When Netflix announced it was going to crack down on account sharing early this year, it was coming off the back of a difficult 2022 where it was haemorrhaging users, having already made known that it lost nearly one million subscribers back in July. The decision was met with quite a bit of backlash, but it will hardly matter to the company if its move to charge people extra for sharing passwords—which came into effect last month—will work.
Well, it looks like it has. The data analytics firm Antenna reported that Netflix recorded an average of 73,000 new daily subscribers in the US in the first four days since it started charging users RM13 a month for sharing their passwords with people outside their household, a 102% increase over the previous 60-day average.
What’s more, the company registered 100,000 subscribers a day on the weekend of May 26 and 27, surpassing the early months of the pandemic where people were facing what would be turn out to be an extended period of time at home.
This result may have been obvious in hindsight, but Netflix did not exactly predict that it would happen, per The Verge. The company actually warned investors beforehand that there may be a “cancel reaction” in response to the new policy, but Antenna said there were more signups than cancellations during this period.
To recap, the RM13 charge would be exacted on accounts that were found to have been shared with people outside of a single household (essentially using another Internet connection), and would be paid by the account owner themself.
Netflix tracks users that are inside and outside of the same household by using information such as IP addresses, device IDs and account activity. Users will be able to add one extra household on the Standard plan and two more on the Premium plan that streams 4K video.
