Netflix is planning to stop reporting subscriber numbers in 2025.
Per Variety, Netflix announced in a first-quarter 2024 earnings report that it will stop reporting subscriber numbers in the first quarter of 2025.
The company said in a letter, “As we’ve noted in previous letters, we’re focused on revenue and operating margin as our primary financial metrics — and engagement (i.e. time spent) as our best proxy for customer satisfaction. In our early days, when we had little revenue or profit, membership growth was a strong indicator of our future potential. But now we’re generating very substantial profit and free cash flow (FCF). We are also developing new revenue streams like advertising and our extra member feature, so memberships are just one component of our growth.
“In addition, as we’ve evolved our pricing and plans from a single to multiple tiers with different price points depending on the country, each incremental paid membership has a very different business impact. It’s why we stopped providing quarterly paid membership guidance in 2023 and, starting next year with our Q1’25 earnings, we will stop reporting quarterly membership numbers and [average revenue per member] ARM.”
How many subscribers does Netflix currently have?
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Netflix added 9.3 million subscribers in the last quarter, bringing their total worldwide subscriber number up to 269.6 million.
Netflix will continue to report “breakout of revenue by region each quarter and the foreign-exchange impact,” according to Variety.
“Success in streaming starts with engagement. When people watch more, they stick around longer (retention), recommend Netflix more often (acquisition) and place a higher value on our service. It’s why we’ve been providing progressively more information on engagement, starting with our Top 10 weekly and most popular lists and more recently our bi-annual report into viewing on Netflix (which covers ~99% of all video watch time on our service). This is more information than any of our competitors provide, and we expect to provide even more over time,” the company said.
