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Netflix has had a heck of a 2022, and the company put a ton of work into turning its fortunes around. The streaming giant introduced an ad-supported payment tier last November in hopes of recapturing its audience. Well, according to internal figures spotted by Bloomberg, Netflix’s ad-supported tier is picking up steam in the US.
Netflix’s ad-supported tier is picking up steam in the US
So, for 30% less than the cheapest ad-free tier, you get most of the perks. Despite this, the ad-supported tier had a slow start. This was bad because Netflix was facing a lot of backlash because of its harsh password-sharing crackdown. In fact, in Q4 2022, Netflix led the pack in service cancelations.
However, Bloomberg was able to see some internal documents about the ad-supported tier. It seems that there are now more than a million users on the ad-supported plan*. The asterisk is necessary here, as it’s not as cut and dry as that.
Firstly, fortunately for Netflix, the majority of those users are new sign-ups or re-sign-ups. This means that most people didn’t hop down from a more expensive plan. This means that most of the people on the plan were attracted to Netflix.
The thing is that a lot of the people on the plan are folks sharing passwords. So, many of the users are just multiple people using the same account. So, while there are a bunch of users, we don’t know how many accounts there are on the plan.
Also, as stated in the report, this news is a month old. If we want more information on the numbers, then we might have to wait until sometime after March ends. This is when we’ll start seeing companies’ reports for Q1 2023.
In any case, it seems that people do see the value in spending time watching ads over spending money. As time goes on, we’ll see even more people jump onto the ad-supported payment tier… this is if this whole password-sharing crackdown doesn’t push all its users away.
What’s this plan all about?
Netflix released this tier back in late November 2022, and it delivers some decent perks. For starters, it’s almost identical to the $9.99/month Basic plan. For $6.99/month, you can watch content on one screen at a time at up to 720p resolution.
You have access to most of the content on the platform. However, there could be content unavailable to you due to licensing issues. Also, you can’t download shows and movies for obvious reasons. If you want to check it out, click here.