Netflix soars shared after it released its Q3 earnings report, and here we’ve charted its paid streaming subscriber growth over a period totaling almost 5 years. As the chart (click to enlarge) demonstrates, the number of paid streaming subscribers outside the US has grown by more than 50% year-over-year in Q3, and by a factor of 2.5 in just 2 years.
US paid streaming subscriber growth has been modest at best this year, by comparison. Netflix has added fewer than 1 million paid subscribers in the US over the past 6 months (end of Q1 to end of Q3), while adding almost 5 million international paid subscribers over the same period.
As a result, the gap between the US and international paid streaming subscriber count has narrowed to less than 10 million. That’s a dramatic shift: as recently as Q1 2015, the gap was more than 20 million.
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Despite stagnating in the US, it’s worth putting Netflix’s paid subscriber count in perspective. The entire US music industry boasted 19.3 million paid streaming subscribers (to any service) during the first half of the year: Netflix more than doubles that number. The service has benefited from rising popularity of video streaming services, which recently reached equal penetration in US households as DVRs. Also, Netflix boasts strong customer loyalty, is the streaming service with the greatest customer satisfaction, and enjoys the best buzz of any brand among Millennials.
