zlacker

>>qainsi+(OP)
This seems to be the sad reality of many paid services: paying is not a guarantee of freedom from advertisement, only a temporary respite. Being a paying customer is a very juicy datapoint, one that every one of these streaming companies eventually decides to capitalize on.

>>woodru+Pj
You end up paying in three ways: (1) money (subscription fees), (2) data (you're forced to log in and allow tracking), and (3) the decrease in attention/focus caused by advertising.

All three prices can be ratcheted up over time mostly independently of each other. Price increases in (2) and (3) are largely invisible to the user.

>>ants_e+Up
The problem is that in terms of revenue (2) and (3) are tiny compared to (1) because by tipping your hand that you value your time above a pittance, you reveal yourself to be much less cost sensitive, so they charge you a massive premium.

>>jdewer+uq
This was what I thought too, but ‘ksherlock has provided some links above that suggest the opposite: paid subscribers are less profitable than their ad-viewing counterparts.

>>woodru+vs
This is what I would have guessed, or otherwise it would be hard to explain why e.g. YouTube stuck with a purely ad-driven model for so long. Also subscribers usually get unlimited content for a flat fee whereas ads-based users pay incrementally for bandwidth and resources consumed.

I think it's possibly useful to think of the revenue streams as a form of diversification. For example, there's value in Google diversifying some of their dependence on ad revenue.

>>ants_e+pt
I don't think it's diversification, I think they just have to have the option to point the complainers and regulators at. They don't actually want anyone to use that option any more than they want anyone to use firefox while they pay to keep firefox around.