How Samsung is making money from its TVs with ads

By
Ivan Makhynia
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Jonas Leupe / Unsplash

Samsung is one of the largest companies that make TVs. According to some reports, Samsung is the leader in sales of TVs with smart TVs. Indeed, it isn’t difficult to believe it, as Samsung Smart TVs are very high-quality devices and many users note their wide functionality and good picture, which is certainly not worse than the nearest competitors. However, this wasn’t enough for Samsung and they decided that they should also add advertising to their TV.

Of course, not all the users appreciated this step and many thought it wasn’t quite correct that after buying a TV for a few thousand dollars you will still have to watch advertising banners on different parts of the screen. You have to admit that’s not exactly what you expect from a premium TV. However, many point out that in this way Samsung manages to earn a lot more from their TVs than their competitors.

What is Samsung’s ads strategy

Samsung is known for its quality devices. The company sells the most smartphones and TVs. According to some information, Samsung smartphones have almost 20% of all Android users around the world. This is a very large and solid figure. Their TVs are also not far behind. Samsung has several different lines of Smart TVs. You can find cheaper or very expensive models to your taste. However, big sales of the company were not enough. Not so long ago, Samsung began to introduce advertising on their devices.

Advertising banners have been shown on Samsung TV since 2016. Usually, it’s just an insert in the bottom menu bar that you can’t remove. In addition, Samsung has its own strategy for dealing with advertisers. They can show ads to as many users as possible.

Despite the fact that Samsung TVs are quite popular, and have a number of interesting features, such as MultiView, many people were so unhappy with the advertising that they decided to abandon their Samsung TVs. Many experts agree that the problem is mainly due to Forced Advertising. And even then, the company makes a lot of money on its advertising.

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What do forced ads mean

The meaning of forced advertising can be understood directly from its name. It’s an advertisement that is forced by the manufacturer and the average user cannot influence its frequency and the content that will be in it. Often such ads lead to unnecessary things or even to sites with malware and viruses.

Many experts on advertising say that forced advertising is more likely to have a negative impact on both users and publishers. The fact is that many users are very annoyed by the fact that they pay money for a product and then have to watch ads on that product. In the case where the product is distributed free, the situation is slightly different, but if the forced advertising very often there is the same product or service, one of its kind begins to annoy users, it also brings rather a negative effect.

In the case of Samsung TV, many customers were mad because they spent from several hundred to several thousand dollars on a device that then offers them to constantly watch ads that Samsung provides. And the manufacturer doesn’t provide a legal way to turn off these forced advertisements.

Who Samsung ads are aimed at

In fact, there is no clear answer to this question. Usually, advertising is based on your preferences. If you have agreed to have your data processed, then your Smart TV will collect information about your searches and preferences to form ads that are likely to be of interest to you.

In the case of Samsung TV, they started introducing ads with firmware updates back in 2016. This was for both old TVs and new models. At first, they advertised their services and partner companies, such as GameFly, Google Play, or Amazon Video. Also some new movies and devices.

Most of the time these kinds of ads are aimed at loyal users who are likely to go and buy another device or service from a well-recognized company. However, as I mentioned above many users noted that they were not happy with this type of advertising. The fact that advertising in Smartphones and Samsung TV has survived to this day indicates that most likely such a tactic was successful.

How much Samsung earn from advertising

There is no exact information about how much Samsung earns through forced advertising on its devices. However, a former Samsung employee said that they have quite an interesting system for selling advertising, which increases its cost and their earnings compared to their competitors.

Their system is that they don’t sell information about their users, but work in cooperation with advertisers to introduce ads more effectively and reach the maximum audience. They also show ads in all possible places to increase the possibility that the user will pay attention to them.

Overall, Samsung’s advertising experiment is likely to be a huge success. Because despite the fact that at first many users didn’t like this decision, now the company is doing well. There is information that from advertising they earn even more than from the sales of their devices.

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Is it possible to turn off ads on Samsung TV

In case you don’t like advertising on Samsung TV then unfortunately there is no legal way to get rid of ads on your TV. However, there are some interesting tricks. They will be related to the settings of your router and your TV startup settings.

The thing is that the ads are shown in the shell of your smart TV, which is called Smart Hub, but if you do not use a smart TV, but for example use a regular TV or set-top box, then you can disable the Smart Hub startup by default via your TV settings. After that, when you turn on the TV, Smart Hub will not start and ads will not be a problem for you.

Another solution is to block access to Samsung servers on your router. That way the advertising inserts can’t take data from there and won’t be able to show you ads. However, this may prevent you from using these servers in the future if you need to use them for other reasons, e.g. to update the firmware.

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