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Over the span of a decade and a half, as cord-cutting slowly eroded pay-TV usage share, broadcast and cable networks stuffed their shows to the brim with commercial time, alienating viewers as they tried to sustain revenue growth. Now, as ad pods rationalize in streaming, that consumer dissonance may be starting to go away. At least, that’s the theory we discuss here.
Price sensitive much? Nearly 70% of Americans now say they’ll watch a few commercials to lower subscription streaming costs
With inflation again surging and energy costs up nearly 24% YoY, it’s not surprising to see impacts on consumer entertainment spending.
As confirmed in the eleventh wave of Hub Entertainment Research’s “TV Advertising: Fact or Fiction” survey of 3,000 U.S. consumers, the percentage of consumers willing to watch a few advertisements to trim their monthly SVOD bills has surged to nearly 70%. It’s up 11 percentage points in five years.
Over that same span, the share of respondents indicating that they can’t stand any advertising declined from 17% to 11%.
Sure, this isn’t a new dynamic. Inflation hasn’t dipped below 2.4% in the last five years, and it’s now broadly understood that hybrid tiers combining subscriptions and advertising represent SVOD’s dominant economic model.
But revisiting Hub studies past, it’s interesting nonetheless to observe just how dramatically consumer attitudes towards commercials have shifted yet again.
