Hell has frozen over. That month of Sundays has come to pass. A flock of winged pigs has just flown casually past your window. Yes, the unlikely has happened: Netflix has introduced adverts to its platform.
It’s worth remarking on how unlikely this development is. Netflix, after all, was the platform that would break those old ways of doing things. As the leader of the streaming revolution, it has always positioned itself in opposition to the broadcast model with its rigid schedules and lengthy commercial breaks. Netflix has always given you what you wanted, when you wanted it, with no interruptions. Until now, that is.
A couple of qualifiers here: it’s unlikely that you’ll actually encounter any of these dreaded ads, at least in the short term. Netflix are only including them in its “Basic with ads” tier, a newly launched, cheaper version of the platform that will be missing a number of the shows freely available on what we’ll call Cool Original Netflix, including The Crown and Cobra Kai. For everyone else it will be ad-free business as usual. And the streaming service is hardly alone in reluctantly embracing the lure of advertising money: Now quietly added them a couple of years back, Disney+ is introducing them, and of course most of the UK’s nominally free streaming services (All 4, ITV Hub et al) rely heavily on them for their income. (There are premium ad-free versions of many of the streaming services, for those who detest ads enough to pay a little extra for their absence).
But still, this seems like a watershed moment. Netflix was the place you went to avoid life insurance spots or pleading campaigns to save the pandas. It’s ad-lessness is baked into its own shows, which tend to lack the structure and rhythms of broadcast series, with their built-in mini-cliffhangers to lure you back after the break. Can you imagine a slow-burning episode of Mindhunter suddenly being interrupted by Santa’s Coca-Cola lorry? It doesn’t smell right, does it?
Netflix’s entrance into the ad game comes at a curious moment: we’ve never been more assailed by adverts – on websites, television, billboards and, at some point soon, the actual night sky – but at same time less seduced by them. With the exception of the Super Bowl adverts or the John Lewis Christmas spot (and even that tradition, I’d argue, has lost some of its clout in recent years), TV adverts don’t tend to culturally resonate like they used to. It’s hard to imagine people actively tuning in for an advert in the way that 23 million did for the conclusion of Renault’s Papa and Nicole ads (a case in point: Renault actually revived the storyline this year and nobody noticed). There’s an attention deficit that its near impossible for TV ads to overcome; these days most of us spend our ad breaks fixated on our phones rather than the other screen in front of us.
So it will be interesting to see how Netflix’s ad gambit goes, and how readily they’ll embrace this new age. It is striking that where other companies have shunted ads into their standard tier offering and created a new premium tier for those who don’t want them, Netflix have kept ads off their standard tier ad-free and created a budget tier below it. That would suggest that the company are cautious of scaring off an audience who consider their platform a blissful binge-watching space free from interruptions.
Yet this is a difficult moment for Netflix, struggling as they are with subscription numbers, a dipping share price and intensified competition from other streamers. They’re not in a position to wave away sources of revenue – so you might want to get used to the idea of red trucks and marketing meerkats intruding on your favourite shows very soon.
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