Before Disney + Launched in November 2019, the Walt Disney Company hoped to cross the 90 million subscriber threshold by the end of the year 2024. It’s safe to say they overturned that goal: Today the company reports that it has already hit 95 million. subscribers worldwide, three years ahead of expectations and only 14 months after initial launch. That means Disney + is already almost halfway through Netflix’s global subscriber total.
THR points out that Disney + added 8.1 million subscribers in December 2020 alone, which equates to the 86.8 million subscribers it had at the beginning of that month. That’s probably due to Pixar’s presence Soul, which consistently performs well on the charts of companies measuring viewership across various streaming services. Of course, it also helps to have a huge archive of family-friendly classics, a ton of properties from the 20th Century Fox acquisition, and a phenomenon of original series like The Mandalorianalso. I wouldn’t be surprised if a large chunk of those subscribers came in the wake of Disney’s big investor day in early December, in which it announced what felt like 9,000 new film and TV projects in an effort to make a permanent place for itself in the pop culture landscape.
Netflix is still the King of Streaming Mountain with just over 200 million subscribers worldwide, but Disney + is slowly emerging. People who study this stuff much closer than I do suggest that Disney + ‘s rapid growth is the result of international launches, which will slow down rapidly and ultimately result in a plateau in subscriber numbers. I imagine it will be a tough battle to actually outperform Netflix considering that company had such a huge lead in streaming and still produces tons of content (most of which are hit and miss, but the ‘hits’ seem to drive a lot of conversation).
Still, the fact That it took Netflix nine years to reach 95 million customers and Disney only 14 months is pretty staggering, and really shows the uphill battle Netflix fought in the beginning and how streaming services, once a niche thing, are second nature become in our society.
But Disney’s quarterly earnings call was far from just bathing in the glory of those streaming subscribers. The company has been ravaged by the pandemic, resulting in this stunning statistic:
Disney’s total profit from October to December, when taxes are included, is … $ 29 million.
In 2019 it was $ 2.1 billion.
– Steven Zeitchik (@zeitchikWaPo) February 11, 2021
Whoa. That really shows how important Disney’s theme park business is to the bottom line during a normal year. With Disneyland still closed, they didn’t have any chance of getting close to what a normal year’s numbers might look like.
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