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We chat about that looong wait between Netflix seasons, the expensive competition Fox is about to face for World Cup rights, and also what’s Microsoft going to do now with Xbox?
With engagement down nearly 20% in two years, Netflix looks to move on from the binge era it created
Just over two years ago, as it began to fear saturation in the “total global addressable market” for streaming, Netflix announced that it would no longer report metrics focused on quarterly subscriber growth.
Besides revenue and operating margin, engagement — defined as time spent on Netflix by its paid members — was the “best proxy for customer satisfaction,” Netflix told investors at the time.
But lately, engagement, or lack thereof, has turned out to be big a problem for Netflix, too.
Paywalled Bloomberg, for example, recently compared the number of “views” individual seasons of Netflix series generated in their first 28 days on the platform using the streaming company’s own internal data. Bloomberg found that views for recent Netflix originals regularly drop off by huge percentages between their first and second campaigns.
Take Lee Sung Jin’s ensemble-cast-driven dark comedy, Beef, which originally dropped all 10 first-season episodes on April 6, 2023. It wasn’t until more than three years later, April 16, 2026, that all eight episodes of Season 2 premiered. According to Bloomberg, Season 2 — which also featured an entirely different cast — finished with a whopping 70% fewer views.
We liked this chart assembled by Roger Cheng at TheWrap:
