Could Paid Advertisements Be Coming To Disney+?

Disney’s CEO Bob Chapek was recently asked about this very possibility via virtual conference at Goldman Sachs 30th Annual Communicopa Conference, and based on his response, he’s open to exploring the idea. Here’s what Bob had to say:

“I think what’s driving it is that combination of great content that draws a lot of eyeballs and draws a lot of interest and a lot of viewership. But at the same time, really sophisticated modeling and technology that we have that enables our advertisers to target exactly who they want, when they want and how they want. Now, in terms of this extendibility to our other platforms, I think it’s important to realize the different target audiences of the platforms.

And for example, Disney+ has a lot of kids that watch it, and the taste for us to consider advertising on something like Disney+ would be completely different than it might be on a Hulu. So then again, you take that individual, no one size fits all type approach that we are looking at across the world. And you say where do we have that opportunity? Where do we not have that opportunity? And then how does that change over time as we look at combining things or keeping things separate à la carte? And so all this is malleable. Again, it’s soft clay right now. And we are very pleased with what we are seeing with addressable advertising on Hulu.

And I would say that does that lead us to think big thoughts about what could happen in other markets across the world? Certainly, it does. But for right now, again, really happy with sort of the à la carte mode that we have with this bundling opportunity and keeping things the way they are, but that doesn’t say that in the future, we might not look at different opportunities for an increased level of addressable advertising across our platforms.”

Streaming services like Hulu, Amazon Prime, and Netflix have certainly revolutionized the way families continue to take in home entertainment, however, there may be a few challenges with bringing monetized advertisements to the platform.

As “What’s On Disney+” pointed out, there are regulations against specific types of advertisements at different points in the day in other countries such as the UK. Chapek also acknowledges that a good majority of viewers are children and with these restrictions on ads in place, finding the right ones for specific times through a day’s cycle would have to be taken into consideration. There is also the question of would we see a decrease in subscribers. I believe that could be swiftly shifted between different tiered platforms (similar to the success Hulu has seen) between an option that would be cheaper where the ads would carry the difference in the monthly cost to the provider.

So it seems there’s a lot to take into consideration with this loaded question, however, it does seem to be a question that we may be seeing a response to in the future.