Six days. That’s how many days you save in watching commercials as a Netflix subscriber. You try to fit in work, chores and binge-watching all 144 episodes of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”. Multiply that number by the one and two-thirds hours that the average Netflix subscriber streams per night, and you get 158.5 hours per day.
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A data streaming site has worked out that Netflix subscribers avoid around 160 hours of commercials per year due to the company’s refusal to show advertisements. That’s “1 and 2/3 hours per subscriber per day”.
At one time commercials seemed like a big part of watching TV, but the advent of new technologies has made ads easier to avoid.
With so much extra time thanks to the lack of commercials, fans of television and film are finally able to commit themselves to extracurricular pursuits like art, politics, charity, novel writing, environmental preservation, social justice, technological innovation or – the majority favorite – watching more television!
But it’s still fascinating to consider how massive the scope of Netflix’s advertising would be if it followed cable’s traditional ad model.
Netflix subscribers stream 125 million hours of content per day. The 160 hours breaks down to equal over a months worth of workweeks for the average full-time employee living in America. For example, TruTV halved the amount of ads it showed a year ago.
Time Warner Chief Research Officer, Howard Shimmel, told Bloomberg a year ago that one of the advantages of Netflix’s ecosystem is ad free content, which is training consumers that there are platform where they can avoid adds. They are trailers for Netflix originals, ‘ the company told the Verge.
This had led some networks to actually cut back the amount of ads they show, to lure back the younger Netflix generation.
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Some networks even went so far as to speed up content to make space for more ads. In Australia, other SVOD players Stan and Presto also show ad-free content.
