The company has resisted making major changes for the past year despite slowing growth. Now it’s tearing up its playbook.
For more than a year, Netflix has told anyone who would listen that there was nothing to worry about. Its subscriber growth was slowing, but the problem was temporary. It was just working through Covid weirdness.
Yesterday, the company reversed itself and admitted its business is losing momentum. Netflix lost 200,000 customers in the first three months of the year. The company predicts it will lose another 2 million this quarter. Its stock dropped more than 35% today. Netflix, worth $308 billion in November, is now worth less than $100 billion.
You will read a lot of takes about what this means over the coming days and weeks. Many skeptics of the streaming business will use this moment to claim they were right all along. Netflix is doomed, as is anyone who blindly follows in its footsteps. Ignore them. Netflix defied expectations for a decade and gave every company in Hollywood good reason to try and mimic its success. It’s got 221 million customers, and generates about $30 billion in revenue.
But this isn’t just a bad quarter. This is a watershed moment for the streaming service, which must now attempt its most difficult transition in years. Netflix has always been the upstart, challenging the established powers. That allowed it to move quickly and adapt. It anticipated the last two seismic changes to its business and got in front of the problem before anyone else knew what was happening. It sacrificed its DVD-by-mail business to embrace streaming and started making its own shows before rivals pulled all of theirs.
Now Netflix is the incumbent, the dominant and default streaming service. It must defend its position against rival services that can give customers the same experience as Netflix, often at a lower cost.
So where does Netflix go from here? (A lot of people have asked me this question, so we decided to do a special edition of the Screentime newsletter to cover it all.)
For all the fuss about streaming, the business is pretty simple. Netflix needs to give potential customers a reason to sign up, and existing customers a reason to stay.
Netflix has already begun to experiment with ways of doing both. It expanded into unscripted TV, original movies, animation and foreign-language material. It funded its growing programming budget by raising prices, which generated more revenue per customer.
While both of those strategies worked well for years, they are no longer enough. There aren’t a lot of new programming genres besides sports and news, both of which Netflix has forsworn. And Netflix can’t raise prices forever. Churn – the rate of people dropping the service – is on the rise. It is now the most expensive streaming service in many markets.
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