Ad-Supported Streaming isn't Driving Downloads - But It's Not All Bad
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - The End of Cable TV?. Check out the full article for more insights.
Video streaming apps started with very attractive pricing to gain traction, but within a few short years, all have increased their prices and introduced new and more expensive tiers.
To combat the obvious churn, some streams have introduced a low-cost tier that’s got ads. And by low-cost I mean that its pricing is similar to where things started.
We analyzed the most popular ad-supported tier releases from Netflix and Disney+ to see if they impacted demand for their apps - they should, right?
We used our App Intelligence to analyze the downloads before Disney+ and Netflix rolled out their ad-supported/cheaper tiers and after to see if it tipped the scales in any way.
You'd expect people to flock to both now that they're more cost-efficient, right? Well, that doesn't seem to be the case when looking at the data.
Over the first 17 months of both having their new ad-supported tiers, downloads didn't really increase. The opposite.
Netflix's downloads remained somewhat flat while Disney's continued to drop, as they have been over the last few years.
The new tier did generate some excitement for Netflix, which saw downloads rise by low double-digits for two months after the release. But it didn't last long as download growth dropped into the negative (meaning there were fewer downloads per month), which continued to be the trend for the rest of the months except for two.
Disney+'s journey was worse. The release generated growth for exactly one month and every other month saw downloads dropping double digits - as much as 36%.
Does anyone even care about the ad-supported tier?
Looking at it now, both streamers have roughly half of their user base on the ad-supported tier, which means the new tier wasn't a way to get more new users but rather a way to keep existing users from churning as subscription prices have soared.
Although neither has a free tier, I wouldn't be surprised if that'll come in the very near future as streamers fight for attention without investing as much into new content.
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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.
