Netflix had announced its intention to introduce advertising into its services as early as April, but in mid-July the idea took a more concrete form with the announcement of Microsoft's involvement to manage advertising. The goal in the medium and long term is to plug the losses related to the decline in subscribers that occurred in the first two semesters of the year. The loss of 200 thousand subscribers that occurred between January and March of this year, in addition to causing a drastic drop in the stock market, in fact induced the company to intervene to prevent the sharing of the password of the same subscription and forced it to lay off 150 employees to reduce their costs. Between April and June, the service reported the loss of one million subscribers. Many, of course, but the estimates predicted a drop of two million subscribers, so the news was greeted with optimism by the company.
Obviously Netflix's user base can't grow indefinitely, but the company wants to work to keep the subscribers it already has and possibly convince some of those who unsubscribed during the first half of the year of the year to return. To this end, there was first an expansion of the gaming offer, which expanded the service offered to users and allowed the company to derive or test ideas from which to start new television productions. The subscription plan with advertising is now ready.