Netflix’s new subscription tier ‘Basic with Ads’: All you need to know

Netflix revealed Basic with Ads, a new subscription tier of the streaming platform on Thursday. The new plan will reportedly cost $6.99 a month in the United States. 

Basic with Ads will release on November 3 in the US, Canada, Australia, Brazil, France, Italy, Germany, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Spain and the UK.

According to the company, existing tiers of their subscription plans will “not be impacted”. Instead, Basic with Ads “complements” the existing ad-free Basic, Standard and Premium Plans. 

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Currently, the basic plan costs $9.99 a month and is ad-free. On the other hand, Basic with Ads will cost $6.99 a month and will show users a total of four to five minutes of commercials on the hour. Each ad will be roughly around 30 seconds and will play before and during a movie or a TV show.

Netflix has said that the company will offer broad ad targeting capabilities to advertisers in an effort to help them “reach the right audience and ensure our ads are more relevant for consumers.”

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“Advertisers will also be able to prevent their ads from appearing on content that might be inconsistent with their brand (e.g. sex, nudity or graphic violence),” it added. Netflix has said that it will partner with ratings tracker Nielsen in the US next year to help advertisers reach their target audience through the streaming platform.

The addition of a cheaper, ad-based tier is a far cry from a 2019 company letter to shareholders. At the time, Netflix had said that they were “advertising free” and that it remained a ” deep part” of their brand proposition. In April this year, the company’s CEO Reed Hastings had said that the company was open to adding commercials to the platform. 

It was the same month that the company revealed that it had lost subscribers for the first time in over a decade.