The Walt Disney Company revealed the company lost 300,000 Disney+ subscribers in the United States and Canada in their latest third quarter financial earnings.
In the company’s third quarter of fiscal year 2023 earnings report, the company revealed that total Disney+ subscribers in the United States and Canada declined from 46.3 million at the end of the second quarter to 46 million at the end of the third quarter.
That’s a loss of 1% of all Disney+ subscribers in the United States and Canada and a loss of around 300,000 total subscribers.
This loss of 300,000 subscribers from the second quarter to the third quarter in the United States and Canada followed a similar decline from the first quarter to the second quarter.
In their second quarter report, The Walt Disney Company revealed their Disney+ subscribers in the United States and Canada declined from 46.6 million to 46.3 million. This was also a 1% decline in their subscribers and another 300,000 total subscribers.
The last time Disney+ subscribers were below 46 million in the United States and Canada was a year ago at the end of the third quarter in fiscal year 2022.
In their earnings report for fiscal year 2022 The Walt Disney Company revealed their total paid Disney+ subscribers in the United States and Canada was at 44.5 million.
It’s unlikely that Disney+ will see a rebound moving forward as the company announced they would actually be increasing their prices for the service. The company announced that the new price moving forward for Disney+ with Ads will cost subscribers $7.99 per month.
For subscribers choosing to forgo the ads it will cost $13.99 per month or $139.99 annually. It’s highly likely this price increase will see a number of subscribers cancel their subscriptions or at the very least change over their subscriptions from the non-ad version to the ad version.
In fact, during the company’s earnings call The Walt Disney Company reported “the company had signed up 3.3 million subscribers to the ad-supported Disney+ option and that since its inception, 40% of new Disney+ subscribers are choosing an ad-supported product.”
Having subscribers switch from the non-ad plan to the ad-supported plan might actually be part of Disney’s plan. The most recent earnings report notes the company’s “Domestic Disney+ average monthly revenue per paid subscriber increased from $7.14 to $7.31 due to higher per-subscriber advertising revenue.”
So despite seeing a decline in subscribers overall, they actually saw a 2% increase in average revenue per subscriber due to the ad-supported model.
Following these losses, Disney scooper WDW Pro posited that the Disney+ platform is dying. He said, “It looks like Disney+ is dying.”
He went on to explain how they are trying to mimic the current model they’ve implemented at their Disney Parks. He said, “The idea then is how do you grow the money, the revenues out of the parks? Well, you find every way in the world to derive more money out of the wallets of those people who are coming to your parks. So you increase the revenue per guests. That’s what Disney is up to with Disney+.”
“They’ve essentially said, ‘We’re going to cut back on the new stuff. We’re going to cut back on the new programs. We’re going to cut back on the new shows. We’re going to find ways to derive more money out of the subscribers that we have,” he elaborated. “I think that’s an anti-growth proposition.”
Later in the video, WDW Pro theorized that Disney’s core problem with Disney+ is that they do not know how to create event television.
He stated, “All of this is kind of trying to escape that base issue they have. They’re losing subscribers because they don’t produce content that is interesting and at the same time they’re creating uninteresting shows and programming at insane budgets. Think about Secret Invasion, about all of the Marvel stuff. Think about Star Wars. We’ve got Ahsoka coming out. We know The Acolyte costs as much as a major motion picture and there’s zero interest in The Acolyte.
“So Disney doesn’t do Stranger Things. They had one good show. They had The Mandalorian in terms of driving cultural interest and then they had a chance at it maybe with the first season of Loki, but the decimated both of those and they’ve never had another hit,” WDW Pro explained.
What do you make of The Walt Disney Company revealing more Disney+ subscriber losses?
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