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By Jason Snell for Macworld
Why ads on Apple TV+ are inevitable
If you haven’t been closely following the world of streaming media, you may have missed the major changes in the past year. Following a particularly bad financial quarter at Netflix, the entertainment industry collectively decided they were done spending huge sums of money to establish new streaming services.
The gold rush is over, and the rules have changed. One of the biggest changes is that Netflix, which for years refused to even consider offering advertising on its platform, instead announced it would add a discounted version of its service… with commercials. And the results are in: already, Netflix makes more money from a subscriber viewing its ad-laden version than it does from a subscriber who’s signed up for a more expensive ad-free tier.
If you don’t like ads on your Internet video, this is bad news because it means you’ll be paying even more to keep the ads at bay. But for Apple, it’s an opportunity—and a data point that might make the company question its video strategy.