Full up on "quick bites," 90% of first-day users reportedly ditch Quibi after free trial ends
Since launching in April, Quibi has struggled to garner the same robust following as some of its more established competitors. The company has also experienced some major PR snags between going after a fan podcast and spending most of its near–$2 billion capital in its first year of activity. Now it faces a new challenge: user retention.
According to The Verge, reliable analytics company Sensor Tower has detected a significant dip in subscriptions three months after the mobile streaming platform. According to the company’s reports, only 72,000 of Quibi’s 910,000 Day One users have continued their subscription at the end of the 90-day free trial. That’s around an 8% conversion rate. The Verge stays that the percentage itself is not too bad when you stack it against Disney+’s 11%. However, the number becomes rather alarming when you just how many people rushed to download Disney’s on-demand service during the first three days—that is, 9.5 million. 72,000 users sounds much more bleak than over a million, doesn’t it? And when you consider that the quality of available programming just isn’t enough to keep consumers around for long, the prognosis just isn’t great.
To be clear, that figure equates to the number of remaining first-day users, not the total number of Quibi subscribers. Though the company has not provided its analytics, Quibi claims that more than 5.6 million have downloaded the app since April. Sensor Tower, on the other hand, believes that only 4.5 million have signed on. In regards to the discrepancy, Quibi told The Verge, “the number of paid subscribers is incorrect by an order of magnitude. To date, over 5.6 million people have downloaded the Quibi app. Our conversion from download to trial is above mobile app benchmarks, and we are seeing excellent conversion to paid subscribers — both among our 90-day free trial sign-ups from April, as well as our 14-day free trial sign-ups from May and June.”
Hopefully the company will give its remaining customers something a little heartier to chew on very, very soon. A streamer cannot survive on Reno 911! alone.