You picked the streaming plan with ads because it was cheaper. Smart move. I’d have done the same.
But sometime this year, you started noticing the commercial breaks felt longer. You weren’t imagining it.
Ad minutes per hour across the major U.S. streaming services climbed 18% between January and August, according to data from research firm Ampere Analysis, provided to Business Insider. Eight of the nine services measured are showing you more ads than they did in January.
Nobody sent you a notice. Your price didn’t go down to match. The deal you agreed to just got worse — and I mean that in the literal, measurable sense.
So I did what a CPA does. I ran the numbers.
What you’re buying when you upgrade to ad-free
Here’s the thing nobody frames correctly. When you pay extra for the ad-free tier, you’re not buying a better experience. You’re buying back hours of your life.
That means it has a price per hour. And you can calculate it.
Take the monthly gap between the ad tier and the ad-free tier. Divide it by the hours of commercials you’d sit through. Now you know exactly what your time is worth to the streaming company — and whether you’re getting robbed.
I used 20 hours of viewing per month per service. Adjust for your own habits.
The four numbers that should make you angry
Prices below come straight off each company’s own pricing page in mid-September. Ad loads are the August figures from Ampere via Business Insider.
- Paramount+: $8.99 with ads, $13.99 without. That’s $5 to escape 9.01 minutes of commercials an hour. You’d sit through 36 hours of ads a year on the cheap plan. The cost to buy that time back: $1.66 an hour.
- Hulu: $11.99 with ads, $18.99 without. A $7 gap against 8.23 ad minutes an hour, or 32.9 hours a year. That’s $2.55 an hour.
- Disney+: $11.99 with ads, $18.99 without. Same $7 gap, 7.54 ad minutes an hour, 30.2 hours a year. That’s $2.79 an hour.
- Netflix: $8.99 with ads, $19.99 without. An $11 gap against just 2.44 ad minutes an hour. You’d only sit through about 9.8 hours of commercials all year. That’s $13.53 an hour.
Read that last one again.
Netflix is charging you $11 a month — $132 a year — to skip roughly 10 hours of advertising. That’s over eight times what Paramount+ charges for the same favor.
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The upgrade almost everyone gets backwards
If you’re paying for ad-free Netflix because you hate commercials, you overpaid. Badly. Netflix runs the lightest ad load in the business, and it still charges the biggest premium to remove it.
Meanwhile the service jamming nine minutes an hour into your evening asks for five bucks to stop.
Paramount+ is the cheapest hour you’ll buy back all year, and I’d bet almost nobody reading this has made that trade.
One caveat worth knowing: Paramount says its Premium tier is commercial-free for on-demand viewing, not for live TV. If you’re watching CBS live, you’ll still get ads. Hulu’s no-ads plan carries a similar exception on a handful of titles.
The part that bothers me
Netflix went from 1.40 ad minutes an hour in January to 2.44 in August. That’s a 74% increase in commercial time — the largest jump of any service measured.
Netflix also raised the price of that ad tier by a dollar in March.
So subscribers paid more and got more commercials, in the same year, without anyone asking them. Amazon’s Prime Video was the lone exception in the study, trimming its load slightly.
I’ve been writing about this stuff since 1991, and this is an old trick in new clothes. Cable did it. Airlines do it. You lock in a price, then the product shrinks around it while the number on your bill stays put.
The only defense is measuring it, which is what most people never bother to do.
What I’d do
Stop treating the ad-free upgrade as a single decision. It’s a different deal at every service, and the differences are enormous.
If you’re on ad-free Netflix, drop to the ad tier. You’ll save $132 a year and give up about 10 hours of commercials. That’s a trade I’d take every time.
If you’re on ad-supported Paramount+, Hulu or Disney+ and you actually watch them regularly, the upgrade is cheap and worth considering.
And if a service is showing you 30-plus hours of ads a year and you’re not watching it much? That’s not an upgrade decision. That’s a cancellation.
Streaming was supposed to be the escape from cable. Run your own numbers before you decide it still is.
If your bill has crept up, “Overspending on Streaming Services? Here Are 3 Ways to Rein It In” is a good next read.
For the free alternatives, see “3 Services That Will Save You $500 on Movies and Streaming This Year.” And if the audit turns up more than streaming, “10 Subscriptions to Cancel Right Now” covers the rest of the leaks.
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