Streaming ad tiers show varying degrees of success in the UK
In recent times, three of the biggest streaming platforms in the UK have all started to offer different subscription tiers, some of which are cheaper and include advertising in their offering.
Adwanted Connected runs an exclusive survey with YouGov, Video & Voice, asking consumers across the UK about their media behaviour. In the latest fieldwork in May, it asked questions around these new subscription tiers and the data was exclusively released to the industry last week in Adwanted’s award-winning Consumer Surveys app.
Netflix has had advertising options within its subscription tiers since November 2022, but has only recently followed Amazon’s lead in cancelling its standard £7.99 subscription that had no advertising and re-enrolling everyone on to the cheaper tier that now includes ads.
It has been promoted to its subscriber base as a 35% saving. Many viewers were keen on the ad-free environment, so Netflix’s move forced them to either change to the more expensive standard tier to remain ad-free or cancel.
Netflix now has three subscriptions levels: the standard £10.99 monthly price, the newer version with ads at £4.99 per month and a premium 4K and HDR version at £17.99. Asking the survey’s respondents, 24% didn’t know which service they currently had. But for those more clued up, nearly 39% were still subscribing to the standard service, while 30% claimed they had the tier with ads.
These numbers changed depending on the age group respondents fell into, with the 18-34 audience most likely to remain in the ad-free subscription tier and older audiences more likely to have moved to the cheaper ad tier.
Looking at the index of each of the subscription tiers, respondents who were 55-plus over-indexed for the cheaper service with ads, at 125, in comparison to 18-34s, who were over-indexing for the ad-free option.
This may suggest that younger people are particularly averse to advertising, posing a challenge for the ad market going forward when it wants to speak to this demographic.
Amazon Prime Video introduced “limited advertising” into its standard subscription by default in February, giving its customer base the option to upgrade to advertising-free if they paid more.
There hasn’t been quite as much change in Prime Video yet, with only 10% claiming to have taken the plunge to become advertising-free. There has been more change in the 18-34 age group, with that number being nearly double the average — 18% claim to have upgraded to the advertising-free subscription.
Subscribers to Adwanted UK’s Consumer Surveys can further explore this data and see how the numbers stack up for Disney+ and its advertising-funded subscription tier, or dig further into the Netflix and Amazon Prime Video data.
To find out how to access this data, please contact [email protected] and the helpdesk is on hand for all your queries.
The award-winning Consumer Surveys app within Adwanted Connected carries industry-leading research covering all media, including Rajar, Barb, Ofcom, TouchPoints and exclusive surveys such as Video & Voice from YouGov and Adwanted UK’s exclusive Connected Screens tracker study.
Contact [email protected] to find out more about the Adwanted Connected data product.
Adwanted UK is the parent of The Media Leader.