> The situation is so dire that even Netflix’s biggest new series of the second quarter failed to get renewed.
And all the other numbers tie back to this. No one wants to invest in a story that ends on a cliffhanger to not be renewed or even worse to get season 2 that is >50% filler because the writers save up for 5 seasons and then season 2 ends on a cliffhanger to never be renewed.
It's all got too much sprawl and poorer production value now. Good riddance
It is an amazing fumble from Netflix. I thought Reed Hastings actually understood the space pretty well back when he somewhat famously said (paraphrasing) "We have to become HBO faster than HBO can become Netflix" and pivoted to making content.
They've been making content now for a long time, Lilyhammer came out in 2012.
They had all the data telling them that long lived series that built dedicated followings like The Office, Friends, Star Trek, etc. were reasons that people stayed on the platform.
They had 14 years to put together their own dynasty series, shows that people could connect with over the years that would become their comfort shows that they could return to again and again, fully owned by Netflix and completely locked in their walled garden.
Instead they pursued a strategy of starting a thousand promising ideas but if they didn't instantly take off, done. No room for a show to grow and mature and develop, you better have a great first season and you might get a second.
And I think everyone I know has at least one show on Netflix that they got invested in only for it to get axed with a dozen unresolved story threads. I think the one that made me go "why bother?" was Santa Clarita Diet. A funny dramatic show with star power, Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant, interesting character development, a 3 season run and then just killed.
It wasn't the first series they killed with a dozen loose threads dangling, but it was the last one I watched. At first I told myself, "I might watch another series after it goes the distance and I know they won't just leave it half-finished" but that quickly just turned into "I don't watch netflix produced series" and as they lost more and more of their licensed content "I don't watch netflix" and this month I realized I was still handing them nearly $30 a month for nothing and canceled.
I think about a lot of the most popular shows and how bad their first seasons are. But audiences like to see characters grow and that's a big part of what causes people to connect with a show and want to come back to it again and again.
This was one of the big reasons I quit using Netflix or following new releases. Why bother investing my time into something that's only going to get killed off not because it didn't make money, but because it wasn't profitable enough?
Netflix put me off of TV as a whole category, which is a pretty great thing, really.
Also what really annoys me as a viewer is that even on a good series that has already been renewed, the waiting between seasons has crept up from 1 year (already bad) to multiple years. Then when the new season finally comes out (in two parts!) I already lost most of the context and am not nearly as interested.
Netflix always used to get a lot of crap for refusing to renew series. The "second season slump" graph suggests that they were right: viewers don't tune in for the second seasons.
It doesn't matter why that is. It only matters that they put their money to something that does keep people subscribing.
If they don't have the creative wherewithal, that's a different problem. It's hard to feed the gaping maw of people seeking entertainment. They hold everything they watch to the highest standards -- TV shows that cost $10 million per hour, and movies that cost $100 million per hour.
It's like they don't understand their own business proposition around bingeable content. I mean renting scrubs DVDs made them a ton of money.
There is a reason "You cannot account for taste." is a phrase.
Parks and Recreation
5.97 million
4.60 million
Twin Peaks
18.2 million
10.2 million
Arrested Development
6.2 million
5.7 million
Friday Night Lights
6.1 million
5.5 million
Seinfeld
15.6 million
12.5 million (so low it was put on hiatus mid season, these are bad numbers for the time period)
Even shows like Scrubs were considered a failure because even though their 2nd season numbers went up, it was only because they were put on after friends, their 3rd season saw a massive drop even though they stayed in the "after friends" timeslot. Their 3rd season is effectively their second season from an exposure/retention standpoint.
The stock market is not a reflection of reality and revenue and users are up. Software stocks are generally down because all the money is going to the current bubble (hardware) before we come back down to earth.
The article actually cites the opposite - reported users going down at many media sites, including Facebook for the first quarter ever, and Netflix now refusing to report user counts until 2027 when they used to proudly report user count increases. With that change of behavior, Netflix users are definitely NOT going up, and are likely declining
And until this week, they would release numbers every six months. Now they are NOT releasing numbers.
If the numbers were up, they would post them.
This sudden change of Netflix' reporting shows they decided it is less bad to raise the flag of halting reporting than to expose the size of the subscriber loss. That is not good. Maybe they are just fearful of showing any loss at all, or maybe it is a really large loss. Eventually, we'll know something.
In my household we're back to watching TV shows from the 2000s, 4-8 seasons some of them 23 episodes. It's also kind of fun watching these characters are story plots adapt to mobile phones, blogs, and social media.
This is a death-spiral. If a company instead adopts a sustainable, customer-centered business strategy they will be punished in the stock market for "stagnant growth," the CEO gets replaced and or a hostile takeover occurs, and there we go again.
> The situation is so dire that even Netflix’s biggest new series of the second quarter failed to get renewed.
And all the other numbers tie back to this. No one wants to invest in a story that ends on a cliffhanger to not be renewed or even worse to get season 2 that is >50% filler because the writers save up for 5 seasons and then season 2 ends on a cliffhanger to never be renewed.
It's all got too much sprawl and poorer production value now. Good riddance
It is an amazing fumble from Netflix. I thought Reed Hastings actually understood the space pretty well back when he somewhat famously said (paraphrasing) "We have to become HBO faster than HBO can become Netflix" and pivoted to making content.
They've been making content now for a long time, Lilyhammer came out in 2012.
They had all the data telling them that long lived series that built dedicated followings like The Office, Friends, Star Trek, etc. were reasons that people stayed on the platform.
They had 14 years to put together their own dynasty series, shows that people could connect with over the years that would become their comfort shows that they could return to again and again, fully owned by Netflix and completely locked in their walled garden.
Instead they pursued a strategy of starting a thousand promising ideas but if they didn't instantly take off, done. No room for a show to grow and mature and develop, you better have a great first season and you might get a second.
And I think everyone I know has at least one show on Netflix that they got invested in only for it to get axed with a dozen unresolved story threads. I think the one that made me go "why bother?" was Santa Clarita Diet. A funny dramatic show with star power, Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant, interesting character development, a 3 season run and then just killed.
It wasn't the first series they killed with a dozen loose threads dangling, but it was the last one I watched. At first I told myself, "I might watch another series after it goes the distance and I know they won't just leave it half-finished" but that quickly just turned into "I don't watch netflix produced series" and as they lost more and more of their licensed content "I don't watch netflix" and this month I realized I was still handing them nearly $30 a month for nothing and canceled.
I think about a lot of the most popular shows and how bad their first seasons are. But audiences like to see characters grow and that's a big part of what causes people to connect with a show and want to come back to it again and again.
They optimized for what they measured.
They measured the wrong thing because it was easier for them.
Some of the most important things can't be measured.
The future can't actually be pre-computed, the forecast isn't the terrain, it isn't even the map.
Netflix has internally treated their employees like machines for a long time and they treat their "content" the same way.
This was one of the big reasons I quit using Netflix or following new releases. Why bother investing my time into something that's only going to get killed off not because it didn't make money, but because it wasn't profitable enough?
Netflix put me off of TV as a whole category, which is a pretty great thing, really.
Also what really annoys me as a viewer is that even on a good series that has already been renewed, the waiting between seasons has crept up from 1 year (already bad) to multiple years. Then when the new season finally comes out (in two parts!) I already lost most of the context and am not nearly as interested.
And then you start to wonder if they’ll end this season on ANOTHER cliffhanger, and you reevaluate your viewing choice.
Netflix always used to get a lot of crap for refusing to renew series. The "second season slump" graph suggests that they were right: viewers don't tune in for the second seasons.
It doesn't matter why that is. It only matters that they put their money to something that does keep people subscribing.
If they don't have the creative wherewithal, that's a different problem. It's hard to feed the gaping maw of people seeking entertainment. They hold everything they watch to the highest standards -- TV shows that cost $10 million per hour, and movies that cost $100 million per hour.
It's like they don't understand their own business proposition around bingeable content. I mean renting scrubs DVDs made them a ton of money.
There is a reason "You cannot account for taste." is a phrase.
Parks and Recreation 5.97 million 4.60 million
Twin Peaks 18.2 million 10.2 million
Arrested Development 6.2 million 5.7 million
Friday Night Lights 6.1 million 5.5 million
Seinfeld 15.6 million 12.5 million (so low it was put on hiatus mid season, these are bad numbers for the time period)
Even shows like Scrubs were considered a failure because even though their 2nd season numbers went up, it was only because they were put on after friends, their 3rd season saw a massive drop even though they stayed in the "after friends" timeslot. Their 3rd season is effectively their second season from an exposure/retention standpoint.
And the author posted a follow-on article yesterday:
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/predictions-on-the-future-of...
The stock market is not a reflection of reality and revenue and users are up. Software stocks are generally down because all the money is going to the current bubble (hardware) before we come back down to earth.
The article actually cites the opposite - reported users going down at many media sites, including Facebook for the first quarter ever, and Netflix now refusing to report user counts until 2027 when they used to proudly report user count increases. With that change of behavior, Netflix users are definitely NOT going up, and are likely declining
> Netflix said it had more than 325 million subscribers worldwide as of the end of 2025 — up from 301.2 million a year prior
https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/netflix-q4-2025-financial-e...
Yup, up 7.9% on that year.
And until this week, they would release numbers every six months. Now they are NOT releasing numbers.
If the numbers were up, they would post them.
This sudden change of Netflix' reporting shows they decided it is less bad to raise the flag of halting reporting than to expose the size of the subscriber loss. That is not good. Maybe they are just fearful of showing any loss at all, or maybe it is a really large loss. Eventually, we'll know something.
In my household we're back to watching TV shows from the 2000s, 4-8 seasons some of them 23 episodes. It's also kind of fun watching these characters are story plots adapt to mobile phones, blogs, and social media.
This is a death-spiral. If a company instead adopts a sustainable, customer-centered business strategy they will be punished in the stock market for "stagnant growth," the CEO gets replaced and or a hostile takeover occurs, and there we go again.
netflix is terrible there are so few watchable shows..they should take notes from apple tv which is fantastic