The company now has 282 million subscribers globally.
Netflix added 5.1 million paid subscribers to reach 282.72 million globally in the third quarter of 2024, marking a year-over-year growth of more than 14%.
The streaming platform reported $5.40 earnings per share and a revenue of $9.82 bn in the third quarter of 2024, ending in September 30, beating analyst consensus estimates of $5.12 and $9.77bn respectively.
In its quarterly shareholder letter, the company stated that it spent a significant amount of space on its content and its advertising tiers, with plans to significantly expand in both areas.
On the programming front, the company said that engagement with its programming “is healthy,” and that it plans to grow its share of the streaming pie by investing even more into its TV series and films and “continuing to improve the variety and quality of our offering,” not by bundling itself with other streaming services.
On the advertising front, Netflix once again framed its ad business as being “a priority over the next few years,” while still being in the early days, but that it is “on track to reach what we believe to be critical ad subscriber scale for advertisers in all of our ads countries in 2025. However, the company also moderated expectations for its ad tier, telling shareholders that “we don’t expect ads to be a primary driver of our revenue growth in 2025.
Going forward, the company said that it expects its subscriber base to improve more in Q4 than it did in Q3 thanks to its content slate and typical seasonality, and it expects 2024 operating margins to be 27%, increasing to 28% in 2025.
