Netflix will no longer report subscriber numbers — which has been a key metric for streaming services for years — beginning with the first quarter of 2025, Variety reported.
The company made the announcement releasing its first-quarter 2024 earnings Thursday. Netflix handily topped expectations for subscribers net adds, gaining 9.33 million in the period, to reach nearly 270 million globally. It also beat Wall Street expectations on the top and bottom lines.
Despite the Q1 earnings beat, Netflix shares dropped more than 4.5% in after-hours trading Thursday, possibly as investors reacted negatively to the news that the streamer will stop reporting quarterly sub totals.
In its Q1 letter to shareholders, Netflix said that engagement – time spent with the service — is its “best proxy for customer satisfaction.” As such, it will no longer report quarterly membership numbers or average revenue per member (which it dubs “ARM”), as of Q1 2025. Netflix said it will announce “major subscriber milestones as we cross them” but will cease disclosing quarterly subscriber numbers.
IGN reported that Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters explained on a call following the reports publication:
“As we noted in the letter, we’ve evolved and we’re going to continue to evolve our revenue model and adding things like advertising and our extra member feature. Things that aren’t directly connected to a number of members. We’ve also evolved our pricing and plans with multiple tiers, different price points across different countries. I think those price points are going to become increasingly different.
So, each incremental member has a different business impact and all of that means is that historical simple math that we all did — you know, number of members times the monthly price – is increasingly less accurate in capturing the state of the business. So this change is really motivated by wanting to focus on what we see are the key metrics that we think matter most to the business. So we’re gonna report on and guide on revenue, on OI, OI margin, net income, EPS, free cash flow.
We’ll add a new annual guidance on a revenue range to give you a bit more of a longterm view. We’re not gonna be silent on members as well We’ll periodically update when we grow and we announce certain major milestones, it’s just not going to be part of our regular reporting. And we want to do all of this thoughtfully and give everyone time to transition, so we’re gonna report subscribers until Q1 of next year, which links into our new annual revenue guidance.”
Deadline reported the new approach by Netflix will remove one element of transparency from its reporting, but in some ways it will bring it a bit more in line with some of its rivals. In the nearly five years since the launch of Apple TV+, the tech giant has never reported any subscriber data. Amazon, similarly, does not break out Prime Video subscribers or viewers as a discrete population, given the company’s broad portfolio of customer offerings.
In my opinion, it seems like Netflix is changing the way they report subscriber numbers because of the trend that other streaming services have gone. Hopefully, this change will benefit Netflix’s customers.