Underlying Data
Antenna sources data from a variety of data collection partners which contribute millions of permission-based, consumer opt-in, raw transaction records. These are derived from online purchase receipts, credit, debit and banking data, and bill-scrape data. Antenna cleans and models this raw data, and then subsequently weighs the panel for demographic and behavioral skews.
Core Metric Definitions
Subscribers: The number of paying Subscribers for each Service at the end of each month.
Cancels: Number of users who canceled in each month. Cancels are counted when the subscription lapses for iTunes, and on the day the subscriber cancels for all other distributors. This excludes involuntary churn, or Subscribers who lose access due to an issue with their credit card.
Trial Users: Users who are currently enrolled in a Service’s Free Trial program, and have not yet converted to paid Subscribers.
Calculated Metric Definitions
Sign-ups: Trial Users, plus Gross Subscriber Adds, less the portion of them who came from a trial conversion.
Gross Subscriber Adds: New Subscribers in each month, including both new paid users and ones who converted from a free trial.
Net Subscribers Adds: Gross Subscriber Adds in a month, less the Cancels in that same month.
Active Monthly Churn Rate: Cancels in a given month divided by Subscribers at the end of the previous month.
New Subscriber Churn Rate: The percentage of new Subscribers in Month 0 who canceled before the end of [Month x].
Trial Conversion Rate: The percentage of Trial Users who convert to paying Subscribers on the day their free trial period concludes.
Cohort Survival: The percentage of new Subscribers in Month 0 who remained Subscribed in each month thereafter.
12-month Resubscribe Rate: The percentage of Gross Subscriber Adds who had previously Subscribed to and since canceled the same Service within the prior 12 months.
Overlap Rate: The percentage of Subscribers who Subscribe to both Service A and Service B in the same month.
Switching Rate: The percentage of users who canceled [Cancel Service] who Subscribed to [New Service] within one month.
Antenna's Coverage and how we define Subscribers
Antenna-Covered Subscribers includes Subscribers who made an explicit paid purchase of a service and are currently being measured in Antenna’s core panel. This currently includes Subscribers that have signed up for a service directly (by going to the Service’s own sign-up page), as well as through Apple App or Google Play Store. In addition, for Video services, we also measure several distribution channels which are prevalent in that category: Amazon Fire TV, Amazon Channels, Hulu Live + TV, Roku App Store, The Roku Channel, and YouTube TV.
Antenna-Estimated Additional Subscribers represents an additional portion of Subscribers who made an explicit paid purchase of a service through a distribution channel which is not covered by Antenna’s core panel methodology, but for which we have developed an estimation through an alternative methodology. Examples of these service-distributor combinations include Netflix via T-Mobile and Disney via Verizon, when they include an incremental cost to the consumer.
Antenna Paid Subscribers is the sum of Antenna-Covered Subscriber and Antenna-Estimated Additional Subscribers.
What is not Measured
Consumers not counted as a Subscriber by Antenna include:
- Trial users who have not (yet) converted to paid
- Non-paid users in long-term trials (e.g., Apple Music free for 6 months)
- Non-paid users in perpetuity (e.g., Peacock free tier)
- Commercial contracts (e.g., Netflix in your hotel room)
- Corporate liable (e.g., Subscriptions purchased by corporations on behalf of their employees)
- Consumers who get access to services included in broad intra-company (e.g., Amazon Prime Video and Amazon Music within Amazon Prime) or inter-company (e.g. SVOD service included at no additional charge in a Comcast Xfinity 200 channel package) bundles
- Subscribers who are outside of the 50 United States and D.C. (e.g., Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories)
Additional Note: We measure subscription at the individual level, not at the household level. For instance, if one member of a household is subscribed to Spotify, and a different member of the same household is subscribed to Netflix, we would not observe that as an “overlap”. Therefore, the absolute values for Metrics such as Resubscribe, Overlap and Switching will typically be lower than a household level measurement would report.
Why do Antenna's Subscriber numbers sometimes not line up with the numbers which Services publicly report?
While Antenna’s numbers will typically directionally align with the numbers that companies report to the public, there are numerous reasons that the exact counts will vary, including:
- Subscriber Definition: Antenna follows the very specific definition described above to count a Subscriber, which will frequently differ (sometimes substantially) from the definitions which Services use to count their own subscribers. For example, Apple may count an individual who purchases an Apple device and receives Apple TV+ and Apple Music for free for an extended period of time as Subscribers to those services; Antenna would only count them after their free trial periods ended and they explicitly chose to pay for the services.
- Coverage: As described above, Antenna does have some coverage gaps, which would typically be included in a service’s own reported numbers.
- Territory: Antenna reports only on consumers in the 50 United States and Washington, D.C., and Services may be reporting on Global, U.S. + Canada, or other territory combinations.
- Estimation: Antenna is an estimation service, and could have errors in its calculation due to panel bias, data errors or human errors.
To dive deeper on Antenna methodology, please contact info@antenna.live
