I was kicking back last Thursday night watching whatever Marvel trash Disney spat out that week when it hit me: how did we get here? Half a minute into my chillax post-work unwind sesh, some car insurance rep decided they’d hijack my evening with their tin-foil-hat-wearing finance advert. Bloody car insurance ads!
I’m paying for this service!
It’s like being charged for entry to a restaurant and then having the waiter wander over every ten minutes to tell you about the specials down the chip shop next door. “I know what you’re thinking,” I hear you cry.
“Well, Noah goofball, clearly you somehow signed up for the adverts option when you subscribed.” Guilty as charged, my Panda-monium watching friends, I am currently signed up to Disney’s Standard with Ads plan which, at £4.99 a month, is apparently the gold standard these days. No, what’s been getting up my nose recently is why this plan exists at all. Go on, take five seconds to think about it with me.
I am PAYING MONEY. Real actual money. Five quid a month almost – sixty smackers a year!
– for the privilege of watching adverts! Come off it when you really think about it. Subscription services were glorious in their simplicity.
Free channels have adverts. Paid channels don’t. Want ITV?
Cool but you’ll have to sit through Sky Ocean Rescue every fifteen minutes shouting about how washing powders are BAD FOR TREES. Want the BBC? Pay your licence fee, Bob’s your uncle.
It’s clean. It’s comprehensible. Everyone knows where they stand.
And yet streaming channels have managed to convince the entire population of Britain that there’s some magical happy medium out there where spending money and watching adverts is not just acceptable, but somehow actually offers better value for money than going advert-free. They’ve gaslit an entire generation into thinking paying for the privilege of being advertised to doesn’t feel like robbery. Sure, I noticed it a little when my mate Dave told me he was “saving money” by downgrading to Netflix’s adverts option at £5.99 a month.
Forgetting the fact that he was paying over SIX QUID A MONTH TO WATCH ADVERTS you really do have to ask – what took him so long?! Half a decade ago that same Dave sat outside my flat refusing to come in for twenty minutes because he’d landed on a YouTube advert and was loudly complaining how adverts were “killing the internet”. Yet here we are, Netflix bully-boy into shelling out six dollars a month to watch adverts.
Madness. What gets me is how they’ve marketed the whole thing. It’s never positioned as – “Look, we know our service was great, but now we’re going to ruin it by adding adverts whilst still taking your money.”
NO.
Far too honest for that. Instead it’s all “choice” this and “flexibility” that and “we want to make our programmes more accessible to as many people as possible.” Wrap enough corporate guff around it and suddenly it’s not charging people money for a worse service, it’s customer-first thinking. Let’s use Disney as an example.
They offer a Standard with Ads option at £4.99 a month. Lovely stuff. Want to go ad-free?
That’s £8.99 a month. Premium? That’ll be £12.99…
Take a second and look at that pricing structure.
Try and convince me that from a consumer perspective that actually makes sense. Five quid a month to watch adverts. If you’re unhappy watching adverts whilst using a service you’re already paying for, that’ll be another four pounds on top.
Extortion. Pure and simple. Pay us protection money or we’ll kneecap your evenings with a barrage of advertising none of us asked for.
Scumbags. The beauty of it is how they justify it though. “Oh but having adverts allows us to keep costs down for consumers.” Rubbish.
Netflix were already profitable pre adverts. Disney doesn’t need adverts. THEY OWN HALF THE FILM INDUSTRY AND RUN THEME PARKS WHERE THEY TAKE YOUR MONEY AND GIVE YOU NOTHING BACK IN RETURN.
This isn’t about keeping costs down for customers. This is about seeing how much money they can wring out of you. Especially when you compare it to what we’ve got here in the UK.
BBC iPlayer: pay your licence fee, no adverts. ITV Hub: free watching with adverts, pay a small sum to remove them. Straightforward choices where paying more money improves your experience rather than simply not being terrible.
Yet here we are, lauded by the government and populace alike for how “transparent” our pricing models are when everything Joe’s decided streaming channels can chuck adverts on in the knowledge we’ve already been trained to accept this stuff. Let’s look at Sky TV, who’ve been strong-arming us viewers for decades. Pay somewhere between £50 and £100 a month and you’ll STILL get adverts.
Doesn’t matter how much you pay, you’re still getting shouted at about DFS sales and life insurance every time you sit down to watch TV like some sort of premiere experience. What decade are we still living in where “premium” TV means adverts? We’ve been so brainwashed into accepting this rubbish that it’s Stockholm syndrome for goodness sake.
Sit down to watch some telly on your subscription box and without thinking, you’ll just assume you’ll get adverts. Don’t pay more money? Prepare yourself for a cascade of society-numbing marketing campaigns that’ll have you reaching for the relaxant medications when your done.
It’s not just TV either. Half an hour ago I walked out of the cinema having watched Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse 3000. I paid £15 to get in!
Sat there for two hours watching the film, rubbish adverts about spoons before watching the actual film I came to see. THEN, another twenty minutes of actual adverts. Not trailers.
Proper PAID FOR ADVERTS. God damn it did that annoy me. I’d paid £15 just to get into the cinema.
Another ten quid on popcorn to get back – and suddenly I’d spent £25 on an afternoon at the movies. But let’s not forget the TWO BLOODY HOURS OF ADVERTS that I watched before watching Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse 3000. If I’d stayed at home and watched ITV I would’ve had less adverts than I had at the cinema.
It makes no sense. Absolutely zero. Yet there we were, a packed cinema watching almost a hour’s worth of adverts that SOMEONE somewhere decided to PAID TO HAVE US WATCH BEFORE WATCHING THE FILM.
It’s illegal how many adverts they shoehorn into that hour and twenty minutes. Why does cinema have to be like this? Who asked for this shit?
Circling back to the point I think – streaming channels have been sneaky about getting us to accept adverts as the norm. They don’t just introduce adverts and go “enjoy folks”. Nay, oh no they launch their services at reasonably cheap price points with zero adverts, build up a customer base and THEN introduce ads-as-an-option months or years later.
Suddenly your affordable service becomes the expensive option and your premium service becomes MORE expensive than it already was but with shiny new benefits and accolades to make you think you’re upgrading rather than staying the same. It’s marketing bonafides, psychology evil style. Convinces you to accept advertising as standard whilst thanking them on bended knee for removing them on “premium” packages.
No, the absolutely vile part of this whole thing is what sodding Amazon decided to do. Prime Video, lads and ladies. They’ve actually managed to find a way to make me feel bad about the service I’ve already been paying for joylessly every month for the best part of a decade.
You pay for Amazon Prime. Doesn’t matter why, you could’ve just signed up for the delivery options but now you’ve got access to Prime Video as a nice little bonus. It’s been that way for YEARS.
You paid your monthly Amazon fee, watched programmes without adverts. Easy. THEN they decide to slowly roll out adverts to existing customers who are PAYING MONTHLY FOR THE SERVICE YOU ALREADY PROVIDE.
Oh no, they won’t just “enable adverts”. That would be reasonable. No, if you want us to STOP showing you adverts, that’ll be an extra £2.99 a month on top of your existing subscription fee.
What a bunch of disgusting, rotten excrescences the human race. Look, don’t frame it like “we’re telling you you’re getting a worse service in order to extort more money out of you”. Frame it with “helping us invest in even more banging content”, “this was a massive decision for us” and my personal favourite “offers the greatest choice for customers”.
Did you know that over 90% of UK Prime Video customers are currently on the default ad-supported plan with a measly 3% having paid to remove ads completely? Choice my arse. Amazon basically blackmailed their existing paying customers.
They know that yes, people have Prime subscriptions but they’re not subscribed just for the joy of Prime Video. They need the subscriptions for other areas of the business too so they could implement this knowing that most people wouldn’t just cancel their Amazon subscriptions over it. Subscription slavery, I’m telling you.
Truth be told I’m making a stand where I can. Dropping ad-supported plans where viable. Downgrading where possible.
Taking my custom back to loving what we have available to us in the UK. BBC iPlayer is a shining example of how it should be done. One payment.
Everything you can think of goes on there. No messing about, no “lets lure you into our great great service until you’re paying for premium then find a shitload of reasons why you need to spend more money”
Last week I enjoyed an advert-break ITV drama because I wasn’t paying anything. The adverts were the price of admission.
You’re not telling me I’m getting some sort of premium experience while also patronising me with a constant stream of adverts that I didn’t ask for OR PAY FOR. That right there is the problem with this entire model. It’s not the money.
It’s not even the adverts. It’s the lies. We’ve been sold a pup that paying for a service also now INCLUDES being sold to.
Marketing to me has become more aggressive for paying than it ever was when I was watching adverts-full television for free. When did we accept that paying for something no longer gives you access to that thing without paying more on top? I didn’t sign up for this when we agreed to start paying for Netflix and am rather sick of being preached at about how I’m “too demanding” to watch TV without paying more on top.
Want to watch TV with adverts? Fine!
Enjoy!
Don’t pay for Netflix then – sit through adverts every ten minutes on YouTube instead! Watch TV without adverts? Pay your licence fee like a good British citizen!
It’s not too much to ask that when I pay for something I get what I pay for without ALSO being sold stuff as a revenue target. Full stop.
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