Because they can. The objective of any company is to squeeze as much profit as they can. It's more lucrative to offer tiered services where you have to pay extra for no advertisements so they do it. If they realize enough people are leaving because of it they will reverse it.
this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2024
82 points (91.0% liked)
Explain Like I'm Five
14395 readers
1 users here now
Simplifying Complexity, One Answer at a Time!
Rules
- Be respectful and inclusive.
- No harassment, hate speech, or trolling.
- Engage in constructive discussions.
- Share relevant content.
- Follow guidelines and moderators' instructions.
- Use appropriate language and tone.
- Report violations.
- Foster a continuous learning environment.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
That's what enshittification is. Make something good, draw people in, they make your service a part of their lives, and then you fuck them in the ass.
The best situation is giving money to a company that's not shitty. The second best situation is piracy. The third best situation is letting yourself get fucked over. It's really up to the companies whether or not we have the best situation. It's up to all of us to have the basic dignity to not get screwed over by the worst option, and to choose the second one when they try.
That first paragraph, I'm stealing that quote.
look up a guide on how to set up stremio with torrentio and realdebrid. takes all of 15-30 minutes to set up and $15 for 6 months of being able to stream practically anything all in one place. ad free
(I know not an answer but I figured an actual solution to the problem was preferable to a 20th person explaining enshittification lol)
eta the important part
20ish years ago...
ELI5 How come paid cable TV channels are now running commercials? Is that not bad for business because most if not all people got it to avoid commercials?
if you are paying for any streaming service that has advert breaks, you are the reason there are commercials. imagine if subscribers walked away when they were introduced!
Oh my sweet summer child, let me tell you a tale of cable television...
You actually have the answer in front of you.
Yes, people signed up for stabbing(streaming) services, with their monthly fees, to get away from ads. So, the corporations start putting ads in the low tier, meaning you have to pay even more every month to start free from ads.
Didn't forget: "good" for the business is "bad" for you. That's pretty much baked into the very foundations of capitalism.
i want to unsubscribe from the stabbing service
Ok, that made my morning. I hate my phone
are you sure? 🔪
I go to bakery and buy bread. They have more money, i have more bread.
Good for bakery, good for me. I don't understand what's "bad" for me?
When they make the bread worse and raise prices to increase their profit margin. And show some ads to make extra profit. And start to pester you with more service tiers and subscriptions before they give you the bread because they'll be able to scam some people into giving them another revenue stream...
So I have to imagine the bad part? Those things haven't happened.
Prep for removal of gate keeping bandwidth with met neutrality.
GOP will gut NN again, leaving the door open for paying for additional bandwidth. Startups won't be able to compete if they're slower, so the big companies will have a captive market just like cable companies used to.
This gives them the ability to squeeze. More money per customer with less customers is cheaper to manage than more customers at less per-person cost.
Businesses are greedy. They're going to squeeze the turnip from every angle they can think of to get every drop of blood out they can.
Consumers are rock chewing stupid. They will choose fancy branding and ease of setup every single time because most of them are allergic to learning how the things in their houses work. People will sign their rights away in EULAs they don't even bother to read because it's too boring, they're not going to stop watching Longmire or Stranger Things just because they added commercials.
We live in a world where fascism is on the rise. The Republicans want to jail or kill women who have abortions or miscarriages. Here in the smart phone age, women often use apps to track, record and predict their periods. These apps upload this data to a server somewhere and store it in a database. Wouldn't the Republicans love to get their hands on that database to see if they can find women they can jail or kill? The solution: Get on Tumblr and ask men to download these apps and start uploading junk data to them, because getting women to switch to FOSS software that doesn't upload their data to devices they don't control is considered too much to ask. They won't learn how to manage their own software and data to literally save their lives. They're absolutely not giving up Netflix.
The line always has to go up. If the company stops picking up new subscribers, then their profits stagnate. And that makes investors unhappy. So to avoid that, they start to jack up the price to keep the line going up. And if that isn't enough, they then start throwing ads into the services.
The line must always go up.
Because it worked with cable tv back in the day so it will work again if its allowed to. Stop giving companies your money as a general rule.
Do you know what else eventually happened with cable? People cutting it by the millions when there was finally another choice.
It’s interesting that my family went from wasting time siting in front of a big screen tv paying massively for cable channels we never used, to cutting the cable and only paying for 2-3 streaming services at a time
But it’s even more interesting we continued down this path so our down time is dominated by small screens and somewhat interactive media instead of passively watching. If I stop paying for streaming media, my teens wouldn’t notice. It would just be the people here who would notice, as I complain more about doom scrolling and reaching the end
They ran on cheap prices and no commercials to get people hooked. Now that they dominate the market, they raise the prices and include ads for increased revenue.
Most people don't get streaming content because commercials most people got it because that is where they content is and you can choose. When you want it.
Streaming services didn't make money when money was cheap to loan. Now money is expensive to get. Company needs to make profit rather than constantly taking in funding . Commercials make money. It kept tv and radio afloat. Streaming is still better than tv
The people that moved to streaming to get away from commercials switched a long time ago. Others watched the streaming sotes that had commercials because it was free or aignificsntly cheaper than cable.
Of course being greedy companies means they want both the subscriptions and the ad revenue.
People are willing to pay for it. It's that easy.
Like pretty much anything, it's because most people continue to pay for it despite the shittiness.
Same reason concert tickets cost so much.
Demand and offer meet where they meet.
Because plebs take it...
I know on Lemmy we like to flex that we don't... But gen pop normie accepts them, no questions asked...
People 15 years ago used to pay for most television from cable. Netflix, back then renting DVD's, made a paid streaming service by buying the rights to stream for pennies on the dollar.
We're now at a point where streaming is what makes money for most shows, so there isn't the subsidy coming from cable or broadcast like there used to. A TV show is expected to only make its money on streaming.
It turns out people don't want to pay the full price for content, so streaming companies are experimenting with ads to fund the difference.
It turns out people don't want to pay the full price for content, so streaming companies are experimenting with ads to fund the difference.
Who exactly determines what "full price" is? This reads like a statement from music executives in the 1990s when they were charging $25 for a CD with 10 songs on it and claiming piracy was costing them quadrillions of dollars. With inflation, that equates to just under $50 per CD today. Is that full price or is full price whatever people are willing to pay at any given time?
Full price is being able to guarantee that you make your money back on the average release.
That isn't really possible to calculate for as you don't know how many people will buy 'XYZ' until after the fact.
Say two separate movies cost $1M to make and only 5k people watch Movie A while 100 million people watch Movie B. According to this, Movie A would need to cost $200 per copy, while Movie B would cost $0.01. The "full price" would be constantly fluctuating so how could you apply it to the first hundred people who watch the movie? What about the last hundred to watch it?
Full price is just code for "what we want" not necessarily what it takes to recoup their investment. These companies want profit and they want every release to be as popular as something like End Game so they're going to claim "full price" is whatever it takes to reach that $10 billion goal.
It is possible to price because studios are playing the odds. They might make money on one show but lose money on three others. Uncertainty gets baked into a lot of the initial decisions.
And we are seeing that production budgets are getting slashed on television shows compared to a decade ago because the streaming money doesn't compare to cable money.
No commercials was a bonus for a bit, but I think most people actually went to streaming services because it was both cheaper than cable, and you could watch on demand instead of according to TV scheduling
I think this is a bug part of it.
Average person doesn't care about the details if their convenience is satisfied. It's why so many continue to use Facebook even after the Cambridge Analytica scandal (which is still in the courts), and exposure of their tracking pixels.
Convenience. That's enough for most people. It's why we traded our personal data for free email accounts with Google, etc.
It was definitely part of the appeal. I got into arguments with people that Netflix would eventually succumb to ads. I've also been warning people about not owning digital content from back when all iTunes purchases came with DRM (or maybe they still do, does iTunes still exist?).