Home > News

Netflix to Grow Revenue by Cracking Down on Account Sharing

By Laura Tucker
Netflix Account Sharing Featured

Netflix has warned before that it might start cracking down on account sharing at some point, and it appears that time is now. Facing a reduced growth, Netflix announced in an earnings report to shareholders that it plans to force an increased payment structure on people who share their account with others who live outside their home.

Also read: Which Roku Streaming Device Should I Buy?

Netflix Earnings Report

Netflix started its earnings report by stating its “revenue growth has slowed considerably.” While its content is popular, it has “high household penetration.” Yet, this isn’t paying off with revenue, as many of these households are sharing an account with another household.

Netflix Account Sharing Revenue
Image Source: Netflix Earnings Report

The company has always believed in its business model: on-demand content via the Web rather than linear TV. It also believes that the increase in connected devices and number of homes with Broadband showed “huge future growth potential.”

The pandemic brought confusion to the issue. The growth was increased a great deal in 2020, leading the company to believe that the 2021 slowed growth was also due to the pandemic.

Netflix now believes there are four factors affecting the growth. The first is the pace of the growth, as it’s not controllable. The number of connected TVs, on-demand adoption, and data costs are out of Netflix’s control but do affect growth.

Netflix Account Sharing Content

Account sharing plays a part in the growth as well. The 222 million paying households share their accounts with 100 million other households.

Streaming competition and macro factors, such as the economy and geopolitical events, such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine, round up the factors affecting growth.

Netflix Increasing Fee for Account Sharing

Overall, Netflix plans to boost its earnings growth by “continuing to improve all aspects of Netflix.” But mostly, it will continue improving “the quality of our programming and recommendations.”

Netflix will double down on “story development and creative excellence.” It is counting on more content like “Bridgerton,” “Inventing Anna,” and “The Adam Project.” It would also like to continue adding features such as the “double thumbs up.”

But a large part of Netflix’s plan to increase the earnings growth is to “monetize sharing.” The company realizes that sharing likely helped fuel its growth. The goal was to make it easy to share – within a household. But that has also widened to other households.

Netflix Account Sharing Regional
Image Source: Netflix Earnings Report

Last month, Netflix introduced two paid sharing features, giving account holders an option to share the account with other households for an increased fee.

This part of the plan debuted in three Latin American markets, but monetizing all of its account sharing is a “short- to mid-term opportunity.” Netflix plans for much of the growth to come from outside the U.S. This is supported by three of the top six TV seasons of all time being non-English speaking.

This means you’ll have some time before you’ll be forced to pay a higher fee for sharing your Netflix account with your friends and family who aren’t residing in your household.

If you’d like to get further use out of your Netflix account (whether or not you share it with others outside your home), read on to learn how to download movies for offline viewing.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.
When survivors near Lake Nyos woke on the morning of 22 August 1986, the cattle were dead in the fields, the birds had fallen out of the trees, and 1,746 of their neighbours were lying where they had stood the night before, with no fire, no flood, and no wound to explain it.
In October 2002, a Russian scientist named Dimitri Malashenkov stood up at a space conference in Houston and quietly explained that the dog Laika, whom the Soviet Union had publicly mourned as a heroic week-long orbiter in 1957, had actually died of heat and panic within about five hours of launch.