Just a few months back, OTT giant Netflix had launched its lower priced ad-supported plans for its subscribers in the US, UK, France, Australia, Japan, and some other countries (excluding India). But in case you are thinking that the cheaper plan may have significantly increased Netflix’s growth in subscriber base in the fourth quarter of 2022, then you’re in for a huge surprise.
Despite the fact that Netflix is riding high after the enormous streaming successes of several of its recent titles like ‘Wednesday’, ‘Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery’, and ‘Troll’, etc, its subscriber base growth forecast figures will astound you.
Netflix is set to report the performance / result for the last quarter of the year 2022 on Thursday. And as per the latest report, Netflix is expected to announce that Q4 of 2022 witnessed amongst the lowest Q4 subscriber growths ever for the streaming platform since the year 2014.
As per the report, Netflix is expected to have gained merely 4.5 million subscribers during Q4 of 2022, compared to a significant 8.3 million subscriber growth for 2021’s fourth quarter.
Previously, Netflix had registered Q4 subscriber growths of 8.5, 8.8, 8.8, 6.6, 7, 5.6, and 4.3 million for the years 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014, respectively. This means that, since 2014, Q4 of 2022 was the worst in terms of subscriber growth.
And it’s not just the poor subscriber growth forecast figures for Q4 of 2022, but Netflix is also bracing for the slowest quarterly revenue growth for the same quarter.
Does it imply that Netflix’s ad-supported plan is a failure? Or maybe the cheaper plan will take its own sweet time to attract more subscribers for Netflix. Having said that, in some countries like the US, market saturation may also be an important reason for the lower subscriber growth figures.
As per the previous subscriber figures, Netflix had a whopping number of 222 million subscribers as of September 2022. After the fourth quarter results for 2022 are announced, we can expect the total subscriber figure to reach around 226.5 million. Now, Netflix might want to seriously reassess its ad-supported plan and/or find other means to retain and increase its subscriber base. The OTT platform might also become more choosy when it comes to going ahead with its original projects in the future. It would be interesting to see how Netflix responds to its latest Q4 results.
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