200,000 users abandon Netflix after crackdown backfires::Aussies have spoken, and the results are not looking good for Netflix. A new report reveals why users are turning to streaming competitors.
This article is specifically about Australia. Globally, Netflix added 5.9 million subscribers after their password-sharing crackdown.
I hate to say it, but the crackdown worked exactly as intended.
iirc, they launched in new countries at the same time, skewing the result quite a bit. Probably intentional to say “see? it worked”
Edit: can’t quite find a source for it. Might have been somthing I misread. Take with a grain of salt
It probably did work though. We had some relatives piggy-backing off of our top tier 20 year old account when we got shut down last August in what must have been beta testing for the program. We cancelled our account. I’m not sure how many of the relatives ended up getting their own accounts but the poorest and least able to afford an additional monthly charge went and signed right up, so they were at at least a net zero change in subs there (though they signed up for the cheapest option).
People are just disappointing.
Not to mention that they did start with the narrative that they start enforcing this on a certain date, but it took me 2 months over that to receive the warning/being locked out. I remember seeing people from Canada (one of the countries in the first wave) that still had not been forced off 4 months into the date they had set.
They appear to be taking it slow (not booting off everyone at the same time) to build this narrative that it’s working fantastically so to not get a massive drop off in users (stock price drop) and waiting out for their competition to also move forward with this change. All of this while also adding more markets, dropping the prices in others and removing the cheaper plans.
As far as I’m aware, our account for the notification once, my wife exited it without doing anything, and everyone is still able to access it to this day.
Yeah, it’s not like people quit because Netflix said they’ll crack down.
They’ll quit after Netflix hassles them a couple times for it.
And yet their stock dropped massively after revealing the 5 million gain because investors realize that it was a one time boost that won’t help them in the long run.
the ad supported subscription cost less, so I wonder if they are still making as much money
Supposedly, Netflix makes more from the ads tier:
In Q2, as in the previous quarter, Netflix’s advertising tier generated higher average revenue per user (ARPU) overall than the Standard ad-free plan ($15.49/month), implying more than $8.50/month in ad revenue per subscriber, Neumann said.
I hate to say it, but the crackdown worked exactly as intended.
Of course it did. Why wouldn’t it? It’s not like anyone is thinking “oh my grandson’s friend can’t use my account for free anymore, I’m going to cancel my subscription now!”. All while Netflix is dramatically reducing their server load costs.
I live in multiple places with each stay lasting about three months. So far Netflix has not given me shit about it. It just asks me if I want to movey home address. As long as it continues to let me move around, we’re cool. The moment it decides that I have to open a separate account per home, I am out. I watch Paramount+ the most anyway.
EDIT: Honestly, the real conversation should be how mid Netflix original content is most of the time. Their best shit is stuff they import.
I have a similar lifestyle thanks to work and Netflix did exactly what will make you cancel. Whatever you do, don’t set it up on your home smart TV because that’s the thing that screwed up my account. Suddenly, I had to create new accounts for every random hotel I was living in for months at a time or go home every 30 days to reconnect to my home WiFi. I cancelled as soon as the account I paid for, that I didn’t share outside my household suddenly stopped working. As an aside, I wonder how this effects other traveling people: truckers, military families, traveling nurses, or air crew.
Maybe. It’s just the start right? How many will keep those subscriptions? What about when they raise costs again? I’ve had a Netflix account for a really really long time. I was even grandfathered into a plan at one point. Eventually was forced into coughing up more and more money, getting less and less for it. It wasn’t just the password sharing. It was the way they keep running their business, and how it’s going across the whole streaming system. I cancelled my service a few days ago after over a decade of service.
On top of this all: 🤬 ads. I’m so sick of being bombarded literally everywhere. From Products I buy and bring home, to being outside of the house. I’m sick of being a cash cow and getting ’trickle down’ wages and dealing with inflation. So yeah. 🖕 Netflix.
wow, surprising in a way but i guess people just want easy access to content to binge
Cable cost hundreds and still had ads, people won’t give a fuck over 20$ if that means relative ease of watching season 57 of Big Mouth
200,000 users is like a piss in the ocean for Netflix, especially when every other major streaming platform is also hiking prices, introducing ads and cracking down on account sharing.
We are still far from the days of cable.
The significance of this, in my opinion, isn’t that Netflix lost 200,000 users in Australia, but that for the first time Netflix has seen a decline of users in Australia. No more line goes up, oh no!
Either way, this is probably less from password crackdowns, more people jumping to alternative streaming platforms.
Piracy is a right.
Legally, it is not, but I get your sentiment.
I would like to say piracy against the big guy also hurts the little guy making the content you like.
I am all for pirating that scientific journal and that college book but there is a reason writers, artists, and the people making a shit amount of money for the work they put into the things we love.
I won’t support something that hurts a regular person giving me the things I like to watch, but I get your sentiment.
Users =/= Subscribers. Most of these users are probably not paying users so from a financial perspective it does not hurt Netflix to shed them.
Article seems to confuse cause and effect. Maybe some subscribers left but they more likely because the service is too expensive or didn’t like the content. It doesn’t necessarily follow they all left because some freeloaders lost their access to another person’s account.
In all fairness, it’s a Forbes article, which generally implies it’s crap.
