Netflix global paying subscriber base stood at 195.15 million at the end of August. The streaming company added a net of 2.2 million paying subscribers in the three months to August, indicating slowed growth.
Earlier this year, in Q1, Netflix added 15.7 million net paying subscribers – more than double what the company had anticipated. In Q2, the company added 10.09 million but had low expectations for Q3. The truth is, the pandemic occasioned all of these significant figures.
The company had low expectations for Q3, however, as economies were slowly opening with many going back to work.
It had projected to add 2.5 million, but the recent earnings report shows it barely managed to achieve the low target.
Despite the slow growth in the quarter, the company has officially added more net paying subscribers (28.1m) in the first nine months of 2020 than it did it the whole of 2019(27.8m). Retention remains healthy, and engagement per is solidly up year over year.
“The state of the pandemic and its impact continues to make projections very uncertain, but as the world hopefully recovers in 2021, we would expect that our growth will revert back to levels similar to pre-COVID,” Netflix said in a letter to investors.
“In turn, we expect paid net adds are likely to be down year over year in the first half of 2021 as compared to the big spike in paid net adds we experienced in the first half of 2020.”
The company still sees growth opportunity in the future as it believes the adoption of internet entertainment is still in the early stages. It expects rising adoption to provide them “with many years of strong future growth.”
Netflix has plans to grow userbase from investing more in content and improving the service. It has also been spotted testing low-cost plans in India.
The American on-demand video platform also started offering some titles for free in September, and now is even considering to offer free weekend-long access to users in different countries depending on how the India test will go.
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