If you are in your twenties, you probably have Netflix but probably aren’t paying for it.
This is a widely-known fact, but now the numbers confirm it.
A new study of college students found the following:
- 92 percent of the respondents answered that they have some sort of access to Netflix.
- Only 34 percent of those respondents actually pay the $7.99 per month for the service.
- 54 percent use their family’s or friend’s account, while 5% use the account of a current-or-ex-significant other.
- 84 percent of respondents said that they would choose Netflix if they could only have one streaming service. 12 percent said HBO GO and 4 percent said Hulu.
Netflix must know that most of its young users aren’t paying for the service, and the company doesn’t seem to really care. It allows multiple people from the same paid account to create their own profiles, enabling the mooching. The goal is clear: Build up users, and worry about the proportion of paid users later.
In the coming years (and decades), this strategy could pay off. $7.99 isn’t much for a monthly subscription that many people use multiple times per week (or even per day). It’s likely that those people will eventually become paying customers now that they’ve been hooked young.
[Mic]
