Hacker News Reader

Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for those links. This indicates that (1) users consistently undervalue their ad data, or (2) the ad data market is misfunctioning (since so many of these companies go on to spend billions on advertising their own unprofitable services). Or both!

The entire situation is ridiculous. We’ve somehow managed to build an even more exploitative user-service relationship than Cable TV.

View on HN

People still paid for Cable TV and got ads too. And I'd go crazy if I had multiple in a row Cable TV ads on youtube like it is on TV without the option to upgrade to premium.

At first Cable TV networks had little advertising. It seems to be a natural progression of all mass-media to eventually enshittify. It's not if, it's just when?

> At first Cable TV didn't have any ads.

100% non-factual. Cable had ads from day one, and the majority of cable-only TV channels had ads from their first day of programming.

Likely fewer ads at the beginning, and then gradually more with time. Sorry. I'll edit my post.

https://www.nytimes.com/1981/01/11/us/advertisers-look-close...

The 10x of revenue increase projection in five years is potentially due to the fact cable subscribership increased 2x in those 5 years, several more cable-only channels that came out, and the market for cable advertising became more proven thus the perceived value of each ad increased. It doesn't require there to be considerably more ads shown per hour of television. Your article isn't exactly strongly supporting your claims as well as you might think it does.

But I do agree, over the years there has been more advertisements per hour of television.

ads have two functions: to drive more traffic, and to preserve mindshare for existing brands. Coke is not buying ads because you don't know what Coke is, Coke is buying ads so that Pepsi or somebody else's ad doesn't take your mindshare away.

Right, but neither of these functions explains the circularity: if Netflix loses money on every paying subscriber versus the "ad watching sucker" demographic, why spend billions of dollars a year[1] advertising your paid plans?

(Maybe I'm being too literal here -- it'd be fair to argue that Netflix mostly just advertises their shows, not the plans themselves directly.)

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/688525/netflix-ad-expens...

Where do they say they lose money on ad free paying subs? Maybe they make less profit than on free ad users.

Sorry, bad phrasing -- they don't lose money in an absolute sense, but make less on full-paying users than ad-watching ones.

media is always about network effects. you want to talk to your friends about big shows. that only works if they watch the big shows, ad-free or not.

Some advertising of the ad-free paid plans is good because it takes the segment of customers who will not tolerate ads and gives them an option, rather than lose them.

Reminds me of the mindblowing album Dispepsi by Negativland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8S3xlIXObA

Reply on news.ycombinator.com