Streaming services are pricing consumers out on purpose

Streaming services continue to rise in price, and the option for a long time to avoid that was to either pay the price or unsubscribe. Recently, streamers have been pushing another choice: going for an ad-supported plan. These plans are typically far cheaper than the premium ad-free options, but that’s for good reason. The ad-supported plans are guaranteed to interrupt your show or movie, but if you can save nearly $20 a month, at least in Netflix’s case, it’s worth looking at.

After seeing other services take the same path of offering a cheaper, ad-supported plan, I have to wonder if that’s what the streamers are banking on. It feels like streamers don’t actually want you to pay these high prices for the most expensive tier, but instead, they want you to sign up for the ad-supported plans. It makes sense from a business perspective, as more people seeing ads means you can sell more of them. I don’t like it, but it feels like it’s something that’s working for the companies — and it’s not going anywhere.

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Streamers are pushing you to watch ads

Cheaper, but at a price

Netflix

No other streamer has such a large price difference between ads and no ads like Netflix, but that doesn’t mean they don’t all get more benefits out of you going for the cheaper tiers. It might sound strange that a service makes more money off you by you spending less money, but the value of ads can’t be understated — Fortune reports Netflix doubled ad revenue in 2024. Ads are a huge reason why regular cable has survived as long as it has, and it’s still hanging around despite the competition that exists today.

Any service you look at offers a discount for watching ads, so it’s like they want to remind you that an option exists. The lone exception among the major streamers is Apple TV+, but it feels like it’s just a matter of time before Apple gets in on the action.

Prime Video’s ad-supported plan is $3 cheaper, Max has a $7 discount, and if you bundle Max, Hulu, and Disney+ together, it gives you $13 in total savings over the ad-free plan. As prices for each of these services rise, the streamers know that keeping an affordable option is key, and it seems like it’s paying off for them. This is especially evidenced by Netflix’s Premium plan leap to $25 while the ad plan remains at a low $8 per month.

As of November 2024, a whopping 70 million people watched Netflix with ads, so it’s clear that gigantic price gap has paid off. The bad news is that millions of people have become okay with a worse way of viewing in an effort to save money. Netflix used to be a real bargain, but the value has been getting worse and worse in the passing years. As streamers, not just Netflix, continue to push into the world of live sports and TV, the value could get even worse for people who aren’t a fan of that type of content.

Moving forward to 2025 and beyond, don’t be surprised to see more streamers creating price gaps like Netflix to push you more toward the ad plans. It’s clear that it works, so it’d be strange not to see other streamers follow suit, especially if they are trying to turn a profit.

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Free streamers reign supreme

Ads aren’t going anywhere

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Streamers wanting to show you ads shouldn’t come as much of a surprise when you look at how well Tubi is doing. Tubi is a free service that doesn’t even give you the option to skip the ads. Only one tier is available, and it’s completely free of charge.

While Tubi has its share of issues, whether it’s lower picture quality and fewer audio options, it makes up for it by being free and offering a wide range of shows and movies. Personally, I don’t like seeing ads, but I’m even a fan of Tubi. It’s strange, but I think part of the reason is that there’s no option to avoid them. Tubi is a service built with ads in mind, while Netflix and Max feel like they are an evil I can pay to remove. Considering Tubi has about 80 million users, it doesn’t seem to be a deterrent to people at all. It’s a system that works well for Tubi, but I don’t think I’d be happy to see every service adopt this line of thinking.

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Is this the future of streaming?

It all comes back to ads

Kaboom Pics / Pexels / Pocket-lint

One of the promises of streaming, and there were many, is that we’d be able to leave behind the commercials that plagued cable. For a while, that was a reality, but as the years have gone on, we’re going back to more of a cable feel. It doesn’t help that live sports are coming to the services that have ads baked right into the programming, regardless of whether you pay to skip ads or not.

In a lot of ways, it feels like cable is coming back, whether it’s the rising cost of replacements like YouTube TV and Fubo, and now the return of ads. For some people, I wouldn’t be shocked to see cable being a better priced option, especially if you can save some cash by bundling it with an internet package. The flexibility that remains is being able to cancel services on a whim instead of being locked into a contract. Now that we’re in 2025, that’s one of the real benefits of streaming, but those benefits are shrinking with each passing day.

I really hope ads don’t come back to the forefront, but it seems like that’s going to be the affordable way to keep up with the latest shows. I understand companies have to turn a profit in order to keep pumping out content, but I don’t have to like it. In a lot of ways, the future feels like the past, and it’s just not a good feeling. It seems like it’s too late to put the genie back into the bottle now, so we’ll just have to sit back and see where this ride takes us.

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