Anyone who’s followed Netflix long enough knows that the streaming giant doesn’t rest on its laurels, and it isn’t religious about anything.
Ads? They are bad. Until they aren’t. Live sports? Not for us. Until it is. Original content? No need for it. Until there was.
The Netflix model is to crawl, start walking, and then to sprint, not being afraid to change course quickly if things aren’t looking great.
It’s that context that makes a few subtle experiments and tweaks by Netflix over the past few days all the more interesting. The streaming giant is bringing back free trials in some markets, a practice it abandoned in 2020 (What’s On Netflix, which first reported the trials, notes that it is not available in the U.S. for now).
And in conjunction with its earnings report, it announced that it would pull back on sharing viewership data for shows twice a year, shifting to a once annual cadence. It only started sharing that data more granularly in Dec. 2023.
