Netflix has presented this week its quarterly results for the second quarter of 2021. In them, the company continues to demonstrate solidity when it comes to generating revenue, and has reached 208 million subscribers . However, the growth in followers comes from countries outside the United States and Canada , since there, surprisingly, they have lost subscribers.
Specifically, Netflix has lost 430,000 subscribers in the United States and Canada, its home market and therefore the most important, with almost 74 million subscribers after the fall of this last quarter, compared to the 72.9 million they had in the second Quarter of 2020. The EMEA area, which includes Europe, is the second most important, with 68.70 million subscribers, compared to 61.48 in the same period the previous year.
Netflix loses users in the United States and Canada
As we can see, growth in the United States and Canada is stagnant, but clearly due to the fact that it is difficult to grow in a place where practically everyone has Netflix. Thus, it is much easier for the number of subscribers to fall at the slightest mistake.
According to Netflix, the drop has two main reasons. The first is the pandemic, where people spent more time at home and needed entertainment, and now with the end of the restrictions, there are those who prefer to save the price of the Premium subscription , which is 15.99 euros in Spain and 17, 99 dollars in the United States.
The second reason is competition. Netflix has to fight not only against other platforms with a skyrocketing growth such as Disney +, but also with other free ones such as TikTok or YouTube , as well as video games. It is for the latter that the company has also decided to enter this world.
There are more reasons Netflix doesn’t detail
However, there are many other reasons why users unsubscribe from Netflix and why the growth is not as great as in the past. Among them, the most important is that of content. Netflix has less and less licensed content because large companies are creating their own platforms to broadcast it, such as 20th Century Fox with Star , or Warner Bros. with HBO Max.
Netflix has chosen to bet on original content in both series and movies in order to differentiate itself . However, another reason that subscribers do not like is the fact that Netflix cancels series and leaves fans hanging. Only in 2021, the platform has canceled ten series, such as The Irregulars, Jupiter’s Legacy, The Crew or Mr. Iglesias. This makes it difficult for users to have confidence in the platform to start watching a series and then be left without enjoying a complete story.
To this are added other problems, such as the quality of 4K broadcasts that gives the feeling that they are increasingly compressed and have a lower bitrate . Other platforms like Disney compress less and have higher quality peaks.
For all this, Netflix should begin to rethink some of its strategies, since the competition is beginning to eat ground . In Spain, Amazon Prime Video is very close to surpassing them in subscribers, less than three points behind according to GECA data (71.5% versus 68.4%)
