Netflix breaks records and raises prices again
The leading streaming platform makes more money than ever – but what about delivering value to consumers?
KOSTAS FARKONAS
PublishED: January 23, 2025

Gone are the days when people would question the viability of Netflix’s initial business plan: that of burning through dozens of billions of dollars in loans every year in the hopes of building a large enough customer base before going bankrupt. After pulling off the greatest “bait and switch” scheme in entertainment history in 2023 – allowing or even encouraging people to share accounts for free for a decade, then cracking down on the very same practice once the service hit 200 million subscribers – Netflix is now seemingly on a roll. Not only is the company adding millions of new subscribers every quarter, but it’s posting impressive numbers despite facing more intense competition than ever.
This is the picture painted by Netflix’s latest earnings report (PDF), where the company confirms it has added 19 million subscribers during the previous quarter thus surpassing 300 million subscribers worldwide. It’s worth noting that this may be the last time Netflix reveals precisely how many subscribers it added during any given quarter: its management means to “only announce major subscriber milestones as they are crossed” from now on. The streaming service is also bringing in more money than ever: revenue in 2024 reached $39 billion (up from $33.7 billion in 2023) and net income rose to $8.71 billion (compared to $5.4 billion in 2023).
After pulling off the greatest “bait and switch” scheme in entertainment history, Netflix is now doing well in terms of both new subscribers and revenue.
Netflix’s 2025 revenue forecast equates to 12%-14% year-over-year growth, which may not sound like much but is actually pretty impressive given the service’s penetration in all major markets. The company believes that Netflix’s customer base has plenty of room for expansion despite the service’s already significant reach – it claims at least two viewers per subscription – per the company’s letter to investors:
With over 300M paid memberships (which excludes Extra Member accounts) and multiple people per household, we’re entertaining a massive global audience estimated at over 700M. Each household has unique entertainment preferences, and tastes differ, so our focus remains on providing a variety of quality titles to keep everyone entertained.
It seems that its latest numbers in terms of both new subscriptions and revenue are not enough for Netflix, though: the company intends to increase the cost of all subscription tiers currently on offer, starting with the USA, Canada, Portugal and Argentina markets (the assumption is that other countries and territories will follow soon). The ad-supported tier’s monthly cost is increasing from $6.99 to $7.99, the standard ad-free tier’s from $15.49 to $17.99 while the premium tier is now going for $24.99 (from $22.99) per month.
Higher prices, more ads… but where is the added value?
People keeping track of such things will notice that what the Netflix ad-free tier used to cost ($7.99) when the ad-supported tier was first introduced is now the monthly cost of the most affordable tier with ads. So Netflix is charging more for an inferior experience, off which it’s also making some money on the side. It took less than three years for that to happen. How does Netflix justify the increased cost of its various subscription tiers? This is what the company itself notes in the same letter to investors:
As we continue to invest in programming and deliver more value for our members, we will occasionally ask our members to pay a little more so that we can re-invest to further improve Netflix.
Given the careful way that these reports are usually put together, the wording here is deeply concerning. So it sounds like we, as consumers, are “occasionally” expected to put up with price increases – in other words, this is bound to happen again and again, as many times as Netflix feels it can get away with it. Great.
The company is doing this partly to invest in new content, which will help it retain subscribers, attract new ones and remain competitive. Justifying the price increases that way, though, does not look great from a consumer standpoint: so, just to be clear, we are now paying not just for access to this entertainment content, but for its creation too, in a way?
That’s not exactly fair, as said content will be making Netflix money for years or decades, while most subscribers will most probably enjoy a small fraction of it (if that). The value created through this content is disproportionally distributed while, in the meantime, Netflix makes loads of money out of the subscription model.

It’s comical to watch the company almost making it sound as if we consumers are partners in a global entertainment business endeavor – only, as it happens, we are the ones holding the short end of the stick. We pay for the necessary Internet access, we pay a subscription fee for this content and indirectly pay for the creation of said content (but we own none of it and lose access to it if the monthly fee is not paid), while Netflix owns said content forever while making at least $40B of subscription revenue per year (probably more without including ad revenue).
Truth be told, it takes a lot of money to run a service like Netflix with no major issues on a global scale – and the company claims to have earmarked around $18B for new content in 2025 – but it does seem like a rather unbalanced “business endeavor” from a consumer’s standpoint. A win-win it definitely isn’t, not in the long run.
With its content catalogue still mediocre at best in terms of overall quality, by increasing its subscription costs Netflix only decreases the service’s actual value.
Worst of all, though, the price increase of every Netflix subscription tier puts the actual value delivered by the service into question. This heavily depends on what each individual viewer deems interesting to watch, obviously, but – based on what Netflix has offered over the last few years – there’s no point denying that the service’s catalogue as a whole remains of mediocre quality at best.
Taking a look at what gets continually added to Netflix’s catalogue (as yours truly does for work) only reveals three or four new things truly worth watching every month. The rest belongs to the “let’s watch it ’cause its free” category, which is hardly valuable. There’s still a lot of back catalogue garbage included just for variety’s sake, while Netflix’s own productions have always been a hit and miss affair.

At the end of the day, Netflix’s strongest argument is the simple fact that it managed to become the “default” streaming service. There are other streaming services offering higher-quality content, other services offering vastly superior content for specific demographics (e.g. kids), but Netflix is the one service most of us return to when there’s not something fresh worth watching on other services. It’s clearly all about the depth of that content library. Chances are we’ll watch an old gem produced by some other Hollywood studio rather than any of Netflix’s new by-the-algorithm shows or films, but this is still a viable, dependable option.
If Netflix keeps increasing its pricing, though, it will be interesting to see where consumers draw the line in terms of monthly fees just for having that option, no?