Netflix’s crackdown on password sharing seems to be having the effect the streaming network had hoped for.
Data from third-party analyst Antenna shows there has been a big surge in new user signups since May 23, when Netflix said it would begin curbing the long-accepted practice. Nearly 100,000 people signed up for accounts on both May 26 and May 27, Antenna said.
“Netflix has had the four single largest days of U.S. user acquisition in the four and a half years that Antenna has been measuring the streaming service,” the company wrote in a blog post.
Sign-ups in the tracked period were even larger than the company saw during the early days of COVID-19 lockdowns.
Netflix told Fortune it "generally [does not] comment on third party research".
Netflix, for a long time, winked at password sharing and was more interested in viewer numbers. The company even encouraged users to share passwords in a 2017 Tweet. With the company looking the other way, an estimated 100 million people worldwide borrowed passwords from family and friends to freeload off the service.
Early crack downs in Spain saw the company lose 1 million users and Antenna’s data shows cancelations also increased in the U.S. in the early days of the crackdown, but nowhere close to the rate of new signups.
“The ratio of Sign-ups to Cancels since May 23rd is up +25.6% compared to the previous 60-day period,” the company said.
Average daily signups in the first six days after implementing the policy reached 73,000, more than double the prior 60-day average.
The crackdown in password sharing comes after a year of lackluster subscriber growth at Netflix, which included its largest customer losses in over a decade. It follows the launch of an ad-supported version of the streaming service, which has also caused a surge in signups.
