On March 6, Netflix pulled out of Russia in protest of the invasion of Ukraine, losing 700,000 Russian subscribers and gaining 500,000 subscribers elsewhere, causing them to post their first net loss of subscriber count in over ten years.

Along with the loss, they are projected to lose another 2 million by the end of this coming quarter. This is an instance in which Netflix counted its chickens before they hatched seeing as how it had predicted a rise of 2.5 million users for that quarter. That 2 million makes up nearly one percent of their whole user base.

Reporting a loss of over 50 billion dollars as stocks plummeted, Netflix decided to cancel multiple shows in the making, including the heavily anticipated Bone series. 

This loss of revenue is forcing the company to consider implementing a new feature in order to crack down on password sharing. This new feature reads the user’s IP address and prompts them with a “Add a new Account for $2.99 a Month” if the IP address is different from the “Parent” account. The new feature is already being tested out in Costa Rica, Peru, and Chile. This is hoped to earn the company back some of their lost money due to the fact that ⅓ of Netflix users are either using the password of someone else or sharing their own password.

When asked, Josh Asare (‘23) said “That’s so dumb like I get it and that’s smart financially but imagine making a college kid pay another 3 dollars a month to use their family’s Netflix account. That’ll probably make some people cancel their account.”

The service has recently pulled many beloved shows and movies off due to not renewing the contracts or companies creating their services. Big names such as The Office and Parks and Recreation, both NBC shows, have been pulled off and made their way to a competing streaming service, Peacock, which is run and owned by NBC.

This started back in 2017 when Netflix lost Food Network and HGTV shows due to the creation of the Food Network service which later was absorbed by Discovery+. Docu-Series such as The People vs. O.J. Simpson was recently pulled off Netflix and put on Amazon Prime and Apple TV. These drastic changes did not go unnoticed by fans. “I was pretty mad that they took off Into the Spider-verse; that was very upsetting for me,” said Sydney Miller (‘24)

Not all hope is lost for the platform, however; there are ways to shore up the subscriber count. First off, the platform can reevaluate the possibility of putting paid advertisements on its site. Your viewers are already paying a monthly subscription fee of fifteen dollars a month and paid advertisements would make popularity go down even further. Secondly, Netflix can start producing its own content again. While this may seem to have the opposite effect than what is desired, to make money, this would model the New Deal made by FDR and this subscriber slump is Netflix’s great depression.

If the streaming service would spend the money on multiple different originals, that may give them a boost of shows that not only do they have full rights to but could continue as long as it is profitable for the company. I say spend the money on multiple shows due to the fact that Netflix is currently spending approximately 30 million dollars per episode on Stranger Things. This of course goes directly against the old adage, don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.