Technical Glitches Couldn’t Stop Netflix From Delivering a Knockout Event
Real or staged, flop or not, there was one undeniable winner in the Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul fight: Netflix. Despite technical glitches during the event, the streaming platform’s stock rose nearly 2%, pushing its year-to-date gain to 80%. Shortly after, Netflix announced Beyoncé as the halftime performer for the Texans-Ravens Christmas game. And next year, Netflix will also begin airing WWE Raw, continuing its relentless push into streaming dominance.
- Netflix’s investment in live streaming is a play to double down on its increasingly important ads business — with half its new subscribers choosing the ad-supported tier, which has already surpassed 70M users in just two years.
- The success of its live streaming is likely to spill over to the rest of the business, with Bloomberg analyst Geetha Ranganathan projecting over 10M subscribers new subscribers in Q4 — more than double the growth of the previous quarter.
All eyes on ads: For advertisers, one metric matters — the number of eyeballs. And despite the issues, Netflix flexed its muscle on its ability to bring in a massive audience. Oppenheimer analyst Jason Helfstein noted that the highest viewership for any US broadcast was the 2024 Super Bowl, which had 124M viewers — and if an average of 2.5 viewers tuned in per household, that translates to 150M viewers. As for the glitches? Netflix has already sold out its ad inventory for the Christmas games, and Helfstein told MarketWatch it’s a “problem that can easily be fixed by Christmas Day.”
