Netflix Stock Drops After Subscriber Loss

Television

Netflix is feeling the pain with the rest of the country. According to CNBC, the streaming pioneer expected to add around 2.5 million subscribers in the first quarter of 2022; instead, it lost 200,000. Following the report of its losses, Netflix shares nosedived 25%, and they brought down Disney, Roku, and Spotify’s stocks as well. Netflix is expecting to lose two million subscribers in the second quarter. To put this in perspective, Netflix has not lost subscribers since October of 2011. As for why this is happening, Netflix explained in a letter to its shareholders that their “high household penetration” has created “revenue growth headwinds,” which is corporate-speak for them gaining so much traction over the years that they couldn’t go much higher. And everybody’s new favorite punk rock billionaire, Elon Musk, tweeted a theory:

The woke mind virus is making Netflix unwatchable

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 20, 2022

Musk is probably partly right; people are tired of woke crap. But that isn’t a Netflix-specific problem; movies, in general, are not doing well, and hits like Spider-Man: No Way Home, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, or the last Fast and the Furious movie suggest that people do want to go to the movies, only they’d rather be entertained and not lectured. And Netflix has some great stuff that isn’t woke, like Cobra Kai (which is the antithesis of wokeness) or The Irishman. I think Netflix’s reasoning is also a factor, and that’s something I’ve been talking about for a while now: there are only so many new people who can subscribe to a service like this. After a while, they reach their ceiling, and instead of making more money, they’ve just got their steady profit stream. At that point, more people will drop off than sign up, and now that the world was shut down for over a year and a band of incompetents is destroying people’s livelihoods in various other ways, a lot of folks have to tighten their belts. That means dropping a streaming service or two, and while its competitors will likely lose subscribers, too, Netflix is one of the most expensive ones, and its price keeps rising. Plus, they’re losing a lot of the content people subscribed for in the first place, like Friends, The Office, and That 70s Show (by the way, someone needs to pick this up because I need my Red Forman fix), and their original content’s good-to-bad ratio is not in their favor. They’re considering things like a cheaper ad-supported version, and that’s probably a good idea. But with so much competition and less disposable income from their dwindling subscriber list, is Netflix on its way out?

Do you think Netflix will bounce back? Have you unsubscribed? Will someone subsidize them in exchange for an end to playing scenes from every movie you pass by while browsing? Let us know in the comments, and stay tuned to Geeks + Gamers for more TV news!