Netflix investors were less than pleased with the streaming platform’s subscriber growth – the company’s stock-driving metric, given its subscriber-based business model – when it released its Q2 earnings results on Monday.
In the three months ending June 30, Netflix said it added 5.15 million subscribers, bringing the total domestic and international subscriber count to 130.1 million subscribers, which was about a million shy of its targeted 131.2 for the quarter. Its stock responded with a 14% tumble to $344.04 in after-hours trading. The difference in subscribers may seem marginal, but for Netflix – which is unique to traditional networks in that it relies on subscribers’ payments instead of advertising dollars to fund content – growing its monthly payments matters.
As this chart from Statista shows, the streaming platform has spent nearly $30 billion on streaming content since the beginning of 2014, with over a third of that sum being spent in the last 12 months alone. It owes $4.5 billion in content expenses by June 2019 and $3.6 billion towards the end of next year.
