The Numbers That Have Netflix Investors Spooked

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0:58Learn more at amcplus.com. that matter most. To learn more, check out Accenture.com slash Spotify. It is Friday, July 17th. It's pretty crazy how much the narrative on Netflix has changed over the past few months. The dominant subscription streaming service is still dominant, don't get me wrong, but the stock price has dropped by half since October when it began its failed quest to buy Warner Brothers, down another 5 % today. And lingering over the company has been this nagging question of engagement or the perception that viewership on the platform isn't growing as fast as it once did. There are fewer hits, the second seasons of shows aren't performing as planned, and the whole push into video podcasts and YouTubers isn't doing much.

1:41The company released its second quarter earnings yesterday and turns out some of those fears were justified and some kind of weren't. Netflix hit its earnings estimates. It's now delivering$12 billion in revenue per quarter. That's more than Disney and without a single major theme park. And profit is up too. But the engagement number increased only 2%. An hour's watch per member was down almost 8 % the second half of 2025, according to Guggenheim. More important for Wall Street, the projections into next quarter were soft. And in a bit of a take our ball and go home move, Netflix's CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters said they will no longer release ratings reports twice a year.

2:21It'll be just once a year now. Kind of a wuss move there, and investors didn't like it. So what's the solution here? Netflix has faltered before the 2022 correction comes to mind, but it has always recovered. And yet now the dominant streaming platform is being treated like just another challenged media company. How can Netflix recharge its growth? And does it need to buy another studio? Today, we've got Michael Morris on to discuss. He's an analyst at Guggenheim, like I mentioned, and he's put out his assessment of the quarter. We're going to get into Netflix's Wall Street conundrum, why the market has turned, and more importantly, what they can do about it.

2:55From The Ringer and Puck, I'm Matt Bellany, and this is The Town.

3:03Okay, we are here with Michael Morris, who is Senior Managing Director of Guggenheim, a prominent analyst firm and a close watcher of Netflix. Welcome, Michael. Thank you for having me. Great to be here. First time. Looking forward to it. I know. How have you not been on the show before? Like, I've known you a while now. I know. We've collaborated. We've collaborated. But no, it's good to be here. Thanks for having me. Well, I want you to come on. Obviously, the big Netflix earnings reveal was yesterday. The reveal has been described as ho-hum or not enough or strong yet dot dot dot. And I want to start here by explaining this to people in Hollywood and elsewhere.

3:47What is actually going on here? Because if you look at the fundamentals of Netflix, this is a company that is generating$12 billion in revenue per quarter, more than the Walt Disney Company. It is clearly the leader in streaming. It is clearly still growing. And yet you guys now have a price target on this stock. It's currently at$68, which is incredible, down almost half from last October. you guys are trying to get this stock to 75. And that is down more than 30 % from what you guys said the stock should be previously. So what is going on here? Yeah, it's a great question. There's two things, right?

4:29I'd say one is, how's the company performing? And I'm sure that this is a source of frustration for the management team because they are generally, they're hitting their metrics, right? They're growing their revenue double digits. They're expanding their profit margins. What do you want from us, right? But the street, the investors, it's about the future. It's about the growth potential. It's about what is the upside for this business. And Netflix, which was once the quote-unquote winner of the streaming wars, and I always kind of hated that because I didn't think there was an end to this process, but sure.

5:02It was kind of unbridled upside, right? A billion global households and pricing power and beating the competition. And now it's like, hey, maybe you're getting closer to sort of the ceiling of that growth. And you're looking for smaller ways to supplement and those kinds of things. So I think this is about the future. The street has looked at engagement, the engagement report, which I'm sure we'll talk about and having that growth slow. It's not robust. If it's not robust at the unit level, what are your limitations at the pricing level? What are your limitations at the profit level? And investors look to other high growth ideas to move their money to.

5:39And that's where we are right now. Yeah, you're basically saying that Netflix is just a media company now. That this rocket ship tech company, a billion total addressable market, that is not the promised land that people had hoped. Sort of. So first of all, I will say yes. I talked to a lot of investors and they get angry or they have opinions. And it has been pitched to me more than once in the last 12 hours that Netflix is now just a media company. so to speak. But I think really, look, it's about the growth, right? It's like, yes, they would say, and I don't disagree with this, they're in less than half of the potential homes they could be in, right?

6:22They're in, they say, 45 % of homes. No, 55 % to still grow into is a great place to be. But what is the pricing power on those 55%, right? How much more price can you take in the US if people aren't using your product more? Do you have to spend more on your content? These are all the things. And yeah, that's a bit more media-like as opposed to the big swing, high-growth tech business it used to be. Yeah, you wrote in your report, this outlook likely reinforces investor concerns with the 2030 financial framework of$78 billion in revenue, $9 billion in advertising, and 410 million members unlikely to be achieved.

7:01That's it right there. It's catchy, right? Yes, very catchy. Congratulations. relations. The growth trajectory they have projected is not going to get there based on these metrics. So let's talk about these metrics because we got to first just do a big FU for the decision not to release the engagement report more than once a year. Ted Sarandos, the co-CEO, has come on this show. Bella Bajaria has also come on this show talking about Netflix being the most transparent of all the streaming companies. They release their weekly top tens, and then they do these biannual dumps of all their shows, and you and I and everyone else can see what we're all watching.

7:45Now they're going to do that once a year, basically because they don't like the results, and they don't like that we all obsess over the show rankings. Yeah. Yeah. You're not going to say that. I can say that. You're not going to say that. I'm not going to say that exactly, But this is what I'll say with respect to the topic. Number one, when you take stuff away, people don't like it. It's that simple, right? Investors do not like it. What do you... You stop telling us your member numbers, which arguably they should have stuck with because I think that those trends probably look better than the engagement report at this point.

8:16And then I do think that Netflix has a valid point that a raw viewership number is not necessarily indicative of the sort of economic power. So like you say, three hours of NFL football for a certain number of people probably drives more subscription behavior than 50 hours of maybe children's programming, right? Which is a point they made last night. And I think it's totally a fair point. Maybe in hindsight, something that could have been relevant when they moved to this report. But I've said that for a while now. Yeah, you don't want to encourage behavior that's not aligned. Yeah, they should be talking about how much better and curated and premium their content is because this race to become YouTube and all of the low value content and the obsession that we all have with engagement time, it's not going to end well for Netflix because they're never going to match YouTube.

9:10and all of a sudden, they've got all these garbage shows on their platform and they decrease the value of the platform to the people who do pay for the platform, in my opinion. I couldn't agree with you more on the core point, which is, I feel like this company and this service at its peak was an incredible value proposition. Not just that the cost was a great cost when you compared it to the bundle, but man, having these shows that were really good without commercials, watching them was terrific. I understand there's a ceiling to that and they want to be more, but I don't know. They were really good at that.

9:50I think trying to compete with YouTube's a little bit of a tough mission and arguably not one that they want to be on. Yeah, and they're getting hammered by the free competitors that are taking time away from them. Tubi, YouTube, the free tiers of other things like Pluto. Do you think, I think they'll have a free tier within a year. Greg Peters basically said they're open to it, but he said there are no immediate plans for a free tier. Do you think that's a smart thing to do, to have a top of funnel where people come in for free library content or the first episode of shows and then you either upsell them or monetize their time via ads?

10:29In the US, I hate the idea. I'll just straight up say it. Why? For the reason we just said. It was like this company was this premium business with pricing power that had enough breadth to be penetrated. You want to, you know, the shows, we talked a little bit about the shows and the engagement report, but the shows that matter, the hits, you're a tech company, you're a media company, right? Like be awesome. Like who do you know that talks about, and I love Tubi for Fox, but who talks about Tubi? Like who talks about Pluto, whatever? I mean, free, sure. Okay, so it's free. Well, they're growing.

11:04It's just a different, it's a different kind of viewing. You asked me at first about the numbers. Hubi, which I would argue is the best of these free streaming services, does about a billion dollars a year in revenue. Roku, which is great. Roku Channel sells less than half of their ad volume available. Netflix is doing 40 plus billion of revenue. And we're saying, hey, the solution is we're going to go into this free business. And by the way, Spotify has a free business that they talk about, this freemium that moves into their subscription. the conversion continues to go down. I would argue, right?

11:38And it's because they have more of these users, but that the promise of that conversion doesn't necessarily show up in the numbers. Now, I want to be clear. I'm talking about in the US. And I think that they hedged a little bit about the difference between in the US and out of the US. I think - They definitely did. They said it would make sense in certain markets. Correct, correct. And so I like that. I see some analyst reports or press reports like, oh, they should have a fast. I just don't know. If you're making high-end cards, I don't know why you need to get into the low end, right? However, I think that the international markets are a different situation because we have awareness here.

12:11There's just not awareness necessarily even still in some markets. Like they're in a lot of markets, right? But one of the reasons that they want to do more of these local partnerships is because people love their local stuff, right? So to think that people in another country behave the way we do, I think that free could be an on-ramp to your point. Yeah, I'm torn on it. I actually think it might make sense for certain things. They could make a clear distinction between the free and the subscription and put some of the lower value content there or the old library stuff that they haven't been licensing out and essentially use it as a front door tease, a window dressing for the larger service.

12:52But there's obviously a risk, both the brand and the business. I'm so skeptical that it works. Who in the U.S. is like, well, if you just give me Orange is the New Black for free, maybe I'll sign up for, you know, whatever the next show is. Well, but I do know a lot of people who used to subscribe and don't because they're not a fan. They don't think that the content is good anymore. So there are those people out there. Maybe you win them back with free. I don't know. I don't know. Let's move on to the engagement report because your analysis, I always enjoy your analysis of the engagement report.

13:22And you noted that the television viewing is up 4.5 % over the first half of the year. Film viewership, the movies that are on Netflix, down 3.1%. Why is that? Does Netflix have a film problem? Because this is not a new thing. They've been dropping for a few quarters now. Yeah, I think, so I'll say a couple things. because seeing whether or not they have a problem or an incremental problem is tough to separate. That maybe they just had a lot more films before and even if they weren't that good, they got views. But that doesn't necessarily translate, right? So that's what they would say. Their whole line, we're only doing the good stuff now.

14:06Yeah, yeah. I mean... Which I don't believe, but whatever. We all only do the good stuff. We've learned so much. I think... So all right, so here's what I have. Here's what I have. I looked into it a little more beyond. So like we said, if you look at the TV and film kind of dynamic, you just mentioned this quarter, since they started giving us this report, I'm just looking, TV's up 13%, okay, in terms of hours, film down seven, okay? So that's a little bit of the paradigm. Since 2023, since the first quarter or first half of 23. Okay. And total hours up 8%, all right? So I'll give you the data offline.

14:42That suggests a problem with film, right? So if you look at film, we kind of broke it down by the amount of viewing. If you look at those titles, they get over 100 million views. They're actually up. They had two at the start of 23, two titles that hit that threshold. They had six in the second half of 23. That's six, okay? Just for a frame of reference here, I want to go through the top 10. It's War Machine, The Rip, Swapped. That's the animated film with Michael B. Jordan. K-pop Demon Hunters. a holdover apex charlie starren thrash people we meet on vacation the crash the peaky blinders movie and office romance with j-lo not an oscar winner there except for k-pop demon hunters but uh maybe the rip i don't know i don't i like that one but you can see what people are watching on netflix i think there's a couple different issues here right they're running a certain business they i I think that they would love to have an entire slate of Oscar contenders.

15:46It's just not the reality of it. They're running a business for streaming and maybe some of the awareness is... Oh, I get it. I'm just making fun of them. Look, if we want to take the conversation more broadly, which is like, what can they do from here? I think at the core, they need to get cooler again, right? They need to sort of reignite that. I'll tell you something else because I really wanted to dig into the engagement and think about it. They talked about this show, their top new release of the year, I Will Find You, right? And if you look at the numbers from the engagement report, they're pretty good numbers.

16:25Like 87 million views in the first month puts it in... Yeah, that's the number three show. And just to say the top 10 shows from this half, His and Hers, Bridgerton, Season 4, I Will Find You, which you just mentioned, Stranger Things Season 5, a show called Runaway that I'm not familiar with, Teach You a Lesson, One Piece, that's the anime show, Man on Fire Season 1, Miss Rachel, which they got from YouTube, and The Night Agent Season 1. Okay, sure, right? What is the path to growth? What can they do to accelerate growth other than make better shows, I guess, make more appealing shows? There's got to be other levers here because I think that's what people are focusing on is Netflix may have run out of levers.

17:16They did the password sharing to boost subscribers. They added the ad business to boost revenue. Where are the levers here for growth? If I knew, they could bring me on, right? And ask you for it. But I mean, I don't think it's some of these marginal things like a free tier in the US. You know what I mean? I don't know. It feels like a stock. I would like to see them put films in the theaters. I would like to see them make films that are of a quality that can succeed in the theaters. I think it's money left on the table if you put financial resources and talent into making a great film. Why would you not put it in the theater?

17:58Now, I know the messages, it's for our members, etc. And that's not going to move the needle. That's not going to get you billions and billions in profits. They need a better plan than that. it is money that their competitors are going to be taking when they make a film that they are not. And it's also marketing for your product that puts you in the zeitgeist. Like, I go back to this data point, just looking at I Will Find You. And I'm kind of like, man, I mean, I'm not totally plugged in, but I'm a little bit like, I'm not really that familiar with that. And I looked at the Google Trends data, the search data, and the searches for the title are a fraction of many other titles, including now you look you look at the hits like you know stranger things or bridgerton or wednesday you get these big numbers but you look at look at the title look at the pit look at the white lotus right on hbo they have multiples of the search you know trend data that that i will find you has yeah i mean it also that show skews a little older it's harlan cobin and the star sam worthington like that it's not not exactly a cool young show but i hear what you're saying right is that they know, they need to market more.

19:04But what you guys do in your report, you do talk about some of the ways they can accelerate growth. Like they need to figure out how to make the ad tier more than 6 % of its business, right? Like things like that. That's where they're going to really grow the business. Yes and no. I mean, look, I think that the ad tier has been incremental. Okay, I want to be clear, when you only had one way to pay for the service, and that was by a subscription fee, I do think you were limiting yourself by not offering people the ability to pay with their time if they wanted. That said, the revenue per user on the ad tier is still below the revenue per user on the subscription tier.

19:48So you're still very much growing that business. And you're going to do$3 billion of ad revenue this year, their forecast, relative to a 2030 target of$9 billion. $9 billion is a real number. It matters. But we're still talking about that's still less than 25 % of the existing revenue. When we're talking about what can be truly value unlocking for the business, I think you have to have something outside of the walls of what they're doing right now. If I talk about the films, I know you say like, hey, it's not going to be that big. But I think it's incremental marketing. I think it's incremental revenue.

20:19I think that you want to be in the physical world. I think you need franchises, consumer products, all these things that you do when you have IP that you can monetize. This episode is brought to you by FanDuel Predicts. You can predict the summer soccer showcase action all the way to the final match with FanDuel Predicts. All you have to do is sign up to get your$25 bonus. From the opening game to the final whistle, stay locked in with every pass, every goal, and every moment that moves us closer to crowning a champion. Sign up now for your$25 bonus on FanDuel predicts. Go to fanduel.com slash predicts to sign up.

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22:12George at the Home Depot. How pros get more done. Well, that brings us to my next topic, M &A. All the things you are saying point to buy a legacy studio. NBCUniversal getting split off is the solution here to buy another studio because the market soured on Netflix exactly when they went after Warner Brothers. Should they double down on that strategy and go after Universal and NBCUniversal? The first thing I'm going to say is I can't speculate on whether they will do another deal. Oh, I can. You do that. You do the speculation. I'll just blink three times. But look at... Okay, so go back to the WBD deal.

22:55Obviously, very well covered. We wrote about it. You wrote about it. What was the company trying to do? I think it was this thing that I am talking about. More like irons in the fire, more IP, more expertise, more ability to attract... At the end of the day, you got to have talent coming in, making great stuff. The processes that you get with a Warner Brothers studio with 100 years of legacy. And then the HBO brand allowing you possibly to segment the market a little bit. You could have a prestige brand. I think it's easier to take a dollar on HBO and a dollar on Netflix than$2 on Netflix right now, for example.

23:33Right. So you got some optionality. But that's what Universal, that's why I think they are going to take a look at NBC Universal. Because it is not, it's not just library and IP. It's a experiential business with theme parks, which I think they would like. It's, you know, it's also TV with NBC, which they wouldn't, but it's also sports rights. I mean, they have incredible sports assets. And like you said, an hour watching football is way more valuable than an hour watching, you know, Dave Portnoy. And like, I know it's a lot more expensive, too, and they're renting the rights. So they're not, you know, they're not owning.

24:08But if Netflix really wants to accelerate the growth, it seems like that's one of their dwindling options. So your words, not mine. But I would say that there is a lot of evidence in the market that the individual components that you just mentioned are things that they would have interest in, right? Obviously, they've moved into sports gradually. We wrote this last night. We think that they need to take a big swing, honestly. Is it going to be more expensive? Yes, but maybe some of it is reallocation. Some of it's multiple expansion on your stock because you're looked at as a player now, not just a second tier type of thing in the sports world, right?

24:48So you have that physical world. I totally agree. You invest in something like Stranger Things and it's hot and you do these Netflix houses and that stuff. I don't know. You wouldn't want to have it as a driver for a bigger part of your business. I think that monetizing that is awesome. I mean, those are basically marketing activations that they're doing now. There's no rides. There's no destination feel to the Netflix houses. they could instantly be in that business. And like I've said, plug their IP into the universal parks, but I don't think they have much of an appetite for this complete circus of an antitrust review that Paramount is going through with Warner brothers.

25:31And it would be even more aggressive if Netflix got involved, I think buying another studio, but who knows, maybe a Paramount can push this through, then it would be a path for Netflix to do the same. Mm-hmm. I think that that thought process is very reasonable. I also think you brought up the fact that the market didn't react very well to the announcement of them doing the Warner Brothers offer in the first place. It's not reacting particularly well now either with that in the past. So I think hindsight is always 20-20, but it wasn't like they walked away from Warner Brothers and the market came back to them full force with conviction.

26:11The questions exist. Well, and the pursuit of Warner Brothers unlocked a lot of these questions that have not gone away. And I think if Ted and Greg could go back and do it all over again, do you think they don't go after Warners? Well, if you knew you weren't going to get it, sure. Right? I mean, it's funny. I will tell you, I think if they didn't know, if they still thought they had a better than 50 % chance of getting it done, I think they still do it. That would be my guess. When they did the deal, the question I asked on the call was about the regulatory process. And they were just like, yeah, we got...