Despite loud and persistent customer outcry, it seems that Netflix’s decision to charge an additional fee for people who use the same subscription in different households (dubbed “extra members”) has paid off in the short run — for the streamer’s profit margin, of course. Early reports from a research company point to a daily sign-in average increase of 102%, a number that’s more expressive than the ones observed during the pandemic lockdown in 2020.
This suggests that the streaming giant’s strategy to transform account piggy backers into paying customers (the “extra member” subscription adds $7.99 a month cost to existing accounts) has borne the results that they expected. Research company Antenna reports that ever since Netflix announced the additional tier for extra members in late May, the company had the four largest days of U.S. user sign-ups since January 2019.
Antenna is a permission-based, consumer opt-in company that analyzes data from raw transaction records, which includes online purchase receipts, credit, debit, banking data and others. Antenna reported that in the period of May 25 to May 28, Netflix saw average daily sign-ups reach as much as 73,000 – a whopping amount by any metric. Even though Netflix also saw mass cancelations of subscriptions in the same period, this was expected by investors and anyone that logged in to Twitter over the last couple of weeks, since co-CEO Greg Peters publicly recognized that the "extra member" tier would be a universally unpopular move.
