The Battle for Your Attention: How Streamers Are Pushing to Boost Engagement

As the streaming market has started to show signs of maturity in subscriber growth, industry leader Netflix is shifting its metric of success to engagement, or time spent, as it looks to prove to Wall Street and Madison Avenue that the service can keep growing. 

The move away from quarterly subscriber disclosures isn’t entirely surprising, as Netflix’s most recent growth has come from its crackdown on password sharing, a benefit some experts predict may be starting to wane.

Wall Street seems to be warming to Netflix’s new strategy. Shares closed up 3.5% on Monday after equity research firm MoffettNathanson published a research note saying that there is more runway for growth ahead as Netflix “still appears to be under-earning relative to the engagement it drives.” The firm upgraded Netflix to a “buy” rating.

Still, making the transition to engagement will have its challenges.

While engagement is a better reflection of a streamer’s success and growth potential, transparency and easy comparisons around this metric remain limited, since most media companies are reluctant to disclose detailed information such as actual completion rates of viewing shows and movies.

It’s also a battleground that’s becoming more competitive than ever as YouTube reigns as the clear leader for time spent watching TV.

Still, the writing has been on the wall for awhile that subscriber counts are becoming a less meaningful metric, Hub Entertainment Research founder Jon Giegengack said. He noted that a third of 1,600 users surveyed by the firm are using four or more of the “big five” SVOD platforms — Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, Hulu and Max. According to Antenna, Netflix had the lowest churn rate in January at 3%, followed by Disney+ at 4%; Hulu, Paramount+, Peacock and Apple TV+ at 6%; Max at 7%; and Discovery+ at 8%.

“If it’s something that subscribers use religiously and think they can’t do without, it’s a lot less likely to get cut,” Giegengack said. “A platform that people only use sporadically doesn’t really have much opportunity to raise prices and will probably have more trouble growing their subscribers because they’re not achieving those network effects with the buzz of shows catching on.” 

During Netflix’s fourth quarter earnings call in February, co-CEO Ted Sarandos emphasized engagement as a priority: “When you’re going to ask for a price increase, you better make sure you have the goods and the engagement to back it up. And I feel like what we have going into 2025 is just that.”

Streamers innovate to keep you watching

While the cliché remains true that content is king, being able to easily discover and interact with that content on streaming is a key challenge. Product innovation and improvements are emerging as an area of opportunity to further boost engagement. During the Olympics, 60% of Peacock users took advantage of the streamer’s Browse by Sport navigation menu, while over 25% of viewers used its multiview feature, with half of time spent coming from users sitting back and watching in the quad box view.

Disney+ has updated its user interface with ESPN and Hulu tiles for a more seamless experience for bundle subscribers, with the latter offering surpassing 1 billion hours viewed since launching last March. It also added Streams, a group of themed, 24/7 live channels, such as ABC News and Disney+ Playtime, which have driven over 10 million streaming hours from subscribers in the U.S.

Other upcoming features the studio plans to roll out to boost engagement include interactivity features for kids on Disney+ and fantasy sports integrations, enhanced statistics, betting features and e-commerce through ESPN’s upcoming “flagship” streaming service, slated to launch this fall. 

Max has also ramped up its capabilities with its own live HBO channels, which has seen strong session length among viewers who use the offering, and CNN Max, a simulcast of the network’s programming that has seen high engagement around big news events.

The June 27 debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump was the second largest live event on the streamer behind the March Madness Final, and New Year’s Eve 2025 with Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen was CNN Max’s fourth biggest programming day on record behind Election Day and the two preceding presidential debates. 

In addition, streamers are lowering the barrier to entry with cheaper, ad-supported tiers.

Netflix, which boasts 70 million monthly active users on its ad tier, said engagement on ad-supported plans is similar to ad-free, which was an average of around two hours per day per paid member as of the third quarter of 2024. Disney touts 157 million monthly active users globally and 112 million in the U.S. and Canada across Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+, which is based on viewers who have watched content continuously for more than 10 seconds.

Film and television producer Evan Shapiro explained that having tapped out new subscribers from a crackdown on password-sharing, Netflix needed to find a new metric to demonstrate growth.

“[Users sharing passwords] were the lion’s share of new subscribers they acquired in 2024,” he told TheWrap. “As those newly paying subs who used to share accounts find it harder to find something to watch on the platform, especially in light of the recent price increase, they will start to churn. Netflix knew this last year, which is why they announced the significant shift in transparency” to talk more about engagement.

The battle for time spent

In February, YouTube led the pack with a 11.6% share of streaming’s 43.5% share of TV time spent, according to Nielsen, followed by Netflix (8.2%), Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ on an aggregated basis (4.8%) and Prime Video (3.5%). Trailing behind were Peacock with 1.5% and Paramount+ with 1.3% and Max with a share of 1.2%.

Netflix, which is focusing on expanding its share of time spent in the areas where neither the company nor YouTube dominate, has increased its transparency around its catalog’s performance with biannual engagement reports, but those data batches tend to favor more recently released titles and don’t reveal completion rates. Other streamers’ disclosures are released even more sporadically and typically only cover specific titles as opposed to their entire libraries.

While acknowledging that Wall Street has been trained to focus on whatever metric Netflix tells them to, eMarketer senior analyst Ross Benes said third-party measurement firms like Nielsen and Comscore are making strides with time spent estimates, even if the data is still limited.

“While not directly the same across the board, it should become more objective eventually and less based on self-graded homework,” Benes said. “Whether they are looking at Netflix, YouTube, TikTok or others, investors and marketers should remain weary of self-reported engagement numbers, but that doesn’t mean they will act accordingly.” 

Content is still vital

In the second half of 2024, Netflix members watched over 94 billion hours of programming, up 5% year over year.

“Squid Game” Season 2 was the company’s most-viewed series during the period with 87 million views, while “Carry-On” was the most-viewed film with 137 million views. Categories that helped drive engagement to Netflix included animated films, true crime and non-English series and films.

While most of the streamers are nowhere near close to competing with Netflix’s scale, Hub’s Giegengack noted their vast libraries of existing IP and acquired titles with more available episodes offer an opportunity to further drive engagement. 

Indeed, Nielsen’s top 10 most-streamed titles for 2024 were “Bluey” (Disney+), “Grey’s Anatomy” (Hulu/Netflix), “Family Guy” and “Bob’s Burgers” (both Hulu), “NCIS” (Hulu/Netflix/Paramount+), “Young Sheldon” (Max/Netflix/Paramount+),“The Big Bang Theory” (Max), “Law & Order SVU,” (Hulu/Peacock,), “Criminal Minds” (Hulu/Paramount+) and “SpongeBob Squarepants” (Paramount+).

Other recent examples of titles that are being touted as engagement drivers include “Moana 2,” which became the biggest Walt Disney Animation Studios premiere since 2021’s “Encanto” with 27.3 million views globally on Disney+ in its first five days of streaming; “The Last of Us,” whose Season 2 trailer racked up a record 158 million views for HBO in just three days; and Comedy Central’s “South Park” and Taylor Sheridan’s “Yellowstone” and “Landman,” which helped Paramount+ grow watch time per user over 20% in its fourth quarter of 2024, per co-CEO Chris McCarthy. 

“Reacher” Season 3 also became Prime Video’s most-watched returning season ever with 54.6 million views in 19 days, while Apple TV+’s “Severance” Season 2 has hit over 3 billion streaming minutes, according to Nielsen.

Streamers are also making moves to grow their live content porfolios in sports, with Netflix’s Christmas Day NFL games and ABC/ESPN’s and NBC/Peacock’s upcoming 11-years rights packages with the NBA; entertainment, with Hulu recently bringing the Oscars to streaming for the first time; and news, with the launch of Warner Bros. Discovery’s CNN Max back in 2023. 

NBCUniversal recently reached a $3 billion deal to extend its rights to the Olympics through 2036. Its coverage of the 2024 Paris Olympics reached an average of 67 million total viewers per day across its broadcast, cable and streaming platforms. Led by Peacock, fans streamed 23.5 billion minutes of the games — up 40% from all prior Summer and Winter Olympics combined.

Peacock, which streams over 8,000 hours of live programming per year, also recently benefitted from its “SNL50” anniversary coverage, which reached 220 million people, 3.9 billion minutes viewed and 866 million platform engagements across NBC, Peacock, digital and social as of Feb. 23. A 2024 NFL wild card playoff game on Jan. 13 also drove Peacock’s highest day of usage, engagement and time spent for the service ever the following day across 16.3 million devices.

The boost from the game and “SNL50” also had a domino effect, with the former propelling “Ted” to become Peacock’s most-watched original title over its first seven days and “The Traitors” Season 2 to its biggest original reality season launch through its first four days.

While Giegengack acknowledged there’s share left for legacy streamers to claim, he warned catching up won’t be easy for those without global scale.

“Netflix has had such a head start that I think it’s going to be really hard for them to independently get the scale that makes them a true competitor,” he said.

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