Boycotts used to be a major conservative tool. Do they still work? Not as well, but they can work.
Big Tech’s biggest vulnerability is the need to project an impossible perpetual motion machine of constant growth. What happens when that illusion of perpetual growth is challenged?
Then the bottom suddenly drops out.
Netflix reported its first subscriber loss in more than ten years on Tuesday, causing its shares to fall more than 20 percent.
The streaming giant reported a drop of 200,000 subscribers during the first quarter of 2022. The company last reported a loss in subscribers in October 2011, according to Reuters.
The company’s stock saw a 23 percent dive in after-market trading, which erased $30 billion in market value, the outlet noted.
$30 billion. Granted it’ll rebound. But Netflix is as much as admitting that it’s oversaturated and that its only profitable path forward is to continue raising subscription costs, something it now constantly does, and cannibalizing existing users by cracking down on the widespread practice of account sharing.
In a letter to shareholders, the streaming service said it expects the drop in subscriptions to continue and forecasted a global paid subscriber loss of 2 million for the second quarter.
Faster please.
Netflix added it’s harder to grow membership in many markets as “in addition to our 222 million paying households, we estimate that Netflix is being shared with over 100 million additional households.”
Look for a growing crackdown on account sharing as Netflix tries to turn freeloaders into subscribers. But that all but admits that the service has a ceilling.
The streaming service blamed “sluggish economic growth, increasing inflation, and geopolitical events such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” as well as “some continued disruption from COVID” for impacting its growth as well.
Is there anything they won’t blame the Ukraine war on?
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