Has investors' souring sentiment regarding Netflix suddenly seeped into its customers' connected living rooms?
Two recent U.S. streaming subscriber surveys show a steep decline in the level of Netflix customer satisfaction. Perhaps all that bad business news about Netflix, which has been proliferate since the company's April 19 "Black Tuesday" earnings report, is fairly or unfairly now interfering with overall consumer perception of the service.
Whip Media polled 2,460 U.S. subscription streaming app users ages 18-54 from April 29-May 4 and compared the results to those of a similarly scoped survey of around 4,000 U.S. streamers conducted a year ago. The results show that overall customer satisfaction with Netflix slipped 10 points and that the streaming service dropped in overall ranking from second behind satisfaction leader HBO Max to No. 4.
The Whip Media data follows a separate data dump made by Evercore ISI last week, which found that Netflix satisfaction slipped 7% in May to its lowest level since the post-Qwikster days of 2012.
Netflix raised its prices in the U.S. in January. The most popular tier is now priced at $15.49, which exceeds all of its SVOD competition.
Perhaps of even greater concern for Netflix: Whip also asked streaming subscribers to rate the value of their service vs. the price. The most popular iteration of HBO Max is still the ad-free $14.99 version of the service. But despite that high price point, an industry-leading 85% of customers rate themselves "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with HBO Max service vs. just 62% for Netflix.
Notably, when Whip Media asked survey participants who'd cancelled Netflix why they bailed, 69% of them said it was because the company raised its prices.
When survey subjects were asked their likelihood to keep Netflix in April 2021, an industry-leading 93% of them said they were "likely" or "very likely" to hold onto the service. That number slipped to 81% for the latest Whip survey.
When Whip Media asked survey participants which SVOD service they could keep if they could only have one, Netflix remained its industry lead with 31% of respondents listing it as the one. But that was down 10 points from last year.
Netflix has seen its churn rise from 6%- 9% in Whip's "Streaming Satisfaction" rankings. Apple TV Plus has the highest churn rate at 13%.
