Netflix has ads now. Disney+ has ads. Amazon Prime Video just announced ads. Peacock has always had ads. We are living in the great re-bundling, and nobody seems to notice that we've recreated cable television with extra steps and seven different passwords.
Here's what fascinates me strategically about this moment: every streaming platform decided simultaneously that the path to profitability runs through advertising. Which means they all need to sell the same thing to the same advertisers: your attention while you're trying to watch something you're paying for.
Here's what fascinates me strategically about this moment: every streaming platform decided simultaneously that the path to profitability runs through advertising.
But attention isn't expanding. There aren't more hours in the day. There aren't more eyeballs to go around. The supply of advertising inventory just massively increased while the supply of human attention stayed fixed. That's a recipe for deflation in ad pricing, and eventually, for a reckoning.
The brand strategy implications are significant:
One, the paradox of choice is now an advertiser problem too. If I'm a media buyer and I can place ads on Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Peacock, Paramount+, and Amazon Prime Video, plus YouTube, plus CTV, plus linear TV... how do I allocate? The fragmentation that made cord-cutting appealing for consumers now makes media planning nightmarish for brands.
Two, the premium perception is gone. When Netflix said "no ads ever" it was a value proposition. It signaled: we respect your time and attention. Now that they've walked that back, what's their value prop? "We have ads but fewer than the other guys"? That's not a brand promise. That's a compromise.
Three, and this is the big one: we're entering an attention recession. Consumers have subscription fatigue. They're consolidating. They're sharing passwords less (thanks to crackdowns). They're rotating between services rather than maintaining all of them. The idea that brands can reach everyone everywhere is fracturing along with the audience.
I think the smart play for brands right now isn't to chase audiences across every platform. It's to invest deeply in the two or three contexts where their audience is most receptive. A luxury brand on ad-supported Netflix might reach more people than on ad-free, but are those people in a luxury mindset? Context still matters more than reach.
We spent a decade disrupting television, and we ended up back where we started: paying monthly fees to watch content interrupted by ads. The only difference is we did it to ourselves.
At least with cable, you only needed one remote.