Netflix’s first quarter in 2017 wasn’t particularly great. Where many other companies are busy beating projections, the video streaming service missed its own projections by almost 250,000 subscribers. However, it is undaunted and is already anticipating the next major milestone along the way. The company currently has over 98.75 million subscribers and it expects to pass the 100 million milestone by this weekend.
Announcing its performance, Netflix said that it had generated somewhere around $2.64 billion in revenue and $0.41 earnings per share for the fourth quarter of 2016. This wasn’t far from analyst expectations, who were projecting $2.64 billion in revenue and $0.37 earnings per share. Interestingly, the company is expecting add as any as 600,000 domestic subscribers and 2.6 million international subscribers in the second quarter.
As far as the first quarter is concerned, The company managed to bring 1.42 million domestic and 3.53 million international subscribers to its ranks. This is a bit less than the company’s own projections that saw it predict 5.2 million subscribers in the first quarter — 1.5 million in the U.S. and 3.7 million internationally.
Growth is a very important part of Netflix’s business. For one, the company has been spending a lot of money over things like content and marketing and it is through these subscribers that it can hope to make some of the money back — preferably with interest. The company also said that it plans to spend another $1 Billion this year over marketing.
As part of this, we are investing more in programmatic advertising with the aim of improving our ability to do individualized marketing at scale and to deliver the right ad to the right person at the right time.
Phew, that is a lot of money. However, Netflix clearly has faith in its on prowess. Among other things, the company’s attempts to create original content tailored to locations appears to yielding fruit as well. Let’s see if it can keep up the pace and even pick it up, in this quarter.
