The carnage at Netflix keeps getting worse. On Tuesday, the far left-wing streamer revealed that it lost close to 1 million subscribers in the second quarter — the largest quarterly loss of customers in the company’s history.
Still, shares of Netflix jumped more than 10 percent in after-hours trading because the bad news wasn’t half as bad as investors had expected.
Netflix reported 970,000 customers quit the service during the quarter, a continuation of the mass subscriber exodus that began earlier this year. Netflix had forecast a net loss of 2 million subscribers for the second quarter, while analysts were expecting a loss of 1.4 million to 1.8 million.
While Netflix shareholders breathed a temporary sigh of relief on Tuesday, the company still faces tremendous challenges ahead in retaining subscribers — its sole revenue stream, for now. Competing streaming services including HBO Max, Disney+, and Amazon Prime Video are aggressively looking to siphon away consumers at a time when households are cutting back on expenses in the face of skyrocketing inflation and a likely recession.
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