Netflix added almost 19 million subscribers worldwide during Q4 2024, taking its global total to 301.6 million.
The quarter represents the company’s biggest-ever subscriber increase over three months, with Wall Street expecting it to add 9.8 million subscribers.
Across EMEA, Netflix added another 4 million subscribers during the period.
According to co-CEO Greg Peters, much of the surge in subscribers was driven by the company’s advertising tier. Speaking on the company’s investors’ call, Peters said the advertising tier represented over 55 per cent of new subscribers across the countries where it is available (including the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain).
“We’ve seen membership on those ads plans increase about 30 per cent quarter over quarter,” he added.
“View hours per member on the ads plan is similar to engagement on our standard non-ads plan in our ads countries, which is a really good marker that we’re excited about,” said Peter. “So, we’ve done the work, I would say, to meet our scale goals for advertisers in 2025. And that means that increasingly we’ve been able to shift more of our focus, more of our attention, on making the offering better for advertisers to increase monetisation of that growing inventory.”
The company is also working on developing its own tech stack for the ad tier, which has initially launched in Canada. Peters said the plan is to roll that out in 2025 across the rest of our 12 countries where the advertising tier is available, starting with the United States in April.
“Being on our own tech stack enables all those advertiser-facing features. The other big benefit is that it just creates a higher-quality experience for our members. So, it increases relevance. That’s good for them, it’s good for advertisers, it’s good for us, it’s good for everybody in the ecosystem, essentially.”
This is the last quarter where Netflix will report its subscriber numbers on a regular basis. In future, it intends to shift emphasis to its revenue and operating margin as well as audience metrics like engagement.
