Netflix continues to be the biggest name in premium streaming. Today, the company revealed that it now has 269.60 million paid subscribers worldwide for the first quarter of 2024. That"s an increase of 9.33 million compared to the subscriber numbers from the fourth quarter of 2023.
Financially, Netflix brought in $9.37 billion in revenue from the first quarter of 2024. That was up compared to $8.164 billion from the same period a year ago. Net income was $2.332 billion for the quarter, also up from $1.305 billion from the same period a year ago.
In its latest shareholder letter (in PDF format), Netflix says that in the near future, it will concentrate on reporting its revenue and other financial numbers above that of its subscriber membership. Netflix points out that it is getting more and more revenue from its advertising division.
Starting in the first quarter of 2025, the company plans to no longer report its membership numbers on a quarterly basis. It did state that it will provide "major subscriber milestones as we cross them.”
While today"s numbers for the first quarter of the year exceeded expectations, Netflix did announce that it expects revenue from the current second quarter to be about $9.49 billion. That was actually a bit lower than was expected which is why the company"s stock is down 3 percent in after-hours trading at the time of this writing.
Netflix still has a lot of major TV shows and movies that are due for release in 2024. That includes the second season of Squid Game, the Korea-based thriller series that became a huge hit with its first season in 2021. The third season of Brigerton is also due to begin very soon, with the first part released in May and the second part in June.
Netflix is also trying to become a major force in video games. It"s been testing a game streaming service since August 2023 to a limited audience. It also has a number of mobile game developers, plus at least one game development team that"s working on a new AAA title for consoles and the PC.