Advertising is Winning. We Need to Keep Fighting (Premium)

I often feel like we’re part of a vast experiment to see how much enshittification we can endure before we finally push back. Subscription services are leading the charge.

The best subscription services deliver so much value that the ongoing cost seems reasonable, not onerous. Other services attract those unwilling or unable to pay by offering ad-supported tiers. This choice is important because it democratizes the accessibility of these services, instead of limiting them only to the well-off.

But 2023 was an inflection point for subscription services, with escalating monthly costs forcing customers to avoid some that were previously no-brainers. But it’s getting worse. This year, the enshittification of some services is crossing a line that I find unacceptable: More and more are adopting an undesirable mix of monthly subscription fees and advertising, undermining the user experience and antagonizing subscribers.

I write this now because today is the day that Amazon Prime Video, a key digital perk of the e-commerce giant’s $140 per year (or $15 per month) Prime subscription, becomes enshittified by adding “limiting advertising.” In other words, you get to pay and watch ads.

According to Amazon, customers will see fewer ads on Prime Video than they do on traditional TV and other hybrid (paid and ad-supported) streaming services. But as I noted over a decade ago, advertising is a slippery slope, meaning companies don’t put ads in a product so that they can later reduce the number of ads. Instead, the ads will just get worse and worse. Having fewer ads, for now, is how Amazon will get paying customers used to this intrusion. And then it escalates.

Previously, there were no ads on Prime Video. But Amazon previously experimented with this enshittification—again, slippery slope—by adding a side service called Freevee that was free and ad-supported. And to tilt the scales a bit, it added some popular content, like a then-new season of the hit show Bosch, to Freevee instead of Prime Video. Freevee is objectively a horrible service. But the results were good enough for Amazon to take the next step. And it is now charging Prime customers an additional $2.99 per month to remove the ads from Prime Video, creating a new tier of its video services. Slippery slope.

But wait, it gets worse.

As it turns out, Amazon has an ulterior motive here: In addition to immediately generating an additional several billions of dollars per year through this advertising, Amazon, you’ll recall, is an e-commerce giant with a very popular online store. And it is not coincidental that this company, which offers both physical goods and digital services through a single online destination, also expects to prop up its retail business significantly with this effort. Amazon is, in effect, double-dipping in this melding of TV, advertising, and its retail business, and it will now milk Prime customers harder than ever. This puts the company’s pledge of no new price hikes for Prime this year in perspective, I think.

This one doesn’t impact me directly, at least for now: I don’t watch Amazon Prime enough to even consider paying them for this additional service on a service. But perhaps the term “service” is incorrect given that customers are paying Amazon to remove an enshittified user experience that Amazon itself created, the corporate version of paying a schoolyard bully to not beat you up. Whatever one calls it, I find this behavior galling. It’s the same issue that triggered my 2022 push-back against periodicals that I pay (a lot) for but still deliver annoying animated ads in their mobile apps.

And that, to me, is the bridge too far. In that case, I started using NextDNS on my mobile devices to free myself from the insanity. At that time, I examined what it would take to implement this solution or something like it across my entire home, but for various reasons, I backed off from that. But here we are in 2024, and I am once again actively experimenting with putting a stop to this behavior for good, on all my devices.

To be clear, not paying for a service that offers that option and circumventing advertising with ad blockers and similar technologies is wrong. Google has been cracking down on this workaround with YouTube, for example, and while I can’t say I blindly “support” its efforts, they are at least understandable. But the debate there is mostly about cost: YouTube Premium is $14 per month, in part because Google provides subscribers with YouTube Music Premium, a service many subscribers don’t want or need. These customers are asking for a lower-cost tier that only hides ads on the YouTube video service. This I support fully.

The question for Amazon and the other subscription service providers is whether their antagonistic, anti-customer behavior will irritate the rank-and-file user base enough to trigger a broader push-back. Given the sheep-like lack of resistance we’ve witnessed so far—despite all the outrage against Netflix’s ongoing price hikes and escalating ad-supported tiers, for example, that company just surpassed the 260 million paid subscriber mark and had profits of $4.5 billion in 2023—I doubt it. Most seem to just sigh, complain weakly to no one in particular, and keep paying.

Put another way, we’re getting numb to this creeping enshittification. And that’s precisely what these companies want.