For years, Netflix investors cared about one thing more than anything else: Go-go growth, which they measured by the number of subscribers the streaming company signed up.
Now, those investors are going to have to live without that data.
Starting next year, Netflix will stop releasing subscriber statistics on a regular basis, the company announced. Instead, it said in an investor letter, it will “announce major subscriber milestones as we cross them.”
It’s a major shift in how the company interacts with Wall Street. And it comes on the same day that the company announced a huge boost in subscribers: Netflix said it added 9.3 million paying users in the last quarter — about 4 million more than the average Wall Street forecast.
What’s the rationale for the change?
Netflix says it’s because it no longer thinks subscriber growth is a good way to understand the company’s progress — something it has been saying for some time in its investor letters.
Here’s the explanation in their words:
“In our early days, when we had little revenue or profit, membership growth was a strong indicator of our future potential. But now we’re generating very substantial profit and free cash flow (FCF). We are also developing new revenue streams like advertising and our extra member feature, so memberships are just one component of our growth. In addition, as we’ve evolved our pricing and plans from a single to multiple tiers with different price points depending on the country, each incremental paid membership has a very different business impact.”
To push that point across, last year, Netflix stopped providing quarterly guidance on subscriber growth. But analysts still created their own estimates. But starting in the first quarter of next year, that’s all going to grind to a halt.
Netflix shares are down a bit after the news — which could simply be a reaction to the fact that Netflix stock has been on a tear for some time, so even wowza numbers aren’t enough to wow investors right now.
Will Netflix be able to crush it in the future?
But it’s also understandable if investors think Netflix is going to stop providing subscriber numbers because the numbers aren’t going to be as impressive in the future.
Which, really, is a proxy for the main question about Netflix for a very long time: Just how big can the company get?
Today, Netflix has nearly 270 million paid subscribers around the world, which makes it much, much bigger than its peers. But for the past few years, investors have wondered if Netflix might be stalling — either because of competition from the likes of Disney, or because there simply may not be as many people interested in paying for videos, period.
That’s why Netflix’s admission that it lost a million subscribers two years ago shook the entire media world and had everyone asking — was that a Netflix problem or a Streaming problem?
Since then, investors have stopped telling would-be Netflix rivals to grow at all costs, and have started pushing them to worry about profits, not subscriber numbers (this also, not coincidentally, synced with the end of zero interest rates, which changed the way most investors viewed most companies, period).
Netflix now looks well set up to live in that world, too: After burning money for years as it built up its streaming business, it is now consistently profitable — this quarter, it earned an eye-popping $2.3 billion on revenue of $9.4 billion, though some of that seems due to one-time accounting issues.
Will that satisfy investors? On the one hand — it’s going to take some getting used to, and plenty of people will reasonably be asking why now? On the other: There really aren’t any rules about how this stuff works — which is why Google/Alphabet has provided next-to-no information about its business forever and has been rewarded with sky-high stock for most of that time. Let’s see if it works for Netflix.
