Happy Monday War & Peaceniks! SVOD’s got a bad case of The Mondays.
Antenna has the best analytics for SVOD data in the business, because they use millions of real (anonymized) banking transactions (not panels or polls of thousands of users) to track sign-ups and cancels. Today, they released their State of Streaming Report for Q2 2022.
“Quarterly Subscriber growth rate across Premium SVOD was the lowest we have ever seen in the 22 quarters for which Antenna has data. It was also the lowest in absolute volume of Gross Subscriber Adds since Q3’18.”
Lest you think this is seasonal…
“Is this seasonal? Maybe, but if so, only partially. While Q2 was the slowest growth quarter of 2021, we have never before seen a slowdown like the one in the second quarter of 2022.”
When Netflix lost 800K subs in 1Q and SVOD began to plateau, I put us all on Churn Notice. Last week, based on the single largest ad spend drop in 3 years, I warned that we have entered an Impression Recession. The data above, and the charts below show clearly that Premium SVOD has hit Subscriber Stagflation (Stagflation: high inflation combined with stagnant demand.) aka SUBFLATION. What’s more, Netflix has passed Subflation, and is now mired in full-blown Subcession (sub recession).
Let’s unpack…
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