33% of Netflix subscribers in the United States share their password outside the family unit: this is what emerges from a statistical study conducted by Leichtman Research Group, which allows contextualizing a little better the decision of the streaming giant to increase the efforts to stem the problem dating back to a few days ago.
The survey shows that 64% of American users regularly pay for the subscription, while the remaining 3% represent cases in which Netflix is part of third-party bundles – for example, it could be that of the telephone operator.
The survey was conducted online among 4,400 subjects, who are therefore called to represent what for Netflix is its largest market, with 74 million subscribers between the USA and Canada, but which has now practically stopped growing.
Netflix invests huge amounts in the production of original content: we are talking about 18 billion every year, and it’s a growing figure. To compensate for the significant slowdown in growth, several increases in the subscription price have been announced, but evidently more drastic measures are needed.
Of course, the phenomenon isn’t just about Netflix. The study shows that 29% of all subscription services are shared with people outside the home, while 12% are paid in full by someone outside the household.
The same goes for multi-service packages, although the percentages are slightly lower – 23% shared and 7% paid in full by an outsider. Predictably, the incidence varies with age: the percentage among young people (between 18 and 35 years old) is 34%, while it drops to 14% among the over 35s.
We are observing how in the growth phase the attitude of streaming services on this front is very permissive because it allows to spread the number of users; there is always time to become more severe, precisely when growth slows down and service is now almost indispensable.
It’s an extremely popular mechanism in the digital world, not just video streaming – think about the steady rise in YouTube advertising or the end of unlimited uploads to Google Photos.