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Ted Sarandos, Co-CEO of Netflix, speaks at a podium with the Netflix logo during the Stranger Things Season 5 World Premiere.
Getty Images for Netflix
Despite being the obvious victor of the streaming wars, there have been very few spoils — at least as of late — for Netflix.
Take yesterday, when Netflix reported its second-quarter earnings. Despite financial numbers that were more or less in line with Wall Street forecasts and a reported increase in the time subscribers spent on its platform, weak future guidance wasn’t enough to quell the fear that the streamer was struggling.
Its stock price sank more than 11% in premarket trading today. The drop came in addition to the streamer’s 40% stock price slide over the past year.
Its recent trouble evokes the spring of 2021, when a brief dip in subscribers caused a full-blown Wall Street panic, known as The Great Netflix Correction.
Getting to the root of Netflix’s recent struggles is more challenging.
The largest issue the company faces stems from a recent Bloomberg report showing a staggering and widespread drop in viewership for Netflix series from their first season to their second. During a call with analysts yesterday, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos did his best to spin those numbers positively.
“In aggregate, we are not seeing any material change in our second season viewing compared to season one. Our second seasons are performing well within our bands of expectation,” he said, arguing that Netflix shows have such large openings, a drop is inevitable. “Our shows tend to start really big, while in most other places, the shows start really small and occasionally grow from there.”
But Netflix also said it’s pruning the amount of data it’s willing to share on how its shows perform — it will now only release its “What We Watched” report (a large-scale data dump that details what shows its subscribers are tuning into) once a year, instead of its current biannual cadence.
While Netflix should be given credit for being more transparent than its streaming competitors, this latest move certainly won’t stop the narrative that it’s no longer growing like it used to.
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