Coming soon to a streaming service near you: Ads

Now it’s shrinking — and now Netflix says it will have ads: Last month, after announcing that his company had lost subscribers for the first time in a decade, Hastings told investors he wanted to introduce a lower-priced version of the service that would have ads “over the next year or two,” though he was unclear about the details. Instead, lots of it seems as dumb and scattershot as the spam in your inbox.“We’ve taken everything the internet taught us about how to make ads shittier and brought it to TV,” says Joe Marchese, a former internet and TV ad executive (he sold his TrueX company to Fox in 2014) who now runs Human Ventures, a startup investment company.“There is an enormous flaw between how digital ad tech has evolved and what will be needed to be successful in a TV environment,” says Dave Morgan, a longtime digital ad executive whose current company, Simulmedia, works with conventional and streaming TV advertisers.Which makes it somewhat puzzling is that Netflix, which long made ad-free streaming a core part of its brand, is now rushing into ads, seemingly without much planning and no apparent infrastructure. Ditto for Hastings’s earnings call comments suggesting he’d like to outsource much of the work to “other people [who would] do all of the fancy ad-matching and integrate all the data about people, so we can stay out of that.” That’s because most TV ad industry people I talk to argue that the worst parts of the streaming ad experience stem from the maze of middlemen that sits between advertisers and streamers, which often makes it hard to figure out where, when, and how ads end up on your screens.None of that jibes with Netflix’s history of taking great pains to control every part of its service — from creating its own distribution system back in its DVD-by-mail days, to building out a sophisticated system to deliver streaming video.