The streaming wars, which for years resembled a land grab for subscribers willing to pay any price to avoid commercials, have quietly reversed course. The ad-free fortress, it turns out, was not so impregnable after all.
Nearly half of subscriptions to premium streaming services are now ad-supported, according to a report from Antenna, the research firm, published this month. The study examined the usual suspects — Netflix, Disney+, Max, Hulu, Peacock and their peers — and found that an overwhelming majority of new sign-ups are choosing the cheaper, commercial-interrupted tiers. For advertisers who spent years watching audiences disappear behind paywalls, this would seem to be unambiguously good news.
And yet.
According to a separate study from TiVo, three-quarters of streaming viewers say they either do not mind sitting through commercials or actually prefer them to paying for ad-free viewing. But a third of respondents also said they are annoyed by having to watch too many ads — a figure that suggests the industry's tolerance, while real, is not infinite.
The problem, according to research from iSpot, is that advertisers may be testing that tolerance in a particularly unimaginative way. Nearly two-thirds of surveyed brand and agency executives said that at least half of their streaming ads also run on social video platforms. (One imagines the viewer, having encountered the same spot on Peacock, TikTok and Instagram within a single evening, reaching for the remote with a certain weariness.)
This is, of course, the eternal tension of the advertising business: reach is good until it becomes saturation, and saturation is efficient until it becomes irritation. The streaming audience, having grudgingly accepted commercials in exchange for lower prices, may not have bargained for the same commercial, everywhere, all the time.
The gates of the ad-free kingdom have opened. Whether advertisers walk through them with grace or stumble remains, as ever, largely up to them.
Original story published in Digiday: "Future of TV Briefing: The ad-supported streaming landscape in graphic detail"