Starting in 2025, Netflix decided to stop reporting on subscriber numbers and focus on financial results instead. It marked a change in the company’s usual reporting, reflective of a change in how the world’s biggest streamer measures success.
Saturation in the Streaming Market
In the early 2010s, Netflix was home to a lot of older content that belonged to IP holders who have since become competitors. That changed when Netflix proved the streaming model and, more crucially, started making its own in-house productions.
This ignited an arms race as studios rushed to claim new IP and gather licensed material to host on their inevitable Netflix competitors. Instead of a convenient content archive, Netflix and its streaming competitors became their own production houses/cable channels. Content became a tappable resource, exclusive to competing streamers.
Most online media economies work differently; they rely on shared user-generated content or material hosted across multiple platforms. To take iGaming as an example, it’s very rare for a casino to claim a game and hold it as an exclusive. Instead, you see casinos sharing a lot of popular slot games, because that’s what brings people in and keeps them satisfied. Failing that, many online creators use patronage or subscription models to carve out niche followings.
However, streaming providers exist in a limbo between terrestrial TV and the online entertainment sphere. They quickly became the big thing to watch, replacing cable outright for a lot of viewers. During this time, providers feverishly pursued subscriber growth, sometimes at the expense of financial health, with a mantra of ‘spread out first, drill down into profit later.’ Netflix was never threatened by this; they’ve always been the market leader, but it’s these conditions that led to subscriber count becoming a meaningless metric now that Netflix’s growth phase was over.
Netflix’s Earnings in 2025
That brings us to Netflix’s latest figures. Though Netflix has stopped reporting on global subscriber count, industry pundits do try to keep track. Their last reported figure for subscribers was 301 million, and many agree that it has probably increased a little in 2025, but not enough to make it worth reporting.
Instead, Netflix started 2025 with two positive earnings beats, reporting a revenue of $10.5 billion in Q1 and 11.08 billion in Q2. Then they took a small step back in Q3 with $11.5 billion, but they were quick to explain that this was due to increased content and ad spend in preparation for Q4. Like many, many businesses, Netflix benefits a lot from the holidays, where crowding around a TV to watch movies or streamed events is more commonplace.
If true, it means Q3 is taking a hit to boost revenue in Q4. We’ll only know if that pans out in early 2026, but Netflix itself has projected a $11.96 billion revenue windfall. The company’s newfound revenue surge is down to a few things, the most infamous being its late 2024 password-sharing crackdown. It seems to have worked; revenue is steadily rising in all of its regions. In Q4, revenue for the US and Canada rose 17%.
To say that first-mover advantage played a part here is an understatement. Netflix singlehandedly carved out the streaming landscape, virtually unopposed until the late 2010s. Unlike most streaming providers that hit the ground running, Netflix has been consistently profitable since 2003. These factors helped them do what many providers are struggling with now – building a big enough user base to stay profitable.
