Screw it, Netflix just isn't going to tell you how many subscribers they have any more
Netflix—already mega-secretive about viewership—announced today it'll soon be releasing even fewer numbers about its performance.
One of the big things that happened, when the rise of streaming TV kicked off roughly a decade ago, is that everybody got very cagey about numbers, very quickly. Netflix was the first to get the big idea, of course, realizing that, since they’d essentially sidestepped Nielsen ratings entirely (with the polling company only recently able to offer even loose numbers of its own to track who’s watching what), it didn’t do anybody any good to tell the public what they weren’t watching. This strategic (if annoying) secrecy surrounding ratings kicked off a whole era where the only time you heard numbers from any of the streamers was when they could find a way to spin something extremely positive—an endless cavalcade of “biggest premiere this week!,” “hottest weekend launch!,” “most watched Arbor Day release ever!” accolades.
The one place the public (and, indeed, Netflix creators, who aren’t any happier about most of this stuff) could usually get straight numbers was in subscriber counts, usually released as part of the various entertainment giants’ quarterly reports to their shareholders. But now, even that little island of certainty is going away, as Netflix announced today that it’s no longer releasing subscription numbers. According to the streamer, starting in 2025 it’s not telling people how many subscribers it has, or how much money it gets per customer, claiming that its “best proxy for customer satisfaction” is simply “engagement,” i.e., how many minutes people spend with the service.
There is an argument to be made here: Given that Netflix has branched out, in the last year or so, into running ads on the service—and muddled both subscriber numbers and revenue with their crackdown on password sharing, which allows users to pay a separate fee to add people to their existing plans—it’s not hard to understand why engagement would have become more important of late, rising to the top of the pile of metrics the company uses to gauge success.
Still, it’s also not hard to see the decision to retreat from the “Who’s got the most subscribers?” stakes as, well, a bald-faced effort to avoid embarrassment (and even, potentially, lawsuits; the company got sued for missing projections a few years back, when numbers dipped for the first time in basically forever). The upshot of all this is that we’ll soon have even less data on how well the streamers are actually doing—a shift that serves Netflix, and pretty much nobody else.
Ironically, Netflix announced the news alongside some of its best new numbers in recent memories, revealing global subscribership has climbed to 270 million. Maybe they just want to go out on top.