Netflix, once a pioneer of ad-free viewing that offered a break from traditional TV norms, is now contemplating launching free ad-supported versions of its service in markets like Europe and Asia, Bloomberg reported.
The plans to offer a free ad-supported tier, albeit in select markets, suggests that pivot towards monetizing user data, in other words — making users and not the extensive library of award-winning shows a product, might be well in the pipeline.
Tech bros reinvent broadcast TV.
Told people this years ago when pewdie pie became a millionaire selling ads. Like that was the time to wake up and hate every single one of these content creators for selling out and making the internet the hellscape this is. But no we Revere and emulate these people.
This is a bit unnecessarily tough on independent content creators… what exactly do you expect them to do? Make no money from their content? How would they be able to make a living?
I’m a big fan of Patreon.
Sure, Patreon is great, but Patreon alone is not enough for most creators to make a living, considering how hard it is to get people to commit to monthly subscriptions.
But why do they need to make a living creating content.
We should go back to hobbyist sharing videos of their hobby and interest for the love of it instead of a guy trying to make money by jumping into trendy hobbies and creating bland generic content until the algorithm picks them.
It would reduce so much noise online and the stuff we would be left with would be people who have the best content. It would eliminate the drama and toxic crap for views.
There are certainly hobbyists making good content. Most of the great content is from people making a living off it. They have time and resources to devote to doing deep dives into subjects that hobbyists just generally don’t. The bigger problem as far as filling the internet with crap goes is all the react content and people making clips of other people’s stuff that adds nothing to it and whatever YouTube shorts are supposed to be.
Patreon alone is not enough for most creators to make a living
I’ve seen a number of content creators argue otherwise. From the “Hello from the Magic Tavern” sketch comedy group to the “Scenes from the Multiverse” Cartoonist to the various musicians cranking out indie tunes on Bandcamp, the refrain I consistently here is that direct patronage offers significantly better returns than ad-supported payments on bigger media platforms.
Indie creators generally have an easier time of securing monthly subscriptions because they’re more boutique and have closer connections to the audience. And you don’t need an enormous audience to bring in a reliable income. While YouTubers need to get into the hundreds of thousands of subscribers to see any kind of productive ROI, Patreon artists can justify the expense of their work on an audience in the hundreds. They can go entirely indie with an audience in the thousands.
Most creators can’t afford to go fully indie, but the margins are so much better relative to the audience size with direct payments. Even just $2/viewer/episode pays vastly more than what a streaming service offers.
Would you put blame on doctors for contributing to the opioid?
I see it the same. Every one bares responsibility. And even though a big chunk is on the pharma and media companies. There is still the pusher
For me, it depends on what they’re promoting. If it’s some crappy mobile game or crypto, I’m out. But I’m fine with the usual shit like energy drinks or VPNs. Like, those things usually have a serious business behind them, even if they might be useless for the vast majority of viewers.
Yep. I don’t hate youtubers for doing ads. Everyone needs to make money. Just skip the ads.
Except for Ryan George because he actually makes his funny as fuck.
If Netflix ads were just energy drinks and VPN then you’re cool with them adding these tiers?
Honest to god question. How many hours a day are you OK being spent on being sold something. What is your ratio of content to ads.
That’s your time by the way. My full belief is anyone trying to sell me anything needs to pay me. Not a content creator. That’s my time I barely have any of it to give so when 1 hr out of 3 hrs I got to relax is spent being sold shit I’m pretty pissed.
And it isn’t like I can. Just opt to enjoy ad free content creators. They no longer exist because the ones that monetized it. That’s the part I hate most.
It’s a little different with Netflix, because of what they started out as. With Youtube, I expected to be advertised to from the beginning, you know? I pay for Youtube Premium and use Sponsor Block to support the creators I watch while having a mostly ad free experience. Also, I just trust most of the creators that I watch to have my best interest in mind in terms of what they advertise.
But for Netflix, their whole thing from the beginning was that they were better TV. That’s how they sold it to me. Now they’re slowly losing their point. So I’d definitely not be alright with it if they started showing me ads on top of my subscription fee. Same with Prime Video, because I know they’re experimenting with that.
That’s exactly what I’m saying with it too. All of this started out as a place to share and collaborate and to reject the stuff that made all other industries rotten.
We had something amazing and we let it rot on our watch and that’s something we can’t ever fix but I don’t think we should forget how badly we fucked up. And how we fucked up should be remembered in case we ever get any new frontier.
YouTube never had ads. We all just shared videos. It was a big deal every time they brought it in. Pewdie pi made a fortune and it was all over from there.
Ill never support any of these content creators or buy any subscriptions. None of this should have been monetized. Advertising is out of control and it was already bad before the internet. Some of us are experiencing an ad 24/7 a day now.
Would you put blame on doctors for contributing to the opioid?
I’m gonna assume by “contributing to the opioid” you mean over-prescribing pain medication for the commission? If so, that comparison is so far-fetched that it’s completely meaningless. You’re really going to compare that with independent creators having skippable ad reads that have to be clearly marked as such on content you get for free?
Mind explains what is far fetched about it?
There was an opioid crisis where drug makers sold pills to the public that the public did not need and they used doctors to sell them.
There is an advertising epidemic where industry is working to push ads into every space we listen, look or experience and they are using content creators to justify it
Both have a large well funded industry. Both require an interface between public and the industry to sell their product. Both push products to people who don’t need them by using these interfaces to bullshit, lie and leverage their authority to sell the product. And in one case we blame the interface in the other we say " they aren’t responsible they are just making money" so why?
Who reveres and emulates PewDiePie lol
Too fucking many. But replace him with any of them. Speed, H2, Moist, donkey something. We use to have to walk uphill both ways in the snow to see content.
Like that was the time to wake up and hate every single one of these content creators for selling out
And then what? Stop consuming their content?
Sure, or accept that you participating in that industry will always lead to this stuff.
What do people want here. In what world do you think you can separate the two things. Monetizing content through ads and marketing and a world where ads and marketing are not capitalized on.
We all had to stop this decades ago when it was a tiny little part of the internet. You can’t kill it once its tendrils are in every corner its grown into Fafnir
You all have to get better at listening to the crazy ranting of random strangers with hair triggers and obsess over things you don’t care about. Otherwise the future is bleek
What’s even crazier is kids today will never realize the freedom that the first few decades of the internet was when the topic of information scarcity was supposed to end.
We were all so against the idea that capitalist and opportunistic people could artificially create scarcity to make us all pay more. They did it through monopolies on industry’s that choked out smaller competitors. The internet was a new frontier that was supposed to reject that. We could digitally copy and share everything. Hero’s shot up and built all kinds of amazing tools and things. Then it got popular and we recreated the same scarcity issues within decades. Everything trapped behind walls and monetized. Instead of open courseware at Berkeley we favored monthly subscriptions to udemy.
This is the average 6 year olds dream right now. A life where they can emulate a NASCAR fender and live that twitch life just like their heroes Pewdie and Moist and whatever else. Those kids grow up with that mentality and end up shaping a new generation pulling away from what all this could have been.
Yes
With my NAS, plex and Usenet I reinvented streaming. It’s awesome.
What I fears is that its a matter of time before entertainment industry figures out a way to stop those services. I’ve even begun to see discussions that open source may be struggling to remain relevant. Whose taking over for the power houses from early days. So much talent out there. But I really worry the community will shrink over time because we all raiser a generation on the concept of monetization rather than open collaboration. I look out on the internet and the loudest voices are artists and content creators. Both groups who push the fuck you pay me mentality that I believe was not what we all had originally on the internet and it makes me so worried to think how that will only grow if there is no push back.
Im the one that was paying for Netflix for my family, but the password crack down motivated me to learn how to build a server and go full arrs. They had a good thing going, but now that $26 a month will be used to buy hdds.
There’s no better ad for piracy than the greed of corporations. Don’t let ads shit in your head. They disrespect you, you disrespect them.
I have hardware dedicated to blocking ads on my home network.
That will only go so far unfortunately. And network level ad blocking won’t protect you from their ads if they’re served from the same servers the content is.
uBlock will manage :)
Not when they are part of the same stream
And not when your client is a Netflix app on your smart tv.
Ublock is not network level ad blocking.
But it helps in addition for the annoying stuff that is not possible to filter on the network.
Ok
What hardware do you use? I have a pihole. Unfortunately it doesn’t block ads on Youtube except in the web browser.
For a long time my pihole was able to do it with some regex entries, but Google was pretty persistent about not letting that work, so for Android I just started doing Revanced.
Like you said, the web browser still blocks fine.
“People are taking the piss out of you every day. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.”
Banksy
“Free ad-supported” makes you no different than a hundred other garbage-tier streaming services.
And in 2 years they’ll move to 3 tiers, free with ads, paid with slightly less ads and even more expensive than before but no ads…
And eventually they’ll just pull the no ads version altogether.
Jokes on them - all of my content is both free and ad free. 🏴☠️🦜🏴☠️
Just like cable!
“The enshittifucation will continue until profits improve.” --CEOs of Publicly Traded Companies
It’s almost like all these CEOs and MBAs are just shooting in the dark because of the $$$ in their eyes, but the fact remains that the market is no longer responding favorably to their absolute need for year-over-year growth.
It isn’t? You might be looking at a different market.
If they aren’t going to charge for access otherwise then I don’t think being ad supported is such a bad thing. Much more honest than subscription pricing and ads in my opinion.
yeah, imo it’s either ads or paid. not both. both is scummy
The advertising ouroboros continues to devour itself
They will still be selling user data whether you opt for the ad supported tier or not, so get used to that.
If they haven’t been doing so for at least a decade, I’m sure their shareholders will want to know why not.
My Plex share doesn’t care lol
The way the industry is pulling the screws tighter and tighter is just ugly to watch, and it’s hard not to be caught out.
Isn’t Plex also slowly going down the shitter? Like, with their social features and stuff?
They do keep adding garbage that nobody wants, but the core product still works great. I plan on getting a jellyfin docker running in parallel though so I’m prepared in the event they piss me off too much.
switch to jellyfin
That’s why I’ve been using Emby. Works just fine for free.
Great for piracy!
They want to squeeze out that extra bit of profit and get the users that never subscribed on there so they can boast about improved numbers.
Doesn’t this already exist or did I imagine it?
I thought they introduced it years ago
Edit: oh I read again, this time it’s free
Then:
Pay + adNow:
Free to watch + adsSee, now I’m fine with that. I pay for Netflix and I want what I pay for to stay ad-free. Having an ad-supported tier with no fee in addition to that means that there are options for other people without enshittifying my experience.
That’s a world of difference to what Amazon have done where they’ve shoved ads into the service that I thought I was paying for, and then offered to charge me even more to get my original ad-free service back.
Depends on whether they start making shows with ad breaks in mind. Because the cut where the ad was, while not nearly as annoying as an actual ad, still diminishes the quality of the show imo.
Yeah, it’s the reason I cancelled Amazon the day they announced that, while Netflix shambles on.
still gonna stick to torrents for my media netflix cause i wanna actually have control of them
When my paid service started giving me ads I stopped watching it. I’ve been paying them since before streaming and in the past couple years stopped paying because T-Mobile started paying. When T-Mobile quits paying we’ll close the account.
Obviously the majority of content is not going to be available. It will essentially b a Tubi clone or what Netflix streaming was when they first launched it.
