Avoiding Adverts: What’s the Cost?

My husband and I stared at each other, deep in thought, as we pondered the conundrum:

Was avoiding adverts on Netflix worth £7 per month?

£84 per year.

It’s a hefty price to pay, simply to have uninterrupted access to something you are already paying for.

Except, and here’s where the weird maths in my head comes into play, we no longer had to pay for our Netflix subscription. It was included in our new TV package.

Free. But with adverts.

Instead of £13 per month, we were saving a whopping £156 per year on a Netflix subscription under our new contract. But the offer to “upgrade” to an ad-less option for just £7 per month had my hand hovering tentatively over the choice of buttons.

“Is it worth it?” I asked him, plaintively.

We’d renegotiated our contract to get a better deal, after all. Saving more than £1000 for the year ahead as a result. Were we about to nibble into that massive saving, the cost of a holiday, by choosing not to subject ourselves to adverts every so often?

Turns out, we were.

We looked each other straight in the eye and it was clear to both of us in that moment that, yes, uninterrupted viewing time had a value. £84 to be precise.

I pressed the button to accept the upgrade and kissed goodbye to £84 of savings, consoling myself I was still saving £72 on the original cost of Netflix. Yeah, I know, that sort of maths is just silly. I could have saved £156. I can almost hear my Mother’s head shaking in disappointment.

That moment got me thinking about the cost of interruption by adverts.

Here I was, a professional marketer with a vested interested in consuming adverts, and being aware of their presence and impact, opting out and being prepared to pay for that privilege. Huh.

I recalled a Substack article that I wrote a few months ago on how much time we waste on Facebook by consuming predominantly adverts on our feed:

Is there a commercial model in opting out for Facebook, to avoid the adverts? We all know that the price we pay for free Facebook access is to become the sellable product for those Meta-Overlords, rendering ourselves as a simple series of targetable features at whom marketers just like me happily want to fire adverts.

Yet, here’s Netflix bucking that trend. Giving its customers the option to be entirely bloody selfish, un-targettable, human beings.

With so many consumptive media formats built on the freemium business models, designed to generate scaled audiences that advertisers pay to reach, there’s something almost anti-establishment about Netflix’s model. Rebellious, even.

How will they make money??

Of course, there are many precedents for this truly weird media model. But they are not what you might think.

Books. No adverts in those. Free flowing, uninterrupted reading. Bliss.

Movies. No adverts interrupting those bad boys either. Suspend your disbelief, sit back and enjoy.

Theatre shows. Interruptive advert free for thousands of years.

Concerts. Devoid of all interruptions. Performance flow only. Everyone having fun.

Albums. These are making a comeback. Uninterrupted listening. Curated compilations.

Is Netflix tapping into some form of zeitgeist here? The value of uninterrupted time?

Is this the absolute manifestation of Netflix’s cultural values that put People above Process? Because, in their own words they’ve “found that giving people the freedom to use their judgment is the best way to succeed long term.”

Has that freedom of choice been extended to their customers too?

It’s an interesting thought. I don’t know the answers, but what I am observing is that, as consumers, my husband and I placed a value on unfettered access. A monetary value.

Could this be indicative of a subtle shift? We’ve had access to so much and so many channels for free in recent years as the tech titans have sought to dominate our leisure time and attention. Are we now reclaiming that time and attention, but in an eminently more subtle way? And what does this shift mean for marketers?

I’ve written and spoken several times now about the downward trend I’ve been observing on social media channel effectiveness.

Could 2026 see a collapse of one, or several, of these channels? Without audiences these channels are nothing. The audience is their product. Netflix at least has a paid subscription model as its fundamental baseline. No one has ever had access to Netflix for free (legally, at least), until now.

If advertisers shift their spend from Meta channels, then what? It’ll be like Bebo and MySpace all over again.

Am I making a prediction here? Could the AI bubble burst in 2026, and could Meta implode as a result? For those of you who have been on this planet long enough to remember the Dot.com Boom, it’s feeling a heck of a lot like it did then. There’s something in the air that I’ve felt before. Signs I’ve seen on this journey previously. I can’t quite define what it is, but my hunch is that it won’t be pretty.

It’s probably why a recent article by Neela 🌶️ resonated so much. She’s seen these patterns before too:

I think it’s time for marketers to take urgently stock and to do it now, before it’s too late.

Those massive audiences you have on Facebook? They could be gone in an instant. Then what?

Legislative changes could wipe out your TikTok business with the flick of a switch. Or at the very least, cause you some serious angst. And then what will you do?

Place has never mattered more in your marketing mix. Place is where you sell and deliver. It’s not just where you communicate.

It’s time for marketers to build new value and resilience into their distribution chains.

If you don’t have a website and are solely selling through third party channels like TikTok, build one. Build something your business has control over, at least. Start now.

If you don’t have physical channels for distribution, start developing some. For all the groans and grumbles of the high street trader, and how challenging it is out there to grow, bricks and mortar retailing still outperforms online sales by 450%. Yes, you heard that right. It’s four and a half times more commercially valuable. And here’s the big secret that no-one’s talking about, so prevalent is the digital narrative – since 2010, the value of in-store sales has declined only once and that was solely down to the during the disruption of the 2020 pandemic. Every pother year is has experience growth. Get your products into shops and you’ll sell more than you ever will from retailing online. Fact.

If you are selling intangibles (ie services), take a long hard look at how you are communicating. If it’s all digital, and all reliant on third party platforms, consider alternatives. Old fashioned print, physical brand presence, telephone based sales, face to face (!) – these all still work. In many cases, they work better.

In fact, it doesn’t even need to be an intangible. Face to face and telephone based sales can be just as impactful if you are selling physical products. The golden olden days of sales reps in cars has been severely underestimated for their effectiveness. I’ve bought from a vast range of organisations I would never have gone looking for online, all because a human came to visit or picked up the phone to solve a problem for me.

Start looking at your distribution and communications mix through the lens of digital collapse, global outages and start de-risking.

We’ve already had three major global tech outages in 2025 which should be, by now, ringing alarm bells in marketing departments, loud and clear.

How much of a house of cards do you have on your hands? Think back to the pre-pandemic pivots – what have you stopped doing that you should now revisit?

It would be easy to dismiss this article as doom-mongering, after all digital is the future, is it not? I’m definitely not outlining the beginning of the end, but I do hope that I prompt your strategic thinking. Technology will continue to evolve, but there will be winners and losers during that evolution, and we can prepare for that, strategically.

We’ve become so accustomed to accepting these technological infrastructures are the real world. But they are not. They are digital, and deletable.

Our websites can fail with a single server upgrade, our communications channels can die on a quarterly stock market crash or a DDOS attack. Even our company accounts systems are rented. You’ll be adequately insured against an office fire, but a digital implosion of some description is much more likely. Because if customers are willing to pay to avoid adverts, then there’s a very good chance that they may decide they are also willing to give up things in order to avoid them too. And if that happens, whole market infrastructures could disappear, just like many newspapers, commercial radio and TV channels before them did.