Netflix wants to attract many millions of viewers with a new advertising subscription

Netflix has firmly resisted ad-supported subscriptions for many years, but the past few months’ poor numbers have forced the streaming giant to reconsider. The new subscription will also start soon and Netflix expects a lot from it. Cheaper, but with advertising: That is the basic concept of the already announced new subscription to the streaming service.

How exactly the whole thing will look like, i.e. when and how much advertising the users will see, has yet to be announced by the company. According to media reports, the start could take place as early as November 2022. Internally, however, Netflix is ​​apparently convinced that an advertising subscription can end its recent negative series in terms of users. Because according to a report by Wall Street Journal the media company from Los Gatos, California, estimates that around 40 million new viewers can be won in this way by the end of the third quarter.

Viewers are not the same as subscribers

The business newspaper got this number from an internal document that Netflix presented to potential advertising partners. The launch of the promotional subscription will be a little slower because by the end of this year the streaming service aims to have 4.4 million viewers with a promotional subscription, a quarter of them in the United States.

However, it is not clear how many subscriptions there will be: Netflix is ​​explicitly talking about viewers here, but that is a different number than subscribers. The company expects that several people per household will access or use Netflix. So this is a similar “trick” as used by newspapers and magazines and talks about circulation and readers – the latter number is always higher.

The streaming service has yet to announce how much Netflix’s advertising subscription will cost and what framework conditions it will offer. It is also currently unknown whether the new subscription plan will also have restrictions on the quality and/or the number of user profiles.