Crunchyroll raises the price of its subscription for the first time in five years

Crunchyroll has decided to increase the subscription prices in a series of select countries, leaving the door open to expand them to a few more.

All streaming services are raising their prices. For the past couple of years, there hasn’t been any service that has decided it’s a good idea to keep prices the same, now that everyone uses streaming. This has led to some dissatisfaction among the public. It’s not just that there are many different platforms, but they are also becoming very expensive. And the one that seemed to have no interest in joining this trend, has finally done so.

Crunchyroll has not raised its monthly prices in five years, with one of the most competitive rates among streaming services. That, along with its excellent catalog of video games and anime, has made it a reference for all lovers of Japanese animation. And now, under the subsidy of Sony, they have decided to increase their prices. With the basic subscription remaining unchanged, the Mega Fan increasing by two dollars and the Ultimate Fan increasing by one dollar, the change is small but significant.

Even worse is the fact of reducing its trial period. If until now it was possible to enjoy two weeks of the service for free, from now on it will only be one. Something that may be seen as a minor change, but opens the door for it to completely disappear in the future.

All these changes have been confirmed for Argentina, Colombia, France, Portugal, and the United States. However, they have also stated that they will occur in some other “additional countries”. So it should not surprise us if this also ends up impacting other countries, including ours. Turning Crunchyroll into a slightly less attractive service than before for certain types of users.

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Facebook has sold your private messages to Netflix, but that’s not the worst part

Facebook has been selling its users’ private messages to Netflix, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg of the whole problem.

Monetizing content on the Internet is difficult. We know it well. Google constantly changes the rules, projections are illusory, and where the money is today, next week there may be a terrible sinkhole. Making the Internet a business is tough, it requires a lot of agility, and having a certain foresight for the future. Something that big companies often lack.

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The headline is that Facebook has sold the direct messages of millions of platform users to Netflix, but the story goes beyond that. Because to get to that, we first have to talk about the relationships that occur between strangers who are lovers when there is money involved. How business projections can lead to creating new content. And how that can end up sabotaging their own interests.

Because, to begin with, one thing must be pointed out: everyone is trying to make money from streaming, but no one knows yet how. Twitch doesn’t generate profits. Netflix is in deficit. Xbox Game Pass is a money pit. And Facebook, whose business has nothing to do with streaming, decided to join it with Facebook Watch.

Facebook Watch is an on-demand video service launched by Facebook on August 10, 2017 in the United States and on August 30 in the rest of the world. By gamifying the video watching experience, their intention was to make a big investment in this service. Among other products, it debuted with original programs such as Red Table Talk, Sorry for Your Loss, or Steve, as well as content from National Geographic. More entertainment-based content than fiction.

The interesting thing is that between 2016 and 2017, Facebook invested over a billion dollars in Watch. Facebook explicitly stated that they wanted 30-minute series, as well as shorter ones, with episodes ranging from 5 to 10 minutes. The products they used as examples of where their interests were heading were House of Cards or Scandal. Quite different from what the platform would end up offering.

What happened? What happened was Netflix. While the CEO of Netflix at that time, in 2017, claimed that there was no major conflict with Facebook, since they did not compete for the same products. But in 2018, when Facebook Watch wanted to acquire the license for Dawson’s Creek, competing with Netflix, they suddenly faced a budget cut of $750 million out of nowhere. Thus, Netflix ended up acquiring the rights to Dawson’s Creek, and Facebook Watch began its dismantling, culminating in the cancellation of all its programs in 2023.

Why did this happen? Because Facebook wasn’t interested in competing with Netflix. And all these details have come to light because recently the documents used in an ongoing antitrust lawsuit against Meta have been revealed. The parent company of Facebook. Which has shed light on everything that happened.

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Facebook, upon noticing a decrease in the growth of ad prices between late 2015 and 2016, decided to develop other business strategies to increase the signals received by the artificial intelligence/machine learning systems that support its advertising business. One of these strategies was the production of television content through Facebook Watch. With this, they aimed to increase the amount of money generated by each ad by displaying more ads to their users.

What happened? When Facebook Watch was able to compete with Netflix, or at least invade its interests, Meta decided it wasn’t convenient. This is because Netflix is one of the companies that invests the most money in advertising on Meta.

In fact, here comes the most concerning part. Facebook has confirmed that it shares information not only with Netflix but with numerous other companies as well. Furthermore, with Netflix in particular, it also shares information from our direct messages, at least those related to its service, under an agreement reached in July 2018. Approximately at the same time that Facebook Watch received a brutal budget cut, preventing it from competing as a full-fledged streaming service.

During 2019, Netflix invested $200 million in Meta’s ads. By February 2015, it was at $40 million annually, and by 2017, it reached $150 million. Considering that Facebook’s ad revenue went from $4.28 billion in 2012 to $69.66 billion in 2019, it’s evident that their interest lay more in keeping advertisers happy on Facebook than in building an audiovisual empire.

Meta has not only settled for selling its users’ private messages to Netflix. They have also allowed, at least, access from Spotify. Given that it is known that they also sold user data to Cambridge Analytica, it is not difficult to infer where Meta’s exponential growth comes from, with Facebook at the helm.

In addition, they not only make money from advertising, but also by selling all the data that their users provide. Why bother generating content when you can simply sell ads using user information to make them invest more in your ads? If you thought this only involved what you were offering publicly, maybe you should think twice.

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This is what Americans on average pay per month for streaming services: you won’t believe it

More than a third (36%) of respondents claim that the content available on streaming video services is not worth it.

Many of us wonder about the streaming and its skyrocketing prices, a race that is leaving many users behind, as it is not sustainable to pay more each year for the same services.

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For this reason, many people wonder about the exact amount that households on average spend on streaming services, especially with the explosion of the last two years. Now we have an answer.

According to the 18th annual report from Deloitte on digital media trends, American households subscribed to video streaming entertainment services spend an average of $61 per month on four services. This figure represents a 27% increase compared to the $48 monthly average from last year’s survey.

A bunch of interesting data about streaming consumption

The survey indicates that the price increase in this category may be close to its breaking point:

  • More than a third (36%) of respondents say that the content available on streaming video services is not worth it.
  • And almost half (48%) of respondents say that they would cancel their favorite subscription video-on-demand service if the monthly prices increased by $5 per month.

According to the latest Deloitte report, churn has softened a bit, but it remains high: 40% of consumers claim to have canceled a subscription video-on-demand service in the previous six months, compared to 44% last year.

According to the survey, 67% of respondents want a streaming package that allows them to search for content across multiple services; and 63% want a service package that can be customized every month.

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Interestingly, around 47% of surveyed consumers stated that they would spend more time on streaming video platforms if the content was easier to find. Over half of Generation Z and millennial consumers claim to get better content recommendations through social media than from streaming services themselves.

GeForce Now will still be able to be used for free, but for a price

Nvidia has confirmed that free users of GeForce Now will have ads every two minutes to maintain the viability of the service.

GeForce Now is one of the best ways to play through the cloud. It has one of the most solid streaming services, if not the most, for fairly reasonable prices for what they offer. Especially thanks to their free subscription, where the only thing we were asked for was to wait in line when the servers were congested. At least, until now.

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According to Nvidia, the developer of GeForce Now, free users will have to start seeing ads to use the platform. But there’s a twist: it will only happen in the queues. When users are waiting to enter a game, an ad will play every two minutes in the queue, helping to finance the platform. Nvidia hopes that this will help offset the increase in operational costs.

As the saying goes, when something is free, it’s because you are the product. That’s why GeForce Now has two other subscriptions, Priority and Ultimate, which, although they are paid, will not have ads. That’s why service users will have to decide how they prefer to pay to play.

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