Yahoo Finance Netflix touts nearly 5M monthly active users for ad-supported tier
During Netflix's first Upfront presentation on Wednesday, Netflix revealed that its ad plan has nearly five million global monthly active users.
This is the first time the company has disclosed figures for the new tier -- which only launched six months ago -- and the number is certainly notable. In March, Bloomberg reported that one million accounts signed up for Netflix's ad-supported plan.
However, because multiple users can share the same Netflix account, the MAU total is not an exact number. It will be interesting to see if Netflix’s numbers change with the upcoming password-sharing crackdown.
Netflix didn't share how many subscribers the ad tier has driven, nor did it share revenue.
The company added during Wednesday's presentation that the ads subscriber base has “more than doubled” since early this year. Netflix has a total of 232.5 million global subscribers.
Netflix’s pitch to advertisers included other interesting figures regarding the ad-supported offering. For instance, the company revealed that 80% of viewing is happening on TV screens. Also, 25% of Netflix signups opt for the ads plan in countries where it's available, according to the company. The streamer noted that the median age for its ad-supported viewers is 34.
Recently, Netflix upgraded its $6.99 per month plan by adding higher video quality (1080p resolution) and providing support for two concurrent streams. At launch, the plan only had 720p video quality and users could only watch content on one device in a single viewing.
