Netflix will no longer report quarterly subscriber numbers

Netflix kicked off its password-sharing crackdown last year, leading to several other major services doing the exact same thing. Now, Netflix has made the decision to stop sharing subscriber numbers with investors, something that the media company's bankrollers are clearly unhappy about. 

Netflix held its most recent quarterly earnings call this week, announcing that it had brought in over nine million new subscribers in the past three months. Additionally, the service as a whole is bordering on the 300 million subscriber milestone worldwide. However, while the company will continue to update investors on subscriber counts when the service hits a major milestone, it will no longer provide regular, quarterly updates on its numbers.

Netflix CEO, Greg Peters, explained that it no longer views quarterly subscriber counts as a good metric for measuring the success of the service. Instead, Netflix wants investors to place more value in metrics like ‘total hours watched'. On the financial side, it wants to look towards revenue and operational margins as the measuring stick for success.

Not all investors have been pleased by this though. While Netflix has profited from its crackdown on password sharing and continues to bring in subscribers, Netflix's stock price has taken a tumble, dropping by 8.7 percent, bringing the price per share down to $557. Netflix's 52-week high price is $639, so there has been a dip. Still, Netflix is a dominating force in today's media landscape, so we have no doubt the numbers will bounce back, before dropping again, only for that same cycle to repeat.

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KitGuru Says: At this point, given how many streaming services there are, many people opt to subscribe for a month or two here or there, before then switching to a different service for a while to watch different shows/movies. With that in mind, I can agree that quarterly subscriber counts aren't necessarily the best measurement of success. The numbers will often jump up and down for all the major services, as consumers bounce around to save money. 

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