This blog post features data originally published in The Wall Street Journal.

Churn – the percentage of customers who cancel in a given time period – has long been a gold standard metric for subscription-based businesses, and Antenna has reported it from our day one. 

But as the video streaming category has matured and become more competitive, Antenna has observed more resubscription activity. Many subscription businesses assume that once a user leaves they are probably gone for good. However, for streaming services, a meaningful portion of users return. 

Those returning users account for a large portion of acquisition in the category. Between September 2023 and August 2024, there were approximately 169M Gross Additions across all Premium SVOD services. Some 57M (34%) were "Resubscribers," meaning they rejoined the same service they had previously canceled within the prior 12 months. 

Churn Rate calculations do not typically take resubscriptions into account. Antenna calculates average monthly churn as the number of cancellations in a month divided by the total number of subscriptions in the previous month. An alternative, Net Churn, factors in Resubscribers, providing a more holistic view of subscriber retention. Antenna co-founder and President Rameez Tase breaks this dynamic down in his Substack post about Gross and Net Churn. 

The chart below shows the impact of including resubscriptions into churn calculations. Antenna calculates Net Churn as the number of cancellations in a month, minus the number of resubscriptions in that same month. The difference is then divided by the previous month’s total subscribers to calculate the Net Churn. 

In August 2024 the Premium SVOD category’s Weighted Average Gross Churn Rate was 5.2%, compared to 3.5% for Weighted Average Net Churn.

The share of Resubscribers varies by service, as does the number of “lifetimes.” At a basic level, Antenna defines customer lifetimes as the number of times an individual has been subscribed to a service; each cancellation and subsequent sign-up counts as an additional lifetime. 

Sports-heavy services like Paramount+ and Peacock, and services which prominently feature big-budget series like Max and Apple TV+ have particularly large portions of their customer bases which have subscribed multiple times.

To be clear, churn remains one of the most important issues the video category is dealing with. But these more advanced retention metrics will help the industry better understand and manage the complex consumer behaviors which are still emerging in the category.

For more detailed information on Antenna’s methodology and definitions of core metrics, please visit http://www.antenna.live/methodology.