Cameron Henderson
01 October 2024 5:24pm
The number of people unsubscribing from Netflix almost tripled after the streaming giant’s boss endorsed Kamala Harris.
Netflix experienced a surge in cancellations after Reed Hastings, its co-founder and chairman, announced his public support for the vice-president’s election campaign.
In July, the 2.8 per cent rate of cancellations – known as churn in the industry – represented the highest rate since February for the streaming giant, which has the lowest rate of churn in the industry, according to the researcher Antenna.
The uptick came after Mr Hastings posted a message on X, formerly Twitter, on July 22.
Congrats to Kamala Harris — now it is time to win
— Reed Hastings (@reedhastings) July 23, 2024
The tech billionaire told The Information that he had donated $7 million (£5.6 million) to an anti-Donald Trump Republican political action committee in support of Ms Harris.
The public endorsement was met with hostility from Trump supporters, who called for a boycott of the subscription service.
Some online users falsely suggested Netflix itself had donated the millions to Ms Harris. Others posted images on social media showing they had closed their accounts alongside the hashtag #CancelNetflix.
The single worst day for Netflix cancellations this year came on Jul 26, three days after the donation was made public.
The spike in cancellations is primarily thought to have been caused by the company’s decision to phase out its basic tier package – the cheapest advertising-free version of Netflix – with users encouraged to choose a new plan to keep on streaming. But the five-day period after Mr Hastings’ endorsement was unusual, even for July.
Mr Hastings, who co-founded Netflix in 1997 and stepped down as its chief executive in 2023, has been outspoken in this election cycle and was one of the first Democratic donors to urge Joe Biden to drop out of the race in July.
“Biden needs to step aside to allow a vigorous Democratic leader to beat Trump and keep us safe and prosperous,” he told The New York Times.
A long-term Democratic donor, Mr Hastings issued a scathing rebuke of Trump in 2016, claiming the now-former president “would destroy much of what is great about America”.
This latest incident is not the first political statement to impact the streaming giant.
In 2020, the company pledged to move 2 per cent of its cash into black-owned banks after the murder of George Floyd and subsequent Black Lives Matter protests that swept the country.
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