In the last few months, Netflix has enjoyed more number of new subscriptions and marked its best quarter.
To acquire new users and to keep the traction going, Netflix is now offering free movies and series. This will help them acquire the audience from some of their untouched markets.
Here's the catch, you can only watch the first episode of a series, movies can be watched in full. Also, only a couple of movies and a handful of shows are made free here. Let's also note that Netflix is now showing ads before the media starts playing, only this is not the type of ad you would see on YouTube but an ad asking you to subscribe to one of their plans for more content.
What you should learn: Explore Limited free + Unlimited premium models.
At present, if you're only offering premium solutions try offering free plans. Though free plans may sometime devalue your product depending on your industry, in certain industries, as in entertainment industry, it may turn out beneficial to you and enjoyable to your users.
This is a good marketing strategy, great for them. It's the first time I hear about this move, but not many people are eager to pay for it anymore. Why? Because there are a thousand online sites for us to watch movies and tv series online, FREE. I could give you so many examples where the quality is excellent, https://gostream5.co and so many more. Why pay when you can watch them free? I know there are ads on most sites and that may be annoying, but it doesn't hurt your pocket haha. I paid Netflix a few months, but I realized I wasn't using it that often, so in my opinion it's not worth it. And it's expensive.
Why many are not eager to pay? I thought they had huge demand side. So they've hit the roof?
Netflix seems to be trying Freemium with some extra steps.
It's most likely to see Ad revenue > Subscription revenue due to this in certain markets and might make it as default monetization strategy for those regions. It would be interesting to see if Netflix does the same in its home market as previous Ad experiments resulted in backlash.
I personally don't like ads too, in fact, I hate it! I hope they don't come up with a model like Hulu where I have to pay for the basic plan and still see ads 👀. There is definitely a demand for innovation in revenue models.
Thanks for sharing, it's really interesting to learn that. 🙏