Study Finds Netflix Subscribers Upset with Price Increases, but Prefer Them to Commercials

There’s no doubt that one of the best benefits of a Netflix subscription is not having to watch tons of commercials during our favorite television shows and movies.

But the service does keep increasing the price. Would subscribers prefer these price increases to Netflix adding commercials to help subsidize the costs of content?

The research team over at Decision Data took a survey of over 1,000 Netflix subscribers and found that while most people are pretty bummed about price increases, the majority of people prefer that to Netflix adding commercials.

Read the whole survey report here.

“We then asked the same group of people if they preferred price increases to the introduction of advertisements to subsidize the monthly cost. So while the majority of respondents said that while they were unhappy with rate hikes, they much prefer paying more for Netflix than having to watch advertisements in-between content with 74% of respondents saying that they at least slightly prefer price increases to commercials.”

I thought about this a bit myself, and agree with the majority of survey respondents. I would much prefer to pay a few more dollars for my Netflix subscription than ever have to deal with ads. In fact, I do this very thing with Hulu, by paying for the ad-free option, the easiest four dollars I spend every month to avoid commercials. 

One of the best parts about not watching much live television is not being inundated with fifteen minutes of commercials every hour. As someone who watches a considerable amount of television, it’s clear that Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and other ad-free streaming services are helping save me from a large quantity of ads.

Now the question remains, what would happen if Netflix offered two tiers of their service? I’m not sure Amazon is ever going to try something along those lines, but it’d be interesting to see how many people might switch to a cheaper option with ads in order to save a few dollars every month.

At some point Netflix is going to run out of room in which to raise prices, so they’ll have to explore other options to maintain revenue growth.