Netflix Getting Positive Response for Advertising Supported Plans, Its 7 Crore Users Watch Content With Advertisements

Netflix, one of the popular streaming services, has said that about 70 million of its viewers watch shows with advertising every month. This number has almost doubled compared to May this year. In countries where Netflix’s ad-supported plan is available, more than 50 percent of new subscribers are choosing it.

Amy Reinhard, President of Advertising at Netflix, said in a blog post that this plan is available in 12 countries. The company plans to make advertising a major source of revenue. The share of advertising business is less as compared to its rivals. For many years, Netflix had stayed away from television content containing advertising. The company had added advertising about two years ago as the number of customers declined. Netflix has kept the price of its advertising plans low. The company is also benefiting from this. According to Bloomberg’s report, Netflix had about 40 million monthly users for its advertising plans in May. At the end of the third quarter, the company’s total number of subscribers was more than 28 crore.

Its rivals like Amazon have asked users who do not like advertising to pay higher prices. Because of this, a large number of their users have shifted to advertising plans. Netflix has also invested in live programming with sporting events like the National Football League. Advertisements will be presented to all its users in these events. This will also create additional inventory for marketers. The company reported that it has sold out of all inventory for the two NFL games scheduled for Christmas Day.

The central government is making a new broadcast policy to regulate the content of these platforms in India. Concern has increased over OTT not following self-regulatory guidelines. For this reason the government is preparing to regulate them. Recently, Minister of State for Information and Broadcasting L Murugan had said that the ministry is assessing industry feedback and public input before presenting this policy in Parliament. He had said that these platforms have started measures like viewer age classification and content advisories. However, these methods of self-regulation have been questioned by both industry stakeholders and the public.