Netflix is looking for advertisers with a lot of money that won’t annoy everybody
The company wants a lot of money but will only take so much of it, which is kind of good news
All it took was one Joker-style bad day to push Netflix over the edge and embrace ads, with the company not-so-quietly having spent the summer developing a new cheaper subscription tier, and a Wall Street Journal report on the caliber of advertisers that Netflix is looking to court has some interesting details about what that might mean for us—or at least those of us willing to save a few bucks each month watching Stranger Things with commercials. For one thing, Netflix is reportedly charging a CPM (cost per mille) of “roughly $65,” which means advertisers would be paying that much for every 1,000 people reached.
That’s apparently “substantially higher” than other streaming services that do ads, but it doesn’t sound like it’s that high just to squeeze more money out of advertisers. That’s because Netflix also wants to impose a cap on how much any one brand can spend on Netflix ads, limiting them to $20 million so “no brand advertises too much on the service and people end up seeing the same ad too often.” So if Netflix wants a lot of money but is only willing to take so much of it, that means the company seems to specifically want advertisers with money to burn but who aren’t so desperate that they’re willing to throw a billion dollars at ads, which might make for (relatively) better ads that aren’t running constantly on every show and movie.