MEASURE 4 MEASURE

Why WHAT We Measure Matters

Happy Monday War & Peaceniks. Let’s get measured!

The chart above measures total active accounts for each of the streaming services listed - Netflix, Prime, Disney+, and MAX. We get subscriber accounts from the companies, but this new data measures how many of those subs actually use the service each month.

For this chart I utilized new data provided to me exclusively by Digital I, which recruits respondents around the world to install software to track their actual usage of their premium streaming services - without providing login credentials or any other private information. For the moment, Digital I only tracks these four services. But, boy, is the data enormously telling.

First, because this data is based on the actual usage of twenty-one thousand subscribers in nineteen countries, it’s far more reliable than a survey of the same or even larger size. Second, the data above awakens a major thought for the streaming media industrial complex, and the advertisers who are buying into it:

The number of subscribers a service has, is far less important than the number of subscribers who actually use it.