As Netflix gears up to set the industry tone for 2025, its stellar performance in 2024 creates a challenging benchmark to top.
The company’s 83% share price increase—its highest since 2015, predating the launch of Stranger Things—far outpaced Disney’s 22% rise and starkly contrasted with double-digit losses for Warner Bros. Discovery, Comcast, and Paramount Global.
Netflix’s success was powered by three key factors: exceptional subscriber retention, strategic content expansion including live events, and a surge in its supply share of global streaming originals, driving significant gains in corporate demand share.
Netflix’s decision to stop reporting subscriber growth after this quarter points to a deceleration across the industry. To build on its recent success, Netflix can:
- Continue leveraging its dominance in global original content demand.
- Expand further into live events and sports, refining the user experience to address streaming quality issues.
- Strengthen retention strategies in relatively high-churn markets and maintain its competitive advantage in low-churn regions.
- Continue to provide enough value to consumers so that it can keep raising prices and monetizing customers without causing a subscriber exodus.
With its track record of innovation and adaptability, Netflix is well-positioned to lead the streaming and entertainment industry through 2025 and beyond.
Industry Leading Subscriber Growth and Low Churn
- Netflix maintained exceptional subscriber retention across all key international regions:
- APAC: This region has accounted for the second largest average quarterly net adds over the last five quarters. Netflix’s churn rates were the lowest in the industry, hitting 2.17% in Q3 2024. Prime Video had the next lowest churn rate of 3.7% in the same quarter.
- EMEA: This region boasts the largest average quarterly net adds dating back to late 2023. EMEA also saw consistently low churn rates of between 1.85% to 1.88% over the first three quarters of 2024. Paramount+ had the next lowest churn in the region during Q3 2024 at 4.94%.
- LATAM: Netflix’s churn rates here dropped steadily from 1.6% in Q1 to 1.41% in Q3 2024, far outperforming second-place Prime Video’s 4.36% regional churn rate in Q3 2024.
- This impressive retention underscores Netflix’s ability to sustain loyalty among its subscribers globally with a diverse library of programming.
State of the Industry: Supply Trends 2020-2024
- Between the beginning of 2020 and the end of 2024, there has been a 321% increase in the global supply of streaming original titles as leading companies prioritized DTC platforms and chased Netflix’s business model.
- Before 2023, there had not been more than one quarter in a row of a shrinking growth rate in global streaming original supply. Now, this metric has decreased for seven of the past eight quarters.
- The significant slowdown in original content production across the industry, driven by cost-cutting measures starting in 2022 and further exacerbated by the Hollywood labor strikes in late 2023, has created a favorable environment for Netflix. By maintaining a robust content pipeline during this period of industry contraction, Netflix has been able to strengthen its competitive position.
Netflix Supply Share
- One key reason behind Netflix’s resurgence in the past two years has been its content pipeline, which co-CEO Ted Sarandos repeatedly stressed during the 2023 strikes.
- In Q4 2024, Netflix accounted for 24.9% of the total global supply of streaming originals, its highest share since Q1 2022. Q4 2023 also saw a major surge in supply share, at 23.7%. This Q4 surges track with Netflix’s strategy of saving big original releases for the end of the year (The Crown Season 6 and Leave the World Behind in late 2023; Squid Game S2 and Carry-On in late 2024).
- These supply share surges correlated with an increase for Netflix’s global originals demand share in both Q4 2023 and Q4 2024.
Netflix Jumps NBCUniversal for Full Year 2024
- Corporate demand share accounts for all original TV content produced under each company’s umbrella, and can help effectively value a conglomerate’s legacy and library content in aggregate.
- In Q3 2024, Netflix overtook one of the legacy studios in this category for the first time ever, leading NBCUniversal by 0.6%. Netflix further built out that lead in Q4 2024 and for the first time finishes in fourth place in this category for the entire year.
- While fourth place in any category may not sound impressive for Netflix, this dataset is dominated by companies that have existed for over a century.
- This means there is more demand for Netflix’s original TV catalog — which started in 2012 — than that of NBCUniversal — whose original TV programming dates back to the 1940s.
- Netflix was the only one of the top five companies to grow its Corporate Demand Share in 2024:
- Netflix: +0.8%
- Warner Bros. Discovery: -0.3%
- NBCUniversal: -0.5%
- Paramount Global: -0.8%
- Disney: -1.3%
