It is not something new, Netflix has been warning for a long time that it wants to end shared accounts. Already in March 2021 we told you about their plans to detect the use of the same account from multiple IP addresses to, based on the statistical analysis of said information, try to determine if the use made of it was legitimate. according to the contracting conditions of the service, or if an abuse was being committed based on said norms.
2022 had just started and Neflix was back on the attack, and that there was still no concrete data on the economic bleeding that ended up being the first months of last year for the company. A couple of months later, they launched a test to charge for shared accounts and, already in the second half of the year, they confirmed their plans to monetize these accounts in a special way and enabled the profile transfer tool, so that users of Shared accounts may segregate their profiles as separate accounts.
Not a beginning of the year without news from Netflix in this regard, it seems that they have a special willingness to take steps in this direction during the month of January. Thus, as we anticipated last Friday, the end of shared (unpaid) accounts is very close. A measure that, as my colleague Juan already commented, we can all take for granted that it will have a considerable cost in terms of the volume of subscriptions to the platform. Now, the really interesting thing would be to be able to quantify it, even if it is speculative, right?
Well, the good news is that Barlovento Comunicación has put specific numbers in a complete report published on its website. There are mainly two numbers that interest us: how many Netflix accounts are shared in Spain, and how many of them will be terminated when the company ends this type of use. And given these numbers, the truth is that the platform is facing what can be a real hack to its accounts.
Thus, as we can read in the report, 61.3% of Netflix accounts in Spain are shared. Yes, more than half of them have two or more users who do not live together, contrary to what is stipulated in the rules of use of the service. It is for these users that the profile transfer tool has been created and, of course, the special billing model, which will allow them to have an account at a cheaper price. Now, well, is this enough for those users?
The answer is clear, not for more than half of them, since the report affirms that 58.7% of them will unsubscribe when this change occurs. They remain close to a tie, above 14%, those who affirm that they will contract the special modality for shared accounts and those who affirm that they will register their own totally independent account and, to the surprise of few, closes the list of options contracting the basic plan with advertising, which is only chosen by 11.8%.
According to the data that we can read in Statista, in 2022 Netflix had 9.6 million subscribers in Spain. If we take all the data for granted, that means that 5.88 million of those accounts are shared, and that when the company ends this widespread mode of use, it may lose 3.45 million subscribers. That is 36%, or slightly more than one in three accounts, an income that does not seem recoverable despite the nearly 41% of users who do consider starting to pay.
