By: Nick Gambino
As promised, Netflix is doing away with their cheapest ad-free plan and nudging subscribers to pick a new one starting this month.
People started posting on Reddit that they were being prompted to subscribe to a new plan as their current Basic Plan would be phased out by July 13th. This had been announced earlier so it wasn’t a shocker. These subscribers seem to all be in the UK and Canada, but the change is coming to the US. soon.
It’s pretty clear the move is to either have the subscriber pay more money for a higher-tier plan or settle in with the new ad-supported plan. Either way win-win. Well, win-win for Netflix, not necessarily the subscriber. But that’s capitalism for you.
The writing has been on the wall for years that ad-free, subscription-based streaming is a limited model that was eventually going to run out of steam. The tried-and-true model of ad-based revenue was bound to make its way to the top of the mountain. And in this case, the top of the video streaming mountain is Netflix.
The popular streamer added an ad-supported plan in late 2022 for those who are willing to pay less money and spend a few extra minutes watching commercials. There are people like me who would rather walk head on into traffic than spend thirty seconds or more watching an ad. It seems I might be in the minority so this is strictly a me problem.
There are now 40 million subscribers to the ad-supported plan, highlighting what a smart move it was for Netflix to offer this option. That said, we had about seventy years of data to support the brilliance of ad-supported movies and TV, but Netflix always wanted to be known as a disruptor and so they had to disrupt before they could adopt.
