Hi, I'm Missa Kwonger. And I'm Ryan Hunt. And we co-host Stadio, a football podcast on the Ring of Podcast Network.

If you like soccer or football, make sure you search for Stadio, a football podcast on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

It is Monday, May 22nd. The television upfronts wrapped up this past week in New York.

If you're unfamiliar, those are the annual presentations for advertisers where they go through

all the new fall shows and wine and dine the brand reps and argue why they should be spending

billions of dollars on TV, not YouTube, although YouTube now does its own presentation.

I didn't go. I'm not an upfronts fan.

The parties mostly suck and everything's webcast these days.

Plus this year, the writers strike prevented stars and showrunners from even participating.

Instead, we saw people like Damar Hamlin and Greg Gutfeld on stage.

But there was one new and interesting thing at the up fronts.

Netflix. After years of saying it would never sell advertising and kind of looking down on the

whole ad market, Netflix now sells ads. They've offered the cheaper ad tier on Netflix for

about six months now. They said they've got about five million ad tier subscribers. Not bad for

that amount of time, but a small fraction of the 230 million subscribers worldwide.

Still, there were the top executives, Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters, doing their own pitch to these same advertisers,

arguing why Netflix is the best platform for ads.

They had some good arguments.

The level of viewing kind of blows away all the other

streamers. Three times the others combined, they said. And they positioned their entry into ads as the

equivalent of inventing the binge model for shows. Innovative, they said. I'm not so sure about that.

But it was a decent pitch, especially since Netflix scrapped a live upfront in favor of a tape presentation because of the strike.

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