![]() ![]() And when those camps encounter a story like the one from Seeking Alpha, maybe they should take note that the prospect of Netflix generating future revenue by selling ads isn’t mentioned once. I would simply point out that viewers aren’t required to purchase Netflix’s stock. This fuels various news reports, including a story from Seeking Alpha featuring the scary headline Why Netflix May Never Actually Turn A Real Profit. If you venture down the deep, dark rabbit hole that is financial accounting, you learn that “profit” tends to be in the eye of the beholder. To make a very complicated story short, some people don’t believe Netflix properly accounts for the cost of its content-original and licensed. Which relates to the issue of whether Netflix is profitable or ever can be. Nonetheless, the bigger question to me is when-not if-Netflix decides to sell ads in its video content. So perhaps proportion is the main issue of concern with Netflix’s latest experiments, not semantics about what constitutes advertising. Unlike in Netflix’s case, they don’t occupy the entire screen and require me to watch or skip them. When I read a story on, say, the Wall Street Journal’s website, I get pop-ups in the lower right-hand corner suggesting another WSJ story, but I don’t consider them ads. Some horrified critics instantly took to platforms like Reddit to attack the trailers as interruptive ads. This is not the first time Netflix has tested pre-roll “trailers,” as the company likes to call them, to assist viewers with much-needed content discovery. This came to mind as I was reading a Cord Cutters News story about Netflix experimenting with video promos for its content in between episodes of other content. ![]() What undoubtedly has changed is that digital has given people more ways to complain about things and launch their thoughts into the echo chamber (think social media). More to the point, it’s probably never been truer. The chaos comes in when content creators try to figure out how to monetize all that video.īecause while digital technology seems to have upended much of mankind, the reality remains that paying actors to do dramatic or funny things on camera has never been a guarantee of profits. Consumers seemingly have more streaming video content choices than there are stars in the universe. ![]()
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