Netflix added subscribers for the first time in 2022, will now stop saying when it adds subscribers

It’s been a wild year for Netflix, the likes of which could someday make for a buzzy documentary series on a streaming service that everyone in the world talks about for a week before it promptly fades away like it had never been there at all, and the whole thing began with the company announcing subscriber numbers that were lower than they were expected to be—a quarterly result that was so unheard of that shareholders sued Netflix for allegedly misleading them about the company’s prospects.

There’s a straight line from those bad subscriber numbers (and the additional bad subscriber numbers from over the summer) to Netflix fast-tracking the long-threatened ad-supported tier of the service, which is coming at the beginning of next month and has some additional drawbacks beyond the inclusion of ads.

Now things are kind of looking up for Netflix, with The Hollywood Reporter saying it added 2.4 million subscribers in the third quarter—the first time it has added new subscribers all year, though the vast, vast majority of that comes from outside the U.S., with North America only contributing 100,000 to that total. It is also expecting to add an additional 4.5 million subscribers in the fourth quarter, but it doesn’t sound like that’s contributing to any newfound confidence for Netflix.

THR says that, starting in January at the end of Q4, it will no longer report subscriber numbers and will instead refocus on revenue, meaning it will keep telling everybody about how much money it makes but will no longer tell everybody about how many subscribers it’s losing (unless the company really is out of the woods and will resume rocketing to the moon next year on the back of this ad-supported plan).