It’s been a minute since we published a post exclusively about churn (everyone’s favorite subscription metric!), so we thought we’d take a look at how churn rates are evolving within the Premium SVOD category through the first half of 2023.
While Antenna continues to see elevated levels of subscription activity—both gross adds and cancels have been growing—the volatility at the top of the funnel in adding new subscribers and on the cancels side poses challenges. For example, in 2Q’23 there were +2.6M Net Adds in the category split among the 10 services in the category...that's not a lot!
Weighted Average Category churn has increased +34.5% YoY from 4.6% in June ‘22 to 6.1% in June ‘23. Compared to June 2022, every Premium SVOD with the exception of Peacock has seen an increase in churn. Discovery+ has seen the biggest increase over that period +63.5%, while Disney+ and Apple TV+ have seen the smallest increase at +20.1% and +18.9%, respectively. Peacock is the only service to see a decrease of -2.2%.
There are a number of factors that can impact churn, but as services continue to prioritize profitability we’ve seen raising prices emerge as a preferred tactic. Eight of 10 Premium SVOD services have announced or implemented price increases since the start of 2022 with the majority coming in 2023 (The two exceptions are Showtime and Discovery+ which have both effectively been folded into Paramount+ and Max, respectively).
For more detailed information on Antenna’s methodology and definitions of core metrics, please visit http://www.antenna.live/methodology.
Brendan Brady is a Content Strategy Associate at Antenna, a measurement and analytics company providing insight into purchase behavior and subscription metrics across the new media landscape.
