A year can be a long time. Especially when it comes to commercials.
Netflix has dominated the cord-cutting era for numerous reasons. One of those reasons is the streaming service’s total lack of commercials. (Hulu and YouTube, by contrast, feature commercials, with premium upgrades that remove them.) How many hours of commercials is Netflix really saving you from? That depends on who you ask — but the answer, it seems, is always “a whole lot.”
A recent post by cordcutting.com estimated that in a given year, the average Netflix user avoids more than six total days’ worth of commercials yearly — that is, if a person’s yearly Netflix diet completely displaced their traditional TV time. To reach that figure, the website cited that Netflix recently exceeded 75 million subscribers, and Netflix’s CEO, Reed Hastings, recently said Netflix subscribers stream 125 million hours of Netflix content daily. By these estimates, the average daily Netflix usage per customer is approximately 1.67 hours.
The website also cited Nielsen data, which indicates a typical hour of cable TV has 15 minutes and 38 seconds of commercials. That becomes 158.5 hours — about 6.6 days — of commercials over an entire year, if the 1.67 daily hours of Netflix consumption were completely displaced by traditional TV viewing.
Other estimates push those consumption numbers even higher. A recent post on reviews.com said the yearly commercial avoidance is actually 219 hours per year, not 158.5 hours. That’s a big gap.
To reach this estimate, reviews.com used Netflix Vice President of Original Content Cindy Holland’s recent claim that the average Netflix user spends two hours on the service every day. And instead of estimating TV commercial time by the average hourly commercial time for cable TV (15 minutes 38 seconds), reviews.com used figures for network TV, which is approximately 18 minutes per hour.
Whether the actual figures are somewhere between 158.5 and 219 hours yearly — or even higher, as COVID-19 quarantines have blown our collective leisure time wide open — the reality is we’re watching way less commercials than we used to. A 2015 inquiry from Exstreamist, which chronicles streaming and TV trends, estimated that Netflix users circa 2015 were averaging 1.5 hours of Netflix consumption a day — a slight decrease from the more recent estimates of 1.67 hours and 2 hours, respectively.
Exstreamist also referenced a Nielsen report that showed both broadcast and cable TV increased its average hourly commercial time in 2014 to the point that commercials comprised 25% of a normal broadcast.
A 2015 report showed that TV networks have been speeding up the playback speed of TV episodes by 10-15% to squeeze an extra ad in during an episode’s time slot.
“With a 30-second ad for the top cable channels selling for more than $17,000, adding two minutes of commercials can add another $68,000 in revenue,” CBS News noted.
TV networks promised to reduce this ad time. Instead, they did the opposite, the Los Angeles Times reported in 2019.
“After declining in 2017, the volume of ads increased every quarter last year (2018) and expanded again in the first half of 2019,” the publication reported.
According to Variety, the United States’ five major English-language broadcast networks secured between $9.6 billion and $10.8 billion for its primetime ads in 2019 — compared with $9.1 billion to $10.06 billion in 2018. Last year was the fourth consecutive year networks increased their ad volume in primetime.
So if you hate ads, things aren’t getting any better on broadcast TV. You may want to stick with streaming.