Netflix is no longer reporting number of subscribers on a quarterly basis. But it’s still motoring with a hot growth engine, delivering financial results for the first quarter of 2025 that topped Wall Street expectations.
The industry-leading subscription streamer reported Q1 revenue of $10.54 billion, up 12.5%, and earnings per share of $6.61 (compared with $5.28 a year prior). It’s the first quarter Netflix will stop disclosing subscriber counts, a longtime metric investors have used to gauge its growth, as the company wants to focus the narrative on financials and user engagement.
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On average, Wall Street analysts expected $10.51 billion in revenue and earnings of $5.66 per share, according to LSEG Data & Analytics. Netflix’s earnings beat comes amid broader fears of a looming economic downturn that could deliver a punch to consumer spending and ad budgets. For the full-year 2024, Netflix revenue rose 15.6%.
In its quarterly letter to shareholders, Netflix said the revenue was driven primarily by membership growth and higher pricing. “Revenue was modestly above our guidance due to slightly higher-than-forecasted subscription and ad revenue (which is still very small relative to subscription revenue),” the company said.
For Q2, Netflix expect revenue growth of 15% “as we see the full quarter benefit from recent price changes and continued growth in membership and advertising revenue,” it continued. The company projected an operating margin of 33%, a roughly 6 percentage point year-over-year improvement.
Netflix ended 2024 with a reported 301.6 million paid subscribers globally, up 16% for the year. But according to the company, the quarter-to-quarter sub count is not as relevant as financial and user engagement metrics, given its rollout of plans at different price points and its paid-sharing option (which lets subscribers add “extra members” to their accounts for an additional fee).
Analysts have suggested that Netflix made the change because its subscriber growth rate is slowing, while also noting other companies that have done the same kind of thing (in 2018, Apple stopped disclosing unit sales of iPhones and other product lines). Meanwhile, following price hikes in the U.S. and other markets in the first quarter of 2025, Netflix can “obscure subscriber churn” while “showing meaningful revenue growth,” Wedbush Securities analyst Alicia Reese pointed out in an April 11 research note.