Bill Ackman says that in early 2022, after Pershing Square bought into Netflix (NFLX), he met with the company's management and suggested a cheaper, ad-supported plan. "They said we're never going to do it," he told Shane Parrish on The Knowledge Project in an episode uploaded on Sept. 29. "About three or four weeks later they announced earnings. And if you go back and review the earnings call, management seemed shell-shocked […] They missed the subscriber numbers again […] They talked, 'Well, we're going to have to adapt, we're going to have to launch an advertising model.' Literally three weeks before they said they would never do it."
That is Ackman's account of a private meeting, and Netflix has never confirmed it. The public record around it is not in dispute. On Jan. 21, 2020, co-founder and then-CEO Reed Hastings said during the company's earnings interview that Netflix wanted to be "the safe respite" with "none of the controversy around exploiting users with advertising." The company separately called speculation about an ad-supported plan "completely false." On April 19, 2022, after Netflix reported its first quarterly subscriber decline in more than a decade, Hastings noted that “those who have followed Netflix know that I have been against the complexity of advertising,” then said the company would explore a lower-priced ad tier. The ad plan launched that November.
