Chart: Streaming Service Churn Rates

The churn rate—the percentage of users who cancel their accounts each month—for streaming services like Netflix and Disney+, is typically reported as a monthly rate. However, this perspective can give the impression that users rarely cancel their streaming accounts. After all, a churn rate of 3% for Netflix or even 6.4% for Apple TV+ in July 2023 may not seem significant. Nonetheless, these are monthly figures, and over a year, they start to add up. In fact, most streaming services experience annual churn rates over 50%.

How many people cancel Netflix, MAX and Disney+ every year?

To create the above chart, we utilized data from the research firm Antenna's Premium SVOD (Subscription Video on Demand) Churn report. We examined the average churn rate of each service over the twelve months from June 2022 to July 2023.

The results were somewhat surprising. Netflix, which faced social media backlash after a crackdown on password sharing earlier this year, boasts the lowest annual churn rate by far. However, nearly one-third of U.S. accounts were still canceled over the past year. Earlier this year, we predicted that the #cancelnetflix social media backlash wouldn't amount to much based on Google search trends.

The platform experiencing the highest churn rate was Starz, which is perhaps unsurprising, given the streamer has relatively few hit shows.

Disney+, which saw extremely rapid growth after its launch during the pandemic, has an annual churn rate of 44.8%. While this is significantly higher than Netflix's, it is lower than that of every other streamer.

MAX (formerly HBO Max) exhibits an annual churn rate of 55.2%, putting it in the middle of the pack.

Methodology

• Churn data is based on Antenna's Premium SVOD Churn report.

• Annual pricing calculation is based on advertised price for the basic ad supported and ad free offerings where relevant. Calculations assume monthly payments, and don't consider annual prepayment discounts offered by some services.

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