this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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It’s spin. The additional subscriptions came from markets where Netflix is cheap. Not North America.
“While the company added subscribers, it said average revenue per member fell 3% from a year earlier. That was partly because many of the new sign-ups came in countries where Netflix charges lower prices.”
https://www.reuters.com/technology/netflix-tops-wall-street-forecasts-with-password-limits-ad-option-2023-07-19/
It looks like they also gained over one million subscribers in the quarter in the US/Canada, and average revenue per membership dropped from $16.18 to $16. It was technically a bigger subscriber gain this quarter than they had in 2021 and 2022 combined. (In 2021 they gained a little over one million, but in 2022 they lost nearly one million.)
Some people paying for a higher tier for extra concurrent streams probably dropped to a lower tier. Then some of the people they shared with may have also joined at a lower tier. Both would drop the average.
Netflix just dumped one of those lower tiers you mentioned (though existing subscribers at that tier are currently grandfathered in). The same article I linked to points out that they also aren’t seeing the uptake for their ad supported tier they’d hoped for. And they’re already coaching that next quarters guidance will be down further. I expect more churn as Netflix quality continues to decline and competition and prices continue to increase.
I'm curious to see how streaming services are going to be affected by the strikes. Theoretically down the road they'll reach a point for a while where they have very little new content to release and will be fighting each other for the rights to existing content.
Just curious, are we sure the numbers reported are “net gain” and not “number of new subscribers”? Distinction being “number of new subscribers” would be all the people that signed up, and “net gain” would be all the people that signed up & subtract those that canceled?
Earnings reports are always full of word tricks to paint the prettiest picture so I’m just curious if we know the net number?
For example, all those articles that came out a week after the change went into effect were bullshit bc they didn’t take into account people who canceled and still had days left til their end of month, instead they only captured the 3 days after the policy change and Netflix got all the media to report this awesome stat for them.
Yeah. If you check their actual released spreadsheets it includes losses and gains (some quarters are overall losses, some full years are overall losses). They also include the overall number of paid memberships which also reflects the same gain (or loss where it's a loss). So like this quarter was up to 75.571 million from 74.398 million the previous quarter.
Cheers, thank you.