Netflix wants to charge extra for account-sharing.
For months now, due to lagging memberships and growth, streaming giant Netflix has been signaling its intent to begin charging users who share their account credentials outside of their household. After lengthy deliberation, not to mention weathering severe blowback from users at the proposal, Netflix is officially poised to pull the trigger on the crackdown.
Netflix announced recently that, starting in 2023, they are planning to begin monetizing account-sharing practices by making out-of-household users establish “sub-accounts” on existing Netflix accounts.
“We’ve landed on a thoughtful approach to monetize account sharing and we’ll begin rolling this out more broadly starting in early 2023,” Netflix wrote in a letter to shareholders. “After listening to consumer feedback, we are going to offer the ability for borrowers to transfer their Netflix profile into their own account, and for sharers to manage their devices more easily and to create subaccounts (“extra member”), if they want to pay for family or friends.”
It is not currently known how much Netflix is planning to charge for this change, though they have been testing a similar format in Latin America that charged $2.99 for out-of-household users.
According to Netflix’s internal estimates, around 100 million households use their services without paying additional fees by sharing an account with another household or distant family. It is Netflix’s hope that, if these non-paying users could be converted into paying users, they would see the surge in growth that they’ve long been hoping for.