[sillystu04]

Netflix should try out a free tier which is entirely monetised by ads. Even if it only contains a subset of their library.

Just imagine how much money loveholidays or Jet2 would pay for an advert midway through a travel show, where a customer could press a button on their remote for a holiday purchase link to be sent to their Netflix email address.

[Mashimo]

Free netflix, but every 45 minutes you have to enter a verification code that is at the bottom of a Mountain Dew Verification Can, 0.5L

[growlNark]

> Netflix should try out a free tier which is entirely monetised by ads. Even if it only contains a subset of their library.

Wait, people are paying to be advertised to? It's like we learned nothing from newspapers.

[SketchySeaBeast]

I honestly think the world would be in a better place if there was more local news media, even if it was both ad driven and user supported.

[growlNark]

Ads fundamentally contradict the role of news. You don't want to get your news from an organization that has two customer bases.

[sillystu04]

What's the alternative? Subscriptions aren't affordable for poor people, government funding creates a conflict of interests, and so does relying on philanthropists.

[graemep]

A mixture so you get different biases (to atleast some extent). That way different problems offset each other.

> Subscriptions aren't affordable for poor people

If people are affluent enough that advertising to them supports the business, then they probably do have the money to pay.

Most people in rich countries certainly can afford to pay. 68% of households in the UK have streaming services, most of the rest pay the TV license fee to the BBC. A lot of those who do not choose not to, rather than being unable to afford to.

> government funding creates a conflict of interest

There are ways of dealing with this and blocking government interference. Hypothecated taxes as in the UK.

> so does relying on philanthropists.

Different conflicts of interest though.

[BobaFloutist]

Ads aren't affordable for poor people either, we just like to pretend they're not the ones financing the vast majority of ad-driven content.

[growlNark]

Substack? Independent journalism? Pay-what-you-want? Donation-funded publications? I'm not saying I have a solution, just that that's "ads" are bad place to start. I certainly read plenty of non-advertisement-based coverage.

Good news costs money, and the poor get propagandized to.

I'm not even sure how the NyTimes justifies this with their massive subscription revenue. They probably just expect people to suck it up, despite greatly lowering the value of their product.

Anyway, Manufacturing Consent came out almost 40 years ago and we're still stuck in the same place if you only look at cable news, newspapers, and radio. Hell even NPR pimps themselves to the nearest think-tanks and corporations (despite a reputation for delivering unbiased coverage from the perspective of liberals)—during the iraq war people with little subtlety referred to them as "national petroleum radio".

[SketchySeaBeast]

Sure, if you're going to insist on philosophical purity, but imagining that people are going to pay full price for news is unrealistic. There's a reason we've ended up with "news" being nearly entirely funded by ads.

There's a difference too between the type of ad and the companies behind its reach - Uncle Bob's Local Mattress Shop and Citizens United are two entirely different beasts.

[growlNark]

> but imagining that people are going to pay full price for news is unrealistic.

Imagining that people use their brains is also unrealistic. Presumably I'm talking to the remaining people in the room.

If paying full-price for the news isn't an option, I'd rather opt out entirely to avoid filling my head with random crap someone really wants me to hear about "terrorists" and "western values" or whatever.