I did something fun for the first time last week: I emailed questions for a corporate earnings call. Obviously, it was Netflix.
I’ll let you know why.. (And I’m under no illusions that I’ll actually have one of these questions asked.) Normally, if you asked me if earnings calls matter, I’d say no. Sure, the letter to shareholders will have some data, and the quarterly reports matter to investors, but the presentation is the most self-interested presentation imaginable. It would be like listening to just the closing statement of the prosecution in a trial. You’d get a lot more guilty verdicts, don’t you think?
But I have a much larger project I hope to unveil sometime this year where I make a “power ranking” of streaming/bundling services. From ad-supported to sports, anything digital video I will rank in one definitive list. Like sports power rankings, if you go to ESPN or any sports website nowadays.
To build that ranking requires good information, like all good decisions. And right now the company that has the most black holes in data, for me, is Netflix. Since I’ve written about their data and even coined a phrase about how selectively they pull it (read here for “datecdotes”), I naturally had the most questions for Netflix, and they convinced me to finally write an email.
To be fair—meaning unbiased across all digital video companies—I hope to roll out this type of feature semi-regularly with other digital video companies. Google, Apple and Disney are the most relevant, though Disney gets a brief reprieve with all the information they dropped on us last week. Youtube deserves a ton of questions and so does Apple with their paucity of information.
With that preamble, onto the questions. I have three big areas: Viewership (to see how valuable their content is), activity (to gauge how subscribers interact with the site) and subscribers (to probe their business model a bit). After each question, I’ll explain my reasoning in parentheses. These explanations I didn’t send!
Viewership
– In the last earnings call, Netflix reported that Bird Box was viewed by 80 million customers over the first four weeks. During that time, was it the most viewed movie on your platform? Over 2019 as a whole, was it the most viewed movie on your platform? Have any Star Wars, Marvel or Disney Animated films had more viewers than Bird Box since their respective launches?
(As we look to the battlefield of 2020, churn is the name of the game. Is the most popular content on Netflix leaving? I believe it is with either Friends (or other long running TV shows like it) or all the Disney content. This question helps get at that for the movies side, especially the Disney content.)
– In the Q3 earnings call of last year, you said that 80 million unique customer accounts had watched one or more “Summer of Love” romantic comedies on your site, was that using the same standard as Bird Box, where you counted “watched” as 70% completion of a film?
(If Netflix answers this, I’d be shocked. My guess is they moved to the 70% threshold after minor pushback on their Q3 report. They knew they had to explain the calculation, but waited for a film that did well enough, like Bird Box, to justify it. Still, if they say, “No”, then that “Summer of Love” number can be severely discounted. Likely they won’t ever answer either way.)
– How many people watched The Christmas Chronicles? Or The Ballad of Buster Scruggs or Private Life? How many hours have customers viewed for any of this content? (You reported in the last earnings call that you do track hours viewed on site.)
(Again, this is to help flesh out the context of whatever numbers they do release. And the scale of losses. This is the best example of how one-sided an earnings report is. If there were a “defendant” making the bear case, these are the numbers their defense lawyers would seize on to make their case, to continue the prosecutor announcement from earlier.)
Activity
– In 2018, what was your monthly active users? What has been your monthly active users in 2019?
(Monthly active users is the metrics that “feels” right for me when it comes to truly understanding the people who love your service. I don’t have data, but my gut that it explains usage best. Monthly users are the people who devoured some piece of your content in their entertainment diet. Subscribers is not that. If I were “entertainment czar” all streamers would have to release this.)
– You reported the service “averages” 100 million hours a day of viewing in the US in a month. How much does that average vary by month? What does the time on site distribution look like by customer decile? What was the annual daily average?
(We all hate averages, don’t we? Well I do. They don’t tell use anything. And since someone quoted the “2 hours per day” number to me for Netflix usage recently, it made me want to know a lot more about it. Also, related to this is the variance overtime. December happens to be a huge month for Netflix, so touting numbers from December is deliberately overselling the annual performance.)
Subscribers
– In your Q4 report, you mentioned a net add of 29 million customer accounts. What was the number of gross adds versus net? How does this breakdown internationally versus US? You used to report gross adds in 2011, why did you move away from this metric?
(I didn’t know Netflix used to report this, and this is the type of number they should report, if you follow the standard, “Does the CEO get this information?” Because Reed Hastings definitely does. [I love that standard, by the way.] Again, churn is the name of the game, and the great thing about Netflix’s 60 million or subscribers is that it grows steadily every year. Which gives an illusion of stability the gross number would help understand. International is even more curious for me.)
– What is the total unique subscriber base you have had in the US since you launched streaming?
(My final way to get at the churn questions. Say Netflix had had 140 million unique subscribers in the US since launching in 2008. Some of those are duplicate accounts—people who signed up, then switched—surely. But some aren’t. That gets to the idea that it isn’t like Netflix is convincing people to try Netflix for the first time, but to come back. Which is fascinating, to me, and a different business challenge.)
