Netflix loses 200,000 subscribers in the first three months of the year, marking first subscriber drop in more than 10 years

Streaming giant Netflix has announced that it has lost over 200,000 subscribers in the first three months of 2022, marking the first time the platform’s subscriber base has fallen in more than a decade amid recent pricing changes.

In a letter to shareholders on Tuesday as shares of Netflix dropped more than 20% in after-hours trading, the streaming service attributed multiple “inter-related factors” to the weak performance reported in today’s first-quarter results, including “a large number of households sharing accounts,” with the company suggesting it will be cracking down on users sharing accounts with one another to help better results moving forward, saying it will implement “more effective monetization of multi-household sharing,” alongside other strategies.

Netflix recently increased the price of its service across the UK, the United States and Canada, something which the platform says lost 600,000 people in the US, with the situation set to worsen in the second quarter of 2022, where Netflix anticipates losing two million paid subscribers.

Another attributing factor to the losses is the company’s exit from Russia which has reportedly cost it 700,000 subscribers.

Netflix is facing strong competition from the likes of Disney+, Amazon Prime and Apple TV+. The market is a lot more saturated than it was a decade ago, with this being something else that has added to the company’s subscriber loss.