Streaming platform Stan is a stand out home-grown Australian asset for Nine, growing its subscriber base and revenue at a strong clip.
The latest numbers for the year to June show active subscribers up by 6% to 2.5 million with revenue 22% higher at $381.2 million.
One of the secrets to its success since launching in 2015 with Mike Sneesby, now the CEO of the whole of Nine, has been programming. The platform has built expertise in picking the content that works in Australia.
Its competitors, Netflix and Disney+, are both racing to release a cheaper, advertising-supported tier to their subscriptions.
Should Stan follow?
Sneesby isn’t keen.
“Advertising on a subscription service in the Australian market certainly has a lesser opportunity than other markets,” he told AdNews.
“Australia has a high penetration of subscriptions, but also has a high propensity to pay just due to our economic environment here.
“So the marginal benefit of adding an ad funded tier here, in my view, is very low.
‘For us as a business, we already have a scaled and operating ad funded platform in 9Now and the opportunity if we wanted to bring together advertising opportunities. There are a lot of things that we could do across those platforms that wouldn't require us to launch advertising on Stan.
“So we feel very comfortable with where we are. We'll continue to monitor…but I wouldn't say that you should be expecting to see ads on Stan anytime soon.”
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