Even though Netflix is the world’s most popular paid streaming service, the company has been struggling to keep viewers watching its series after their first seasons. Beef — the streamer’s anthology about people locked in feuds — lost 70 percent of its viewership when it returned earlier this year. There seems to be some confusion as to why people aren’t champing at the bit to dive back into once-popular projects like the live-action adaptations of Avatar: The Last Airbender and One Piece. Netflix is reportedly hard at work trying to figure out what, exactly, is prompting subscribers to jump ship in droves. But if you’ve spent any time paying attention to the broader media landscape, the answers — there are a few — are fairly obvious.
It only took a few years for adults in the US to begin spending just about the same amount of time scrolling through TikTok as they do watching things on Netflix. This is undoubtedly part of the reason why the streamer has been so aggressive about getting into games, live sports, and video podcasts. Netflix also has plans to experiment with short-form content that sounds like it’s meant to be consumed in the moments when people have time to kill. But the simple fact that TikTok and YouTube are free makes them significantly more accessible than Netflix, and it seems very unlikely that short videos will be enough to get people signing up for the paid service.
In addition to viewers spending more time on other platforms, Netflix also has to contend with the way the streaming wars have fundamentally altered people’s relationships with episodic television. When the platform first launched, appointment watching was still a thing and people made an effort to keep up with programs from week to week. But Netflix’s binge model trained audiences to cluster around shows for brief windows before moving on to the Next Big Thing that folks are yapping about on social media. The binge model made it difficult for Netflix’s shows to maintain long-term engagement or generate the word-of-mouth buzz that turns people on the fence into paying customers. And while the company has had some success releasing projects on a weekly basis, it’s a bit too late in the game for that strategy to solve its fall-off problem.
Something else that Netflix has to take into consideration is that, sometimes, people just stop watching shows when they aren’t particularly enjoyable. As much as we all loved Stranger Things in its early days, the show became an unwieldy mess by its final season. Stranger Things was a big enough phenomenon that its diminishing quality didn’t exactly hurt its overall viewership. But the same can’t be said for some of Netflix’s newer would-be flagship shows like Avatar, which came out of the gate limping and quickly drew ire from fans of the original animated series.
What Netflix needs to really turn this ship around is to focus on producing the kind of programming that gets people locked in, and then actually sticking with it once shows manage to build dedicated audiences. This will take time, patience, and money on the company’s part, which isn’t exactly the kind of strategy that gets stockholders salivating. But it’s really the only way that Netflix can hope to climb its way out of this hole and keep other platforms from eating its lunch.