The biggest gets biggest-er: Netflix ended September with 282.72 million global paid subscribers, the company announced alongside its financials for third quarter of 2024, growth of 5.07 million subs since the end of June.
Media analysts expected Netflix to add somewhere between 3.9 million and 4.5 million global paid subscribers over the past three months. While Netflix didn’t blow that number away as it has in recent quarters, a beat is a beat.
The streaming leader has had some monster quarters recently in terms of net adds:
- Q3 ’23: +8.76 million
- Q4 ’23: +13.12 million
- Q1 ’24: +9.33 million
- Q2 ’24: +8.05 million
Netflix can mostly thanks its password-sharing crackdown for that massive growth. Its launch of a cheaper, ad-supported tier has also helped, but marginally so. With gains waning from what Netflix calls its “paid sharing” program, it is time for advertising to scale.
Wall Street expected third quarter earnings per share (EPS) of $5.12 on $9.77 billion in revenue, according to consensus forecasts. Netflix reported EPS of $5.40 on $9.825 billion in revenue for a net income of $2.364 billion.
Netflix’s own internal forecasting as of July 18, 2024 anticipated Q3 earnings of $5.10 per share on $9.727 billion in revenue. The company expected to turn a profit of $2.237 billion from July-September. In summation, it expected Q3 2024 to be stronger than Q2 — and a hell of a lot stronger than Q3 2023.
The streamer no longer shares its internal guesses on subscriber additions. Further, the company says that it won’t even share its quarterly subscriber gains (or losses!) come 2025. We expect to be able to reverse-engineer those numbers pretty easily, however.
Film highlights from what we shorthand to be the “summer” quarter included the new “Beverly Hills Cop,” a “SpongeBob” spinoff focused on the character Sandy Cheeks, Mark Wahlberg/Halle Berry vehicle “The Union,” and the action-thrilled “Rebel Ridge.”
TV remains Netflix’s bread and butter, of course. The top series in the quarter were “Emily in Paris” Season 4, limited series “The Perfect Couple,” “Cobra Kai” Season 6, and Ryan Murphy’s “Monsters: The Lyle and Eric Menendez Story.”
Netflix executives will follow up the earnings announcement with a video interview at 4:45 p.m. ET.
