Technology

A spike in subscribers for a period doesn't necessarily mean they're making more money than before, even if the number of new signups offsets the cancellations.

I used to pay for the Premium plan, sharing with my parents, but downgraded to the Basic plan. My parents ended up getting their own Basic plan. So a single account essentially split into two, but the sum of both payments is now less than what it used to be for the single account. So Netflix gained an extra subscriber, but is now making less money from that pool of users.

It's totally possible that some number of these new signups consist of people who did the same thing.

Basically, seeing a spike in new signups isn't itself a measure of success. What matters is how much money they're bringing in monthly going forward compared to previously.

Sad. I will probably make a Plex server or something for people I share a password with when it comes to the EU.

This increase will be more interesting as we see the trend over time. My thought is that while sub numbers will go up, renewal rates, generally, but certainly post-trial will drop precipitously due to casual/temporary interest for the hit show or movie of the week/month/year - using someone else's login to watch a singular "must watch" of the moment will not directly translate to ongoing subscriptions.

Netflix has shifted to quantity over quality (not saying some of their content is not still quite high quality) and with that, viewership and subscription trends will shift as well.

It is frankly insane how much attention those three paragraphs from a random outlet have garnered. The data they release is sparse, with little context, and largely obscure. It reads like the abstract of a term paper that used questionable statistics to validate a preconceived point. I would not be surprised to find out that they had incentive to publish something that makes Netflix's decision look successful to investors. But even if you trust their numbers, all they are saying is that Netflix had more signups than usual on two days. It doesn't mean anything.

I actually had no issues with Netflix enforcing their ToS but people can of course cancel their subscriptions if they want. I have no issues with paying for a good service.

It's a little buried in the account settings, but Netflix does allow account sharing for an additional fee (~$7?). I know families that went with this option so they could continue sharing their account with elderly parents, and college aged children.

I imagine that if a group of friends agreed to split the cost of an account + fees, they would end up paying less than having individual accounts.