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Nearly half of new Netflix signups are for its ad tier

It turns out a lot of people would rather save money than avoid ads.

7/18/24 3:44PM

Netflix’s ad tier is making up a growing share of its new signups. In places where you can get the $6.99 ad service, it accounted for 45% of new signups in the second quarter, up from 40% in Q1.

In May, Netflix told advertisers its ad-supported tier had amassed 40 million subscribers globally, nearly double what it was at the start of the year and accounting for 15% of all subscriptions. This quarter its ads tier grew 34% from last quarter.

That’s good news for Netflix, since ads are potentially worth more than the difference in subscription price. Netflix’s ad-free tier costs $15.49, or $8.50 more than ad tier per month. eMarketer estimates that Netflix earns $10 in monthly ad revenue per subscription.

“On a long enough timeline, the ad-supported tier is expected to generate higher average revenue per user (ARPU) than its ad-free compatriots as it amasses more cost-conscious users,” Parrot Analytics said in a statement ahead of Netflix’s earnings.

The situation is the same with other streamers, who are making their ad-free tier prices more attractive. Last month, for example, HBO raised the price of ad-free Max while keeping the ad subscription the same.

“Ads fulfill two important strategic priorities for Netflix: first they enable us to offer lower prices to consumers; and second, they create an additional revenue and profit stream for the business,” Netflix said in a press release.

Jon Keegan12/5/25

Report: SpaceX planning for IPO late next year

SpaceX has told investors that it is planning for an IPO in late 2026, according to a report from The Information.

Elon Musk’s rocket company is in talks for a share sale for employees and investors that would put the company’s valuation at $800 billion, making it the world’s most valuable private company, recapturing that crown from OpenAI.

Per the report, all of SpaceX including Starlink would be listed as one company, rather than spinning off Starlink, which Musk had discussed a few years ago.

SpaceX Tells Investors It’s Aiming For Late 2026 IPO

Per the report, all of SpaceX including Starlink would be listed as one company, rather than spinning off Starlink, which Musk had discussed a few years ago.

Rani Molla

12/5/25

What prediction markets think will happen with Apple’s CEO

People inside the company say executive changes are coming, The Information reports.

Rani Molla

The Netflix Effect

12/5/25

How much could Netflix charge if a subscription included HBO Max?

Here’s what streaming companies, many of which offer streaming bundles, charge now.

Rani Molla12/5/25

Meta reignites on-again, off-again relationship with news organizations with multiple AI content licensing deals

Meta has a long and tumultuous relationship with news organizations: first flooding them with traffic, then cutting it off; declaring news a priority, then deprioritizing it in people’s feeds; even hiring its own team to curate breaking news before abruptly disbanding it.

Now it seems media companies are back in Meta’s good graces. The social media company has struck a number of content licensing deals with publishers — including USA Today, People, CNN, Fox News, and The Daily Caller — in order to use information from their articles in Meta’s AI tools, Axios reports. The company first inked an AI news deal with Reuters last year.

Meta has been integrating its AI chatbots across its suite of products, and these licensing deals, which the company reportedly plans to expand to more news organizations, will give users better access to real-time information.

Exclusive: Meta strikes multiple AI deals with news publishers

Millie Giles12/5/25

Cloudflare just went down again, but apparently only for 20 minutes this time

Another day, another massive network outage taking down huge sections of the internet... and, once again, the cause of the hiccup was Cloudflare.

On Friday morning, the American IT giant reported that a change made to “how Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall parses requests” caused its network to “be unavailable for several minutes.”

Roughly 20 minutes later, the company said that “a fix has been implemented,” helping to soothe the stock’s losses after falling as much as 6% in premarket trading, according to Bloomberg. Shares of Cloudflare are trading about 2% lower at the time of writing.

Users reported that sites including LinkedIn, Zoom, Fortnite, Shopify, and Coinbase were all made unavailable by the outage — or at least they would’ve reported that, if Downdetector weren’t also down, per The Verge. Even so, some are still seeing issues as the service supposedly gets back on its feet.

Cloudflare went down only last month, though that time the network was down for roughly three hours and took OpenAI, X, and “League of Legends” with it — and that incident followed in the digitally disruptive footsteps of Amazon Web Services, which saw a major outage in October lasting some 15 hours.