I paid ahead on my Hulu account, and, as such, it seems they won’t let me upgrade to an ad-free version. As I’m binging shows on Hulu lately, I’ve been stuck with a long-forgotten problem: ads. There are so many ads. You’ll be watching a 30 minute show and have to suffer nearly 10 minutes of ads during it. It’s maddening. However, lots of things are maddening these days. Instead of angrily calling up Hulu and demanding an ad-free subscription, I’ve instead taken to finding other things to do during the commercial breaks. I’ll mute my TV, as commercials are excessively annoying, and then I’ll pick up a book, my Switch, or my iPhone, if I wasn’t using it already.
Guess I won’t be using “MoviePass 2.0.” The new plan uses eye tracking to make sure you’re watching those ads to “earn” the movies you’d like to watch.
Unfortunately, it could be the future of ad tech.
MoviePass 2.0
This is MoviePass 2.0…. or is it 3.0? They’ve gone through many changes over the years. So what happened to “MoviePass 1.0?” MoviePass charges a subscription, and, with that, people would get to see movies. Simple, right? It started off as $9.95/month to see one movie per day. You might already see the problem. A movie ticket costs $15-$20, sometimes even more than that. As it turns out, those high ticket prices were keeping people home. There wasn’t a lack of desire to see movies, movies were just too expensive. When people could see a movie every day, many people did see a movie every day. Their business model attracted movie fanatics, and with the price set at just $9.95 per month, even people less likely to go to the movies often were using their pass monthly.
So MoviePass went to just three movies per month. Still, this didn’t slow down usage enough to make a profit. MoviePass made a few changes, attempted to perform more data collection, but ultimately, couldn’t stay in business. MoviePass declared bankruptcy in 2020.
The New MoviePass
Co-Founder Stacy Spikes returned to bring MoviePass back with a new payment scheme. Rather than just pay for movies like some silly subscription service, users will instead (or perhaps also) have to earn those movies. MoviePass users will earn credits by watching ads. In tests, MoviePass realized something. People hate ads. We see ads everywhere, all the time. We’re being tracked across the web and through our everyday lives for the purpose of ads. Now, more than ever, people cannot stand ads. So, when one would come up on their phone, people would load up the advertisements and then walk away. Their phone would play the ads and they would do the dishes, pull up something on a different device, or otherwise not waste time watching those ads.
So MoviePass got an idea. Maybe they watched A Clockwork Orange recently, but they thought, “What if we could force users to watch ads?” From that, a technological version of tying someone up with their eyes held open was born. Using facial recognition and eye tracking, MoviePass can ensure users are watching their ads and really earning those credits. They even came up with a scheme to give users additional credits if they buy items they see in ads.
Yeah. It’s Creepy.
No one seems enthused about this. MoviePass doesn’t have a good track record when it comes to privacy either. The company’s $10/month plan just wasn’t making enough money, so they wondered what data they could collect about users to potentially make more money from them. Under previous CEO Mitch Lowe, the company started tracking users. Not just when they used the app or were in a movie theater, but before and after as well.
“We watch how you drive from home to the movies. We watch where you go afterwards.”
– Mitch Lowe, former MoviePass CEO
This kind of tracking wasn’t even something users agreed to. In fact, it wasn’t in the privacy policy at all. After the CEO let the information leak, the company quickly turned tracking off after facing backlash. Still, many lost faith in MoviePass. With ads that require eye tracking and pay you for making purchases with movie tokens, it doesn’t seem like MoviePass is very interested in protecting users’ privacy… or their dignity.
The Future of Advertising
Ad tech hasn’t been kind to consumers. In the pursuit of infinite profits, companies have gone from trying to figure out the best kinds of ads for the demographics of their users to simply tracking every user individually and targeting them with relevant ads. Ad tech is already downright dystopian. With ads tracking how much you’re looking at them, they could do a lot more than just give you credits. They could figure out what ads get more eye attention, which ads you read as you scrolled past them, and even whether or not you looked away to perhaps search for an item elsewhere.
In this dystopian eye tracking future, you might not only have to look at ads. They might look back at you too.
Sources:
- Rebecca Alter, Vulture
- Devin Coldewey, TechCrunch
- Matthew Gault, Motherboard
- Caroline Haskins, Motherboard
- David Wolinsky, GameSpot