October 20th, 2022, Shinmin Bali
Netflix recently announced the details of its ad-tier plan, Basic with Ads, across several markets. Set to launch in early November, in the US the plan starts from $6.99/month, and in the UK, it’s £4.99/month. The ad-supported tier is designed to help Netflix bring its subscriber count up, as well as attract or retain more cost-conscious audiences.
As per a recent YouGov study, globally, 28% of consumers expect to spend less on streaming services as compared to last year. For the UK and the US, this would be 28% and 23%, respectively.
But how open are viewers to watching ads?
While not a free tier, the trade-off in the new plan is between ads and cheaper pricing minus certain content and download capabilities. According to YouGov Profiles - which covers demographic, psychographic, attitudinal and behavioral consumer metrics - more American Netflix customers (59%) than British ones (53%) agree that watching ads in exchange for free content is a fair trade. While 15% of its consumers in both markets have no opinion on this, more of the streaming service’s customers in the UK (32%) as compared to those in the US (26%) disagree that free content is a fair trade for seeing ads.
More recently, Netflix has shared that it will begin tackling the password/account sharing problem it faces. This may not go down well with 45% and 47% of its customers in the US and UK respectively who believe that video and music streaming companies shouldn’t care about users sharing their login credentials and subscriptions with others. Globally, 35% of consumers share this view, a recent YouGov study revealed.
A much larger but an almost equal number of the brand’s customers in both markets believe video and music streaming services should have more group subscriptions on offer.
Come 2023, as Netflix states, it will offer the ability to transfer an account or have sub-accounts that are paid for by main account holders in an effort to curb password-sharing.
While it might simplify things for the brand trying to have a clearer view on how many actual subscribers/users it has, the extra steps of transferring or creating a sub-account may irk the 44% of its customers in the US and 53% in the UK who find sharing subscriptions with others more convenient.
Explore our living data - for free
Discover more media content here
Want to run your own research? Start building a survey now
Make smarter business decisions with better intelligence. Understand exactly what your audience is thinking by leveraging our panel of 20 million+ members. Speak with us today.
Methodology: YouGov Profiles is based on continuously collected data and rolling surveys, rather than from a single limited questionnaire. Profiles data for US and UK is nationally representative and weighted by age, gender, education, region, and race. Learn more about Profiles.