Somehow, 4% of U.S. Adults Have ‘Never Heard of’ Netflix

Everybody you know has Netflix, but believe it or not, not everybody knows about Netflix.

In a new quarterly study of 1,000 U.S. adults, 4 percent of respondents (we’ll help: that’s 40 people) said they have “never heard of” Netflix, according to the private banking firm Wedbush Securities. And that’s not a statistical anomaly for Q2 — the number is steady with what the bank found in Q1 2024. It had been half that, 2 percent, at the end of 2023.

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Of the 1,000 respondents, 57 percent said they currently subscribe to Netflix, down from the 60 percent who did in the prior quarter. In the second quarter of 2023, 69 percent had said they were current Netflix subscribers. Wedbush’s relatively small sample size may provide imperfect statistics; Netflix’s reported UCAN (U.S. and Canada) subscriber numbers have steadily grown amid its password-sharing crackdown. Wall Street expects 1.1 million paid net additions from the region to be reported on Thursday when Netflix unveils its second-quarter earnings.

Seven percent of the survey respondents said they’ve canceled Netflix within the past three months, which is reasonably steady compared to previous quarters. An eye-opening 14 percent of respondents said they had heard of Netflix but “never subscribed to” it.

Come on. At the end of March, Netflix had about 83 million paying members in the U.S. and Canada (Netflix does not separate the two in its reporting). In other words, who in 2024 America has not heard of Netflix? Furthermore, who has not heard of the streaming video titan but is taking an online survey?

The Wedbush survey, like any worth its salt, is weighted across demographics as informed by U.S. Census data. Unless a few dozen grownups get their kicks out of messing with Wedbush each quarter, the answer to our question is, well, them. If we were to guess (and it’s only a guess), it is likely to be elderly Americans, possibly living under a rock (but, again, with internet access), who say they have “never heard of” Netflix.

We’re sure Netflix, with its 270 million global paid subscribers (and growing! Wall Street forecasts that number will reach 275 million with Thursday’s update), isn’t too worried about the survey results. If anything, Netflix executives would be comforted by the bank’s bullish $725 price target from the same note to clients (obtained by IndieWire). As of this writing, shares in NFLX were trading for about $75 less than that.

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