My unsuccessful journey into Netflix’s ad tier
So, last month, in a fit of pique over the continual increases in the cost of a Netflix plan, I decided to cancel Netflix.
This is a big deal because I’ve been a Netflix subscriber since the very beginning—back when it was all DVDs and no streaming. I checked in with my kids because I was worried Netflix was more popular with the youths than with people like me. But even my kids didn’t care and thought there wasn’t much to watch on Netflix.
So, I canceled it, figuring I’d pick it back up again on a case-by-case basis. “When there’s something to watch, I’ll resubscribe for a month, watch what I want, and then cancel again,” I thought.
This month, though, I already had some reasons to watch. Everybody’s talking about “Adolescence,” and I hadn’t seen the newest iteration of John Mulaney’s live talk show—which means I wasn’t able to talk about it on Downstream last week, which felt like a mistake.
(It turns out that even when there’s nothing you think you want to watch on Netflix, there’s still some stuff you sort of want to watch on Netflix.)
So I figured I’d resubscribe for the month—but I’d stick it to Netflix by opting for the ad plan, which is only $8 a month. Netflix insists that the ads on that plan are “short and seamless” and “won’t interrupt the action”—and it really pushes that ad plan hard because it makes a lot of money from it. (The price hikes for the ad-free plans are largely because the ad plan has such a high average revenue per user that Netflix has needed to jack up the price of the ad-free plans so that they earn similar amounts of money per user.)
My plan did not survive even the briefest of contact with the enemy.
The first thing my wife and I watched on our reactivated Netflix was episode one of “Adolescence,” a tense, serious, dark drama about children and crime. Each episode is one continuous shot—a technical marvel. But the flow was broken numerous times by bright, shiny, noisy ads, disrupting the mood repeatedly with 30 to 45-second interruptions.
I feel sympathy for whomever Netflix is paying to tag content for the best places to insert ads. There are no clear act breaks in “Adolescence,” and the fact that it’s one continuous shot means that literally any interruption is going to be incredibly disruptive to the content of the show. It was never intended to be shown with advertising inserted mid-stream.
Netflix programmed four separate ad breaks.
The truth is, outside of live sports, I haven’t really watched a commercial in 25 years. Back in 2000, I got my first TiVo, and since then, ad skipping has been the norm for me. I’ve been fast-forwarding through ads or, in some cases, clicking a button to skip ads automatically ever since.
So, to sit there in 2025, watching a countdown timer tick down during a loud, colorful ad, all while in the middle of a grim, dark, contemplative show… was unbearable. After 25 years of mostly ad-free viewing, I am irretrievably broken. I just couldn’t take it.
While the ads played on, I began creating a thought experiment: There’s a $10 difference between the ad and ad-free plans. If Mr. Netflix (he wears a top hat) came to my house and said, “Jason, I’ve got a great deal for you. I’m going to pay you $120 a year, and all you have to do is watch ads while you watch Netflix,” what would I do? When I started thinking about it, I thought it might be an interesting intellectual question. What would I accept in exchange for having Mean Mr. Netflix beam ads into every show I watch?
It turns out that whatever my price is, it’s a whole lot more than $120 a year. The next day, I upgraded back to the $18 ad-free plan.
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