance of ads and downloadable content in those markets will be interesting.

Why not just have lower pricing tailored for those more price sensitive markets? It doesn't even make any sense for me to use ads for more price sensitive markets, because surely if they're much less likely to buy the products/services being advertised, then there is way less ad revenue to be made?

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