Netflix made $1.5 billion from advertising last year, about 3% of its total revenue

It’s been over three years now since Netflix first introduced its cheaper, ad-supported tiers, which landed with a bit of a thud at the time. Now, selling ads for the plans accounts for a bigger chunk of the streamer’s sales than ever before, with the company revealing that advertising revenues hit a record $1.5 billion in 2025.

Alongside posting a disappointing earnings forecast that’s seen shares slump, Netflix also revealed that the money it made from ads was up more than 2.5x from the year before in its Q4 and full-year financial report yesterday. While that’s certainly progress of a kind, $1.5 billion is still a drop in the ocean in the wider context of the media behemoth’s business.

Last year, as millions of people around the world rushed to sub (or re-sub) to the streamer to watch huge movie hits like “KPop Demon Hunters” or tune in for the final season of “Stranger Things,” Netflix’s total revenues rose 16% from 2024 to a whopping $45.2 billion. That means that advertising accounted for a little over 3% of the company’s total sales, proving that it still has a ways to go to build its commercial break business into anything like the one over at YouTube.

So, what are Netflix’s ads worth per user?

Assuming the streamer had an average subscriber count of about 312.5 million throughout the year, the ~$1.5 billion works out to about $0.40 a month for every one of its global subscribers. But, of course, not every subscriber is on an ad-supported tier. Given that estimates cited by Deadline suggest ~40% of Netflix’s active user base was on an ad plan around the end of last year, the real “ad revenue per user” figure is likely closer to $1 a month.