Tag: Media

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Scroll launches its subscription offering ad-free access across 300 partner sites

After a long period of invite-only beta testing, Scroll is officially launching today, offering ad-free access to sites like BuzzFeed News, Business Insider, Salon, Slate and Vox for an introductory price of $2.49 per month.

CEO Tony Haile previously led analytics company Chartbeat, and he said he founded Scroll because of his frustration with the way news sites were becoming dragged down by ads and trackers — and despite those performance-slowing/privacy-defying practices, publications were still struggling to make money.

“Basically, we were trying to think through: How would the internet have evolved if it didn’t have to rely on ads [from the start]?” Haile said. “What would the economics look like?”

The solution that he and his team came up with is a subscription where consumers pay (the price is starting at $2.49 for the first six months after launch, then goes up $4.99 per month) for “a that’s web that’s twice as fast, with no shadowy trackers, no ads, no pre-rolls.” Publishers, meanwhile, make more money than they would have by showing ads to those same visitors.

The consumer experience may resemble what you can already get with an ad blocker, but Haile said it offers a few key advantages. For one thing, you won’t run into the issues you currently might with partner sites that detect ad blockers. For another, it works smoothly on mobile — once you’ve logged into your account on the Scroll site, you should be able to visit any of the partner sites and view them without ads, and you can also read via the Scroll mobile app.

Scroll

Plus, there’s what Haile described as the “good karma” of knowing that you’re supporting the publishers behind the news and stories that you actually read.

He noted that every reader’s payment is dispersed separately, based on their own “engagement and loyalty,” rather than putting all of the subscription revenue into a single pool. So your money will never go to a site that you’ve never visited — and you’ll even get a monthly report showing which publishers your money is supporting.

Haile said Scroll has already signed up around 300 partners. (TechCrunch isn’t one of them, but I hope that changes.) The startup estimates that a normal page view brings in only $0.011 through advertising, versus $0.016 with Scroll. And the startup also offers a revenue calculator to help publishers confirm that they won’t be losing money.

Speaking of publishers, Haile said he’s trying to bring a “broader range of sites” into Scroll, representing a broad range of viewpoints — again, because the money isn’t going into a single pool, you don’t have to worry about supporting a site that you don’t like (unless you’re doing a lot of hate clicking and reading).

Still, he will be exercising some editorial judgment: “I’m too fucking old to deal with Nazis. I don’t want to give them money.”

Of course, many (non-Nazi) publishers are also experimenting with their own paywalls and subscriptions. Haile argued that Scroll is complementary to those efforts, because it allows publishers to offer a better experience to reader and make more money from them, even if they’re not yet “superfans” who are ready to sign up for that specific subscription.

“We don’t get in the way of that,” Haile said. “We’re trying to solve that other problem, to make the internet not suck.”

Subscription startup Scroll acquires news aggregator Nuzzel

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Flipboard expands into local news

Flipboard, the personalized news aggregation app used by 145 million users per month, is today launching a new feature aimed at bringing local news coverage to 23 cities across the U.S. and Canada, including major metros like New York, L.A, San Francisco, Seattle, D.C., Boston, Dallas, Chicago, and many others. The goal with the new offering is to give Flipboard users an easy way to catch up with local news, sports, dining, real estate, transportation, and weather from a variety of sources, including local newspapers, local TV stations, radio stations, college news sites, and even blogs.

Local media outlets have been one of the hardest-hit by the internet, but a Knight Foundation study from October found that people trust local news more than national news. They also think their local reporters are more caring and unbiased compared with their national counterparts. But until now, there hasn’t been an easy way for readers to follow all their local news in a given city or metro — you still have to visit the individual news publications and area blogs separately.

Flipboard initially tested the local news product with Toronto, and found it resulted in an almost 10% lift in engagement from those who ended up adding Toronto’s local news to their Flipboard interests versus those who didn’t.

At launch, Flipboard users will be able to find the 23 Local sections inside the Explore tab in the Flipboard app. Once added, they’ll then be able to browse their local news in Flipboard alongside the other content they’re interested in, across Flipboard’s wide variety of topics.

In addition, some local publications also organize their content based on local interests. For example, The Miami Herald today publishes 15 different magazines to Flipboard on topics like The Miami Heat or even Cuba. The Chicago Sun-Times publishes 24 magazines, like Chicago Politics and Chicago Education. And The Mercury News has 37 magazines on topics like The San Francisco 49ers and the California Wildfires. When articles are added to their Magazines, Flipboard’s topic engine classifies the content then recommends it to people interested in related subjects.

For the local news initiative, Flipboard will also now recommend stories to local audiences, based on their IP address. However, Flipboard says it doesn’t track a user’s precise location — the IP address gives it a rough idea of who to suggest these local news topics to. Flipboard’s advertisers don’t care about precise location, either. They target based on user interests, like travel. Now they’ll be able to add a city metro region as an “interest” they can consider when targeting ads.

In the longer term, Flipboard sees the addition of local news and information as a jumping-off point that could allow for further partnerships in the future. For example, Flipboard could partner with ticket sellers or event platforms like Ticketmaster and Eventbrite to connect readers to tickets for local events, or to Airbnb for opportunities related to travel.

But one thing it won’t do is try to compete with Facebook as a place for local community members to interact, as they do today in local Facebook Groups. Instead, Flipboard’s Local news product is only about connecting users to their interests.

“We applaud Flipboard’s thoughtful efforts to elevate local news to its users and are delighted that two of our largest metros, the Miami Herald and The Sacramento Bee, will be part of this inaugural initiative,” said Jessica Gilbert, Senior Director of Product and Experience at McClatchy, in a statement about the launch. “We’re excited that our high impact local journalism, including investigative, opinion, sports and ‘news you can use’ will be surfaced and look forward to continuing to collaborate with Flipboard on spotlighting local journalism,” she added.

The new initiative requires that local publishers participate by publishing their content onto Flipboard. To do so, they have to first create an account then use the Flipboard bookmarklet to start curating content into the platform. To automate submissions, they can instead submit their RSS feed to Flipboard. From then on, their content will automatically be analyzed and indexed by Flipboard’s A.I.

Flipboard plans to expand the list of local metros to smaller cities and even smaller boroughs or communities over time. In the case of the latter, this could involve rounding up more local bloggers and curators, rather than only relying on the wider metro region’s bigger newspapers. This is an area where Flipboard could be useful, as it’s capable of ingesting all sorts of content — including things like Twitter feeds, RSS feeds and blogs. For instance, the local section could be augmented with the Twitter feed from the local high school sports team or college newspaper.

Local news is still an area tech companies are looking to solve. Digital news company Patch now uses a combination of humans and software to write its local news. And both Google and Facebook have made investments in local news, despite having been complicit in harming local news in the first place.

For participating publishers, being available on Flipboard will give them a different way to engage with and expand their audience, rather than relying on other traditional advertising and marketing opportunities, including social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, and digital ads. There’s no cost for publishers to participate on Flipboard. But for now, that means it only indexes free content — for paywalled content, users are sent to the website instead, where they either get a certain number of free articles per month or can log in as a subscriber.

At launch, the 23 metros regions covered include:

Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis-St. Paul, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Toronto, Vancouver, and Washingon, D.C.

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‘Star Trek: Picard’ breaks streaming records on CBS All Access

CBS’ streaming service, CBS All Access, credits a trio of high-profile events — including the premiere of its new Star Trek series, “Star Trek: Picard,” as well as the 62nd annual Grammy Awards, not to mention a busy month of football — with helping it to achieve a new record for subscriber sign-ups in a given month.  The company says January 2020 surpassed the service’s previous record in February 2019 for subscriber sign-ups. In addition, last week was the second-best sign-up week ever, closely behind the week of the 2019 Super Bowl.

Much of the record-setting had to do with the launch of the highly anticipated show, “Star Trek: Picard,” which brings back fan-favorite Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard, now a retired Starfleet Admiral whose quiet life on his family’s vineyard is about to be disrupted. The show, set 18 years after the events of the final “Star Trek: The Next Generation” movie, “Star Trek: Nemesis,” not only capitalizes on Stewart’s draw, it also brings back previous “Star Trek” actors including Brent Spiner (Data), Jeri Ryan (Seven of Nine), Marina Sirtis (Troi), and Jonathan Frakes (Riker).

But unlike other reboots which hope nostalgia alone will bring the viewers, “Picard’s” creators have actually given thought to the story the show is trying to tell, resulting in a 95% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes.

CBS says “Picard’s” premiere also marked a new record for total streams and drove the highest volume of subscribers to stream a CBS All Access original series to date.

“Picard” was up by more than 115% in terms of total streams, when compared to CBS All Access’s first record, which was by its other “Star Trek” show, the less well-received “Star Trek: Discovery.” It was also up by 180+% over “Discovery’s” prior record for subscribers streaming a CBS All Access original.

Meanwhile, CBS said last night’s Grammys were the most-streamed to date and a new record for sign-ups on a Grammys Sunday, surpassing 2019 by more than 80% in new sign-ups and more than 30% in unique viewers on the service.

However, what CBS won’t talk about is the total number of subscribers for CBS All Access alone, nor does it break out how many have upgraded to the ad-free tier.

Instead, the company only shares that CBS All Access and Showtime’s over-the-top service, combined, have more than 10 million total subscribers.

In any event, that figure puts it far behind streaming rivals like Netflix and Hulu, with 61 million U.S. subscribers and 29 million subscribers, respectively. Even newcomers like Disney+ and Apple TV+ have boomed. Disney+ is estimated to have somewhere between 23.2 million and 25 million. One estimate believes Apple TV+ could be even bigger, but the analyst firm’s methodology is questionable. (After all, Apple TV+ may be available to users with a new Apple device for free for a year, but that doesn’t mean users are watching the service, nor will pay for it later on.)

In short, what these figures mean is CBS needs more than football, seasonal events, and a new “Star Trek” series in order to grow. Even if “Star Trek: Picard” becomes a hit, fans who come for “Star Trek” alone are likely to sign up only when the show is airing, then unsubscribe in the off-season. Some may even wait to watch the series until they can binge it all — possibly even during a free trial period.

But as the newly-combined ViacomCBS, the company now has options. ViacomCBS’ top execs have indicated they could bring Nickelodeon, BET, MTV and Comedy Central shows to CBS All Access, as a result of the Viacom-CBS merger. The company believes it can hit 25 million CBS All Access subscribers by 2022.

“We’ve seen tremendous continued growth in the service, and the new records we’ve experienced due to Star Trek: Picard,” the Grammy’s and a fantastic season of football are a phenomenal way to kick off what will be a fantastic year for CBS All Access,” said Marc DeBevoise, Chief Digital Officer, ViacomCBS, and President and CEO, CBS Interactive. “CBS All Access continues to build upon its great mix of programming – from original series, to sports and special events – and we’ve strategically programmed 2020 to bring subscribers an ‘always on’ calendar of must-watch series and events,” he added.

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Original Content podcast: Apple’s ‘Little America’ chooses uplift over anger

“Little America,” a new anthology series on Apple TV+, has been widely described as the best show on the fledging streaming service.

Here on the Original Content podcast, we aren’t ready to go quite that far, particularly since a couple of us are big fans of “See.” But we were pretty impressed.

The series, which counts “The Big Sick” writers Emily V. Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani among its executive producers, tells eight separate stories (all based on real-life profiles in Epic Magazine) about immigrants to the United States. For example, the first episode focuses on a young boy whose parents end up returning to India in the face of deportation, leaving him as the de facto manager of their motel in Utah.

At a time when immigration remains a hot-button issue on the national stage, this might sound like the setup for a righteously angry and political show. Instead, “Little America” largely eschews overt politics, aside from its insistence in depicting as immigrants from all over the world as individuals with their own idiosyncrasies and ambitions — in short, as real human beings.

This makes for a funny, engaging show that never gets particularly dark or depressing. Perhaps that’s our only real criticism — that the stories seem so carefully chosen to emphasize uplift over anger that they can start to feel a bit formulaic.

In addition to our review (which includes some mild spoilers for early episodes), this episode takes us all over the place, covering everything from Netflix’s new method for reporting audience size to a lawsuit alleging that M. Night Shyamalan stole the idea for his TV+ series “Servant.

You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

And if you’d like to skip ahead, here’s how the episode breaks down:

0:00 Intro
0:27 Netflix audience metrics
15:52 “Little America” review (mild spoilers)
45:59 M. Night Shyamalan lawsuit discussion
56:31 “Encore” discussion
1:02:07 “Bachelor” discussion

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Apple TV+ show ‘Little America’ to get a companion podcast, exec producer says

A recent report from Bloomberg claimed Apple was considering making original podcasts related to its Apple TV+ streaming service shows. Now we have further confirmation that these companion podcasts are indeed in the works. In an interview with Forbes, an executive producer of the Apple TV+ anthology series “Little America,” Lee Eisenberg, talks about the benefits of working with Apple — noting, by the way, that the show will have a podcast as well as a playlist featuring music from the series.

Neither of these has yet to launch, but are in line with what Bloomberg claimed Apple has been planning.

The audio programs — basically Apple’s own original podcasts — would help to market some of Apple TV+’s more high-profile shows. “Little America” was mentioned in Bloomberg’s report as one possibility, given the rave reviews it received from critics. Golden Globe nominee “The Morning Show,” which also won Jennifer Aniston a best actress award at the Screen Actor Guild Awards, was another.

Eisenberg, speaking to Forbes, confirmed the plans to cross-promote the new show across Apple’s platform.

“Apple is such a worldwide and multi-faceted brand,” he said. “We’re doing a podcast to delve more into the stories and the music on the show. There’ll also be a playlist for every episode. We’re putting out a book too. Apple has an infrastructure that just felt like it would be able to touch all of the different pieces that we wanted,” he added.

The comment was meant to highlight one of the benefits of working with a company like Apple, in a piece that laid out how different Apple’s approach is from rival networks and streaming services. For example, Apple was passionate about “Little America,” which focuses on the immigrant experience in America, even when traditional networks had passed with concerns over subject matter and lack of star power. In fact, Apple sold itself and its streaming service to “Little America’s” producers and creators, not the other way around.

It’s unclear when the “Little America” podcast or episode playlists will go live or to what extent Apple will be involved when they do. Apple has not responded to requests for comment on the matter.

Such a move would represent a big jump by Apple into the world of original podcasts, if and when it comes to pass. Today, the company’s selection of Apple-produced podcasts are limited to things like Apple keynotes, special events, and quarterly earnings calls — not really what you think of as original audio programming.

Apple is alone among the top streaming services in terms of not having some sort of original audio programming play. Spotify has heavily invested in podcasts, and now has hundreds of originals and exclusives available to its users. It also acquired several podcast networks and podcast startups, including Gimlet, Parcast, and Anchor. It’s now said to be in discussions with The Ringer. 

Pandora is leveraging the assets of new parent SiriusXM to turn its talk shows into podcasts and develop a new podcast-and-audio format, called Pandora Stories.

Meanwhile, Amazon Music — now close to Apple in user numbers — wraps in a premium collection of Audible podcasts with its Prime membership. That means Amazon Prime subscribers get both free music as well as exclusives audio shows from Audible.

Even a smaller player, Stitcher, offers its own network of originals.

It seems original audio programming is something that’s now becoming table-stakes in the streaming music wars. Apple’s entry may be belated, but it will at least be differentiated as its podcasts will promote its shows and vice versa, instead of only being connected to music.

 

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NBC partners with Snapchat on four daily shows for 2020 Tokyo Olympics

Snapchat and NBC Olympics are again teaming up to produce customized Olympics content for users in the U.S. — this time, for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics this summer. The companies had previously worked together during the Rio 2016 and PyeongChang 2018 Olympics. The PyeongChang Olympic Winter Games in 2018 reached over 40 million U.S. users, up 25% from the 2016 Rio Olympics.

In addition, 95% of those users were under the age of 35.

This younger demographic is getting harder to reach in the cord-cutting era, as many people forgo pay-TV subscriptions and traditional broadcast networks in favor of on-demand streaming services, like Netflix. That limits the reach of advertisers, impacting NBC’s bottom line.

The Snap partnership helps to fix that, as it offers NBC Olympics a way to sell to advertisers who want to reach younger fans who don’t watch as much — or any — TV. Snapchat today reaches 90% of all 13 to 24 year-olds in the U.S., and 75% of all 13 to 34 year-olds. 210 million people now use Snapchat daily.

NBC Olympics says it’s the exclusive seller of all the new customized content associated with the Games, working in partnership with Snap.

This year, it’s also putting out more content than before.

The company plans to release more than 70 episodes across four daily Snapchat shows leading up to and during the Games. That’s triple the number of episodes it offered in 2018.

For the first time, it’s creating two daily Highlight Shows for Snapchat, which will be updated in near real-time. The shows will include the must-see moments from the day in Tokyo.

In addition, two unscripted shows will air during the Games, each with two episodes per day. One, “Chasing Gold,” which first debuted during PyeongChang 2018, will follow the journeys of Team USA athletes. The second show is new this year, and will be a daily recap of the most memorable moments curated especially for Snapchat users. Both are being produced by The NBCUniversal Digital Lab.

The deal will also see Snap curating daily Our Stories during the Games, as it has done in previous years. The stories will include photos and videos from fans as well as content from the NBC Olympics.

“We know the audience on Snap loves the Olympic Games,” said Gary Zenkel, President, NBC Olympics, in a statement. “After two successful Olympics together, we’re excited to take the partnership to another level and produce even more content and coverage from the Tokyo Olympics tailored for Snapchatters, which also will directly benefit the many NBC Olympics advertisers who seek to engage further with this young and active demographic.”

Snapchat isn’t the only digital destination for Olympics content, however. NBC and Twitter teamed up to stream limited live event coverage, highlights and a daily Olympics show from the Tokyo Games. It was unclear at the time the deal was announced if NBC had opted for Twitter over Snapchat. Now we know that’s not the case — in fact, Snap’s deal with NBC is even bigger than before.

NBCU had said earlier, it expected to exceed $1.2 billion in ad sales for the 2020 Games, which are also presented on NBC, NBCSN, Olympic Channel: Home of Team USA, and NBC Sports’ digital platforms.

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Here are the six startups in Betaworks’ new Audiocamp

Back in September, Betaworks put out a call for startups to participate in its latest “camp,” this one focused on audio.

Danika Laszuk, the head of Betaworks Camp, told me at the time that the startup studio was looking for companies that are trying to build “audio-first” experiences for smart speakers and wireless headphones, or pursuing other audio-related opportunities like synthetic audio or social audio.

Now Betaworks is unveiling the six startups that it has selected to participate in the program, covering everything from game assistants to AI music production. Each startup receives a pre-seed investment from Betaworks, and will be working out of the firm’s New York City offices for the next three months.

Here are the companies:

  • Storm is working on a live audio platform that it says will allow your friends to ask you anything.
  • Midgame is building voice-enabled gaming assistants, starting with a bot that answers questions to improve your gameplay in Stardew Valley.
  • Scout FM is developing hands-free listening experiences such as podcast radio stations and voice assistants for Amazon Alexa, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.
  • Never Before Heard Sounds is an AI-powered music production company, working to create new sounds and new musical datasets.
  • SyncFloor is a marketplace of commercial music that can be used in movies, TV shows, ads, video games and elsewhere.
  • The Next Big Idea Club offers a subscription for curated nonfiction books — you can buy the books themselves, but also read, watch or listen to condensed summaries.

Here are the six startups in Betaworks’ new Audiocamp

 

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Netflix is still saying ‘no’ to ads

Despite ongoing speculation and investor pressure, Netflix is still declining to adopt an advertising-based business model as a means to boost its revenue, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings confirmed on Tuesday. The company on its Q4 earnings call again shot down the idea of an ad-supported option, with Hastings explaining there’s no “easy money” in an online advertising business that has to compete with the likes of Google, Amazon, and Facebook.

Explained the exec, “Google and Facebook and Amazon are tremendously powerful at online advertising because they’re integrating so much data from so many sources. There’s a business cost to that, but that makes the advertising more targeted and effective. So I think those three are going to get most of the online advertising business,” Hastings said.

To grow a $5 billion to $10 billion advertising business, you’d need to “rip that away” from the existing providers, he continued. And stealing online advertising business from Amazon, Google, and Facebook is “quite challenging,” Hastings added, saying “there’s not easy money there.”

“We’ve got a much simpler business model, which is just focused on streaming and customer pleasure,” he said.

The CEO also noted that Netflix’s strategic decision to not enter the ad business has its upsides, in terms of the controversies that surround companies that collect personal data on their users. To compete, Netflix would have to track more data on its subscribers, including things like their location — that’s not something it’s interested in doing, he said, calling it “exploiting users.”

“We don’t collect anything. We’re really focused on just making our members happy,” Hastings stated.

That’s not exactly true, of course. Netflix does track viewership data in order to make determinations about which of its original programs should be renewed and which should be canceled. It also looks at overall viewing trends to make decisions about what new programs to greenlight or develop. And it tracks users’ own interactions with its service in order to personalize the Netflix home screen to show users more of what they like.

The company also this quarter introduced a new viewership metric — “chose to watch,” which counts the number of people who deliberately watched a show or movie for at least two minutes. That’s far longer than Facebook or Google’s YouTube, but isn’t a great way to tell how many people are watching a show to completion, as on TV.

However, none of this viewership tracking is on the scale of big tech’s data collection practices, which is what Hastings meant by his comment.

“We think with our model that we’ll actually get to larger revenue, larger profits, larger market cap because we don’t have the exposure to something that we’re strategically disadvantaged at  — which is online advertising against those big three,” he said.

This isn’t the first time Netflix’s CEO has had to repeat the company’s stance on being an ad-free business. In Q2 2019, Netflix reminded investors in its shareholder letter that its lack of advertising is part of its overall brand proposition.

“When you read speculation that we are moving into selling advertising be confident that this is false,” the letter said.

Analysts have estimated Netflix could make over a billion more per year by introducing an ad-supported tier to its service.

To some extent, the increased push for Netflix to adopt ads has to do with the changes to the overall streaming landscape.

Netflix today is facing new competition from two major streaming services, Disney+ and Apple+ — both of which have subsidized their launch with free promotions in order to gain viewership. In the next few months, Netflix will have to take on several others, including mobile streaming service Quibi, WarnerMedia’s HBO Max, and NBCU’s Peacock. The latter features a multi-tiered business model, including a free service for pay-TV subscribers, an ad-free premium tier, and one that’s ad-supported.

The service was introduced to investors last week where it was well-received.

Other TV streaming services also rely on ads for portions of their revenue, including Hulu and CBS All Access. Meanwhile, a number of ad-supported services are also emerging, like Roku’s The Roku Channel, Amazon’s IMDb TV, TUBI, Viacom’s Pluto TV, and others.

Netflix’s decision to keep itself ad-free is likely welcome news for its subscriber base, however, who see the lack of ads as being a key selling point.

 

 

 

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Adblock Plus’s Till Faida on the shifting shape of ad blocking

Publishers hate ad blockers, but millions of internet users embrace them — and many browsers even bake it in as a feature, including Google’s own Chrome. At the same time, growing numbers of publishers are walling off free content for visitors who hard-block ads, even asking users directly to be whitelisted.

It’s a fight for attention from two very different sides.

Some form of ad blocking is here to stay, so long as advertisements are irritating and the adtech industry remains deaf to genuine privacy reform. Although the nature of the ad-blocking business is generally closer to filtering than blocking, where is it headed?

We chatted with Till Faida, co-founder and CEO of eyeo, maker of Adblock Plus (ABP), to take the temperature of an evolving space that’s never been a stranger to controversy — including fresh calls for his company to face antitrust scrutiny.

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Netflix adds 8.8M subscribers despite growing competition

Netflix grew by 8.8 million net subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2019, according to its latest earning report, putting its growth well ahead of its forecast of 7.6 million.

The company says it has 167 million paid memberships worldwide, with more than 100 million outside the United States. It also reported stronger-than-expected financials, with revenue of $5.47 billion and earnings per share of $1.30, compared to analyst estimates of $5.45 billion and EPS of 53 cents.

That’s all despite the launch of two major streaming services, Disney+ and Apple TV+, with more competition coming this year from WarnerMedia’s HBOMax and NBCUniversal’s Peacock.

Netflix addresses the competitive landscape in its letter to shareholders, arguing that there’s “ample room for many services to grow as linear TV wanes,” and noting that during Q4, “our viewing per membership grew both globally and in the US on a year over year basis, consistent with recent quarters.”

Netflix also points to Google Search Trends showing much higher interest in its original series “The Witcher” than in Disney+’s “Mandalorian,” Apple TV+’s “Morning Show” or Amazon’s “Jack Ryan.”

Google Trends

That might seem like an unfair comparison, especially since Disney+ is only available in a handful of countries so far, but Netflix argues, “If Disney+ were global we don’t think the picture would be much different, to judge from the ​NL results​ where Disney+ first launched.”

In fact, Netflix says “The Witcher” is on-track to become “our biggest season one TV series ever,” with 76 million member households choosing to watch the show. It also says 83 million households chose to watch the Michael Bay-directed action film “6 Underground.”

If you’re wondering about the slightly awkward “chose to watch” phrasing — yep, Netflix is switching up the (already controversial) way that it reports viewership. While it previously shared the number of accounts that watched at least 70% of an episode or film, it’s now looking at how many members chose to watch a show or movie, and then actually watched for at least two minutes (“long enough to indicate that the choice was intentional”).

The company says this increases viewer counts by an average of 35%.

“Our new methodology is similar to the BBC iPlayer in their rankings​ based on ‘requests’ for the title, ‘most popular’ articles on the New York Times which include those who opened the articles, and YouTube view counts,” Netflix says. “This way, short and long titles are treated equally, leveling the playing field for all types of our content including interactive content, which has no fixed length.”

One dark cloud in the earnings report is what appears to be slowing growth, with 7.0 million projected net additions in Q1 of this year, compared to 9.6 million net adds in the first quarter of 2019. Netflix attributes this to “the continued, slightly elevated churn levels we are seeing in the US,” as well as more balance between Q1 and Q2 growth this year, “due in part to the timing of last year’s price changes and a strong upcoming Q2 content slate.”

As of 4:51pm Eastern, Netflix shares were up 0.41% in after-hours trading.

Netflix Q3 earnings exceed estimates, despite disappointing US subscriber growth