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Is advertising coming to Netflix? It's been a point of speculation over the past few days, it seems. The streaming service didn't add as many new subscribers as Wall Street analysts estimated it would, and this has people debating what, if anything, Netflix should be doing in the name of "growth." (Otherwise known as taking in more money to pass along to investors.)

While I certainly understand the business case for creating an advertising-supported service tier, in order to give people an entry point into the service that doesn't cost as much as a subscription-only model, there is another wrinkle, which while I'm sure that Netflix' executives are mulling over, hasn't really made it into the media articles: Who would be advertising?

For all that advertising receives a bad rap, it's not that advertising is bad, per se. But a lot of it is low-quality. What prompted me to finally install an ad blocker on Firefox were advertisements that were in some cases nonsensical, and in others, actively bothersome. A couple of weeks ago, I was out having dinner with friends, and there were televisions going in the restaurant. I learned that competitive Tag was a thing, and that while there is apparently enough of a market to televise it, it doesn't command particularly high advertising rates. So there were a lot of commercials for cheap products and featuring former celebrities that I hadn't heard anything from in decades. And while one can make the case that these aren't the sort of outfits that would be able to afford to advertise on an upper-tier platform like Netflix, there are a couple of counter arguments: If the point behind creating a less (comparatively) expensive tier is to entice people to sign up for the service without needing to pony up as much money, is there an expectation that advertisers are always going to roll out expensive, high-quality advertising to reach them? Also, the more places there are to advertise, the less money any one of them is going to be able to command. While the understanding is currently that advertisers are chasing Netflix, will there be advertising-supported service tiers that wind up chasing advertisers? The web is already full of poor-quality, misleading and oddly sexualized advertising, tacked on to the bottoms of webpages, because these are the outfits that are willing to pay to be presented there. And on some platforms, advertising rates are low enough that fraudsters can afford to troll for marks. As advertising proliferates, and prices drop, the quality and relevance of advertising declines with it.

And I suspect that Netflix is considering that, if only because once advertising is a part of the picture, it often becomes seen as part of the offering. Bad advertising can lower perceptions of the service as a whole. And while that's unlikely to be a near-term phenomenon (so Wall Street is unlikely to care), for people who need to take a longer-term view, it's worth thinking about.