It’s a good question whether we’ll see Netflix ads in 2022 or 2023. In an investors earnings call for Q1 2022, the company’s co-CEO Reed Hastings has suggested that the streaming service will be looking into creating a new ad-supported tier. This is despite him admitting in the past that he admires the simplicity of the one-size-fits-all price model for Netflix and doesn’t want to include advertising at all.
Is Netflix adding ads?
Put simply, yes. As to when that will be, that’s uncertain, but it will likely be within the next two years. During the earnings call (posted above from YouTube), Hastings offered a very wide release window for a tier that he believes “advertising-tolerant” consumers would be interested in:
“One way to increase the price spread is advertising on low-end plans and to have lower prices with advertising… Allowing consumers who would like to have a lower price and are advertising-tolerant get what they want makes a lot of sense. So, that’s something we’re looking at now, we’re trying to figure out over the next year or two.”
To be clear, Netflix will still offer the ad-free options that currently exist. However, the company also stated in the earnings call that there might be some additional fees for those who have been sharing their accounts with others.
Both this aggressive crackdown on password-sharing and the addition of an ad-supported tier at a lower cost are due to the streaming service’s overall loss of about 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter of 2022. While a part of this stems from the service cutting off Russia from the platform because of its invasion of Ukraine, Netflix hasn’t seen an overall loss in subscribers during a quarter for about a decade.
That aside, the streaming service will essentially be doing what Hulu has already done, just in the opposite direction. Hulu began as an ad-supported streaming platform before adding an ad-free tier in 2015. With Netflix admitting that there are numerous streaming competitors — Disney+, Hulu, Apple TV+, Paramount+, just to name a few — the company hopes that these new measures will help keep the service at the top of the heap.
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