iWorld
Know the story behind Netflix’s ‘skip intro’ button
Mumbai: Streaming major Netflix, in a blog post, revealed that its ‘skip intro’ is pressed 136 million times in a typical day by its members. The platform claims that the feature has saved its members 195 years in cumulative time.
The germ of the idea was conceived six years ago by the Netflix team. The intention was to help members get the most out of their experience on the platform, it said.
“An idea was floated to add skip forward and skip backward buttons in 10-second increments,” stated Netflix director product innovation – studio product management Cameron Johnson. “The reason to offer a skip back 10 seconds was obvious: maybe you got distracted and missed a particular moment.”
“But why skip forward 10 seconds?” Netflix asked themselves. “Well, you might want to skip the opening credits. But no one could come up with any other compelling reasons,” said Johnson.
“At the same time, I was watching Game of Thrones, which has a famously long (and beautiful) opening credits sequence. I found the show so compelling that I wanted to skip the credits and jump right into the story, and I found it frustrating to try to manually jump forward to the just the right place. Sometimes I would jump too far, and sometimes I would jump too short. I wondered whether other people felt the same,” he added.
Netflix research showed that 15 per cent of their members at the time were manually advancing the series within the first five minutes. “This gave us confidence that a lot of people wanted to skip the intro,” noted Johnson.
Instead of building a general purpose solution that may help with several different needs, Netflix designed a single purpose solution that did one thing well.
A little known hack unknown to many Netflix users is that they can press the ‘s’ key on the keyboard to trigger the ‘skip intro’ feature without having to move the mouse.
“To find a name for the button, we brainstormed a few options including ‘Jump Past Credits,’ ‘Skip Credits,’ ‘Jump Ahead,’ ‘Skip Intro’ and simply ‘Skip’ and then started to test the feature with a random set of members,” recalled Johnson.
Netflix initially tested the feature on the web across 250 series excluding films in the US and Canada. According to an engineer, “I’m not sure that if you put a button that said ‘free cupcake’ that it would get more clicks than ‘Skip Intro.’”
“We quickly added ‘Skip Intro’ to TV in August 2017 and mobile in May of the following year. The rest is history,” said Johnson.
iWorld
Netflix ad revenue set to soar past $8bn by 2030, outpacing CTV rivals: Warc
From $1.5bn in 2025 to $8bn in 2030, Netflix is fast becoming a CTV ad powerhouse
MUMBAI: Netflix is turning heads in the advertising world, with forecasts showing its ad revenue set to surpass $8 billion by 2030, outpacing the wider connected TV (CTV) market, according to the latest Warc Media Platform Insights report.
The streaming giant’s advertising journey gained serious momentum in 2025, generating over $1.5 billion, a remarkable increase of more than 2.5 times compared with the previous year. Management aims to roughly double that figure again in 2026, targeting around $3 billion.
Rather than waiting for the market to grow, Netflix is going after a bigger slice of the existing CTV ad pie, and the strategy appears to be paying off. Analysis by Omdia, cited by Warc, predicts Netflix will account for 9.2 per cent of global CTV advertising spend by 2027. By then, the company’s ad growth is projected to hit 58 per cent year-on-year, while the overall CTV market grows at just 9.9 per cent.
CTV may be booming, but traditional TV continues to shrink, losing spend to digital channels and retail media, according to Warc’s latest Global Ad Trends report, Media’s new normal. Despite this, Netflix is focused on monetising its expanding ad inventory with better infrastructure and smarter tools, turning what is currently a small 3 per cent slice of its total revenue into a high-growth engine.
WPP forecasts that Netflix’s $3 billion ad target in 2026 would place it as the 27th-largest global ad seller, just behind French media group RTL. Yet the company sees its relatively modest ad business as an advantage, providing a buffer against market fluctuations while it ramps up operations.
Looking ahead, a potential acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery could give Netflix even more content to offer and bundle, helping to retain subscribers, attract new members, and sustain long-term revenue growth. For now, the platform is quietly staking its claim as a rising star in the CTV advertising arena.
