The real reasons are almost certainly economic and structural, and not a result of silly culture war wedge issues.

1) Netflix has much more streaming competition now.

2) Availability of good content has gone down as networks reserve it for their own new platforms, and as production was halted by covid.

3) Greater scarcity gives studios pricing power to increase Netflix's cost to acquire the few good shows available.

4) Netflix tried to counter (2) and (3) by making their own shows, but a lot of it is trash.

5) Netflix raised customer prices aggressively, while there's not much on their platform to justify the higher prices.

6) Customers are increasingly savvy about binge-watching what good shows there are on one platform, then cancelling it and rotating through other platforms.

7) Loyalty is for suckers. Churn, baby, churn.

They actually gained subscribers in the western world still, but lost in total because of all Russian accounts were terminated.

yes lets talk about the actual reason for god sake. it was hugely due to Russia

Russia is also not (and cannot be) the reason Netflix themselves project a 2.7m subscriber loss for the next quarter.

Not having a large part of the world's populating confined to their couches probably plays a large part of this. People are doing other things with their discretionary money; eating out, drinking out, traveling, buying new clothes that they haven't had to for 2+ years.

The issue isn't necessarily that they lost users this time, even though that's what all the headlines are about. They projected continued losses of subscribers, even after the one time event with russia is through.

Russia's why it was a net loss, but not why they missed their projection so badly.

You're probably right. For what it's worth, I'm like the parent and for me at least that stuff isn't why I cancelled, it's what pushed me over the edge. I don't watch Netflix much (poor catalog, maybe lack of discoverability), but I don't notice $20 going away either and would keep the service if it provided much value at all. Cancelling had been on my list for years.

I finally cancelled when I realized that whenever I did go look at it to see what's available it felt like there was more agenda pushing than entertainment, which itself made me check for content less often in the first place. Netflix won't miss my money, I may be in a small minority. It may be they get more subscribers for their politics than they lose (I'm sure they think so).

Until we have publicly available statistics, speculation is irresponsible. We can't possibly know or being able to sample or extrapolate what motivation 200,000 had, nor their commonalities.

It sounds more like you'd like the reasons not to be one of or a combination of those, which would be fair.

> Until we have publicly available statistics, speculation is irresponsible.

> We can't possibly know or being able to sample or extrapolate what motivation 200,000 had

Speculation on the causes of major changes for which we have no hard data is the basis of the original article and pretty much every comment on this thread. Nobody here is giving investment advice, so I don't know how it's irresponsible.

> It sounds more like you'd like the reasons not to be one of or a combination of those, which would be fair.

My personal guess (also note the use of 'probably' in my original comment) is when it comes to things like paid streaming services, personal economics is the biggest factor in the decision to subscribe/cancel for most people, and other rationales are mostly tangential. In my experience, the bottom line is what matters in the end.

We have publicly available stats for their competitors. (And actually we do "know" the reason for this quarter's loss for Netflix: shutting down and losing 700K subs in Russia.)

Is Netflix more "woke" or "less scifi" or "prone to pirating" or "annoying about UI and recommendations" than Disney+ or HBO Max? (Ok, HBO Max has had a lot of cinema-quality sci-fi and similar genre content land recently, so maybe on that one?)

Those services are gaining subscribers faster so any backlash seems less likely, compared to "there is a lot more serious competition than their used to be, Netflix costs the most, and has a far less proven content model."

Netflix is increasingly only worth it for their originals, and now those are head to head against Disney and HBO+Warner cinema originals.

I'm sorry about your share price, but speculation is just what the market does.

You'll have better luck asking for prayers.

If we can never know, then their speculation is as valuable as your anecdote.