Not Showing At Netflix: The Great Online Ad Slowdown
The online ad slowdown that everyone has seen and heard about? It has yet to benefit Netflix (NFLX), one of the world’s biggest buyers of online advertising.
That odd bit of cognitive dissonance surfaced yesterday, when the DVD rental company said it hadn’t been able to buy Web ads at a discount at the end of 2008. Hard to tell if it’s meaningful - does this mean the slowdown hasn’t been as great as people think, or is it just a statistical anomaly? - but it is interesting.
The details: During the company’s Q4 earnings call, CEO Reed Hastings told analysts that Netflix "didn’t see any benefits" from lower online ad pricing during the last three months of last year.
That’s odd, since Netflix buys more online ad inventory than just about everyone. Last year, when Nielsen Online would provide monthly reports about top advertisers on the Web, Netflix routinely made the top 10 list, along with a handful or mortgage and finance companies. (Surely you’ve been annoyed by their omnipresent pop-under ads). So if anything, its leverage should have increased in the past few months.
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