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In 2021, the entire Dutch population will become a Netflix subscriber. um… excuse me? Well, that’s how you could describe the growth in the number of paying Netflix customers worldwide. The streaming service was able to welcome 18 million new subscribers. Yet, compared to previous years, this is relatively modest growth. 2020 was a record year with more than 37 million new subscribers, but that was mainly due to the corona pandemic. Between March and May of that year, about 20 million people subscribed to Netflix.
Growth is leveling off
Netflix experienced relatively stable growth figures in 2018 and 2019. In both years, around 28 million new subscribers were added. Seen in that light, 2021 is therefore a bit of a setback for the streaming service. Growth is clearly leveling off. That is also the expectation for this year. In the first quarter of 2022, Netflix expects to welcome about 2.5 million new subscribers. A year ago there were 4 million.
At the end of 2021, streaming reached its 222 million paid subscribers, generating annual revenue of more than $29.7 billion and an increase of 19 percent compared to the previous year.
Netflix-Google
The fact that Netflix is primarily a series channel is apparent from the search results on Google.
Billions of viewing hours
Netflix doesn’t like the ratings. The streaming service prefers to publish the number of hours that a certain series or movie has been watched (streamed). The Witcher series returned in the fourth quarter of 2021, which had more than 484 million “viewing hours” in its first four weeks. That same quarter, the popular La Casa de Papel series came to an end. Over 6.7 billion hours were watched over the entire duration of the series.
The fact that Netflix is primarily a series channel is also apparent from the Google statistics for 2021. Of the ten TV series that were most searched for online, six were from Netflix.
