I understand that it's not free to produce TV shows, no free lunches and whatnot, so I understand why stuff I watch for free has ads, but if I'm paying for something I draw a line that I don't want my shit interrupted by advertisement.
It really annoyed me that Prime decided that they would just impose ads on me unless I pay them an additional $4 a month. I already pay for Prime, I already buy many products on Amazon, I don't want to pay an extra $50 a year just to watch your mediocre shows without you trying to indoctrinate me to buy more shit.
Companies seem incapable of imagining a world where they don't double dip, since they've built the whole house of cards on the cable model and they want nothing else than to recreate it.
So if they stopped letting you watch their new content because you had an old no ads membership would that be ok?
But what I don't understand and find the most stupid is when you are forced to watch ad for the internal content. It gives me an aweful experience instead of pushing me to watch more. So makes me want to stop using the service.
The worst offender is Disney+, not only the app is the shitiest one with great pain to seek in content, but you have systematic 30 or 40s long as for content of the platform you don't care like the last woke show. The worst of the worst in that case is that they will not care to show you 100 times the exact same ad as for the same movie or show sometimes. It has no good effect except totally wasting your time and frustrating you!
And now they simultaneously added ads and raised prices. I haven't dropped the subscription yet but am sure thinking about it.
If this is not stopped, there's no limit, your car, TV, fridge, it will be everywhere, and it pumps more and more income away from people and products/service providers into advertisers' pockets.
So much so that it effectively has become the main focus of some companies who we as consumers still perceive as online stores/marketplaces. Specifically sponsored search results apparently can become a bigger income stream than the one from actual sales themselves.
Which is great for these companies, terrible for us consumers.
I was a little worried about cancelling Amazon Prime at first, but realized I didn't -really- need some JIXFOZ branded gadgets next day, after all.
I plead with everyone who feels similarly to vote with their feet/wallet. It's the only hope of getting out of this mess.
This is a field that requires regulation to see any difference.
The problem with cancelling Prime is the unrelenting haranguing to re-sign up and the clearly punitive delivery charges. You get adverts from cancelling due to adverts and end up paying more.
I’ve just started to focus my purchases at specialist UK stores, rather than defaulting to Amazon for everything.
This is not a structural victory just a badly executed change.
Same with a lot of providers simply unilaterally raising prices. Entirely illegal, but they are mostly getting away with it.
Ah, capitalism, with your endless power imbalance.
Because that is how Amazon adding ads with payment to remove them, to existing customers feels like.
Organised crime neighborhood motto.
Blame the consumers.
They don’t want to pay for monthly subscriptions because “economy is tough”
Maybe many of these companies have never had our interest at heart, and people are tired of feeling constantly screwed over and seen as a revenue stream instead of customers.
The consumer is not a single person, and until we (the consumers) all coordinate, our individual incentive is to not pay (Classical prisoner dilemma).
So "voting with your wallet" doesn't maximize your personal interest.
In any case, the headline oversells the ruling: it's only about changing the conditions for existing customers.
Amazon can let the old contracts run out and sign up people under a new scheme, that allows them to show ads.
we got into such a place where we don't encourage competition.
Right now, we are dealing with effective monopolies and duopolies. You can't just exit the App Store if you have an iPhone, and Amazon has cornered the market so hard that switching isn't really an option for most people. When competition is dead, the market can't self-correct because consumers have nowhere else to go.
Also, "monetizing their own property" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your take. These platforms already charge: transaction fees, commissions, listing fees, higher product prices baked in, and in many cases consumers are paying directly (Prime, app purchases, ride fares). Injecting ads is basically double charging. On top of that it shifts the platform from "help me find the best match" to "whoever pays the platform wins".
Honestly, unless you are in a C-suite role, I'm not sure why you would defend a model that actively works against you as a consumer.
Yes, and that matters in the short run. In the long run, churn is unavoidable.
A newspaper recently published an article stating that if you wanted to watch every NFL game, you'd need eleven streaming subscriptions.
Remember when Netflix inttroduced ads they added a lower tier to go along with it.
But doing so would mean risking to loose customers who were just too lazy to cancel. So most Businesses don't like it. (Spotify did cancel their old contracts though, for people who had not agreed with the recent price hike)
I can't sign a contract with you for $10/month for no ads and then start showing you ads.
ETA:
I mean, I'm sure there is some exception to this, but generally speaking everyone hates ads. Part of the reason that the whole "cable cutting" thing happened was because everyone hated paying a lot of money to some cable company just to be bombarded with advertisements. At least that's a big reason as to why I did it.
Now all these media companies realized that they can start shoving ads at us again and people will keep paying.
Obviously I'm not entitled to having media at a specific price indefinitely, but I'm perfectly allowed to not like it when companies engage in rent-seeking bullshit.
Cynicism aside, I wish there was a happy medium where companies could just _make money_ and not always have to make _even more money_.
I suspect once the heat on this settles down, every streaming service is going to start forcing ads on us at all times, and then the only way to fight back on this will be bittorrent.
And actually some subscriptions can include unilateral price increases in the contract (a subscription is a contract) with early termination fees. It just isn’t commonly done because word gets around and you will lose business. You typically only see this in predatory industries where there are few alternatives and the service is necessary, like local waste management.
If the contract is unfair enough you can usually escape it in court or arbitration, but nobody wants to go through that.
(And it's not even that: the X you're charged is subject to change upon renewal!)
I'm not arguing that this is a good or bad thing, just pointing out the reality of every single subscription agreement I've signed up for online.
Also you aren't agreeing to pay to renew the contract. It isn't a rent payment in a structured contract. You can cancel at any time.
We have to educate them again that taking our convenience means them loosing money.