It is an amazing fumble from Netflix. I thought Reed Hastings actually understood the space pretty well back when he somewhat famously said (paraphrasing) "We have to become HBO faster than HBO can become Netflix" and pivoted to making content.

They've been making content now for a long time, Lilyhammer came out in 2012.

They had all the data telling them that long lived series that built dedicated followings like The Office, Friends, Star Trek, etc. were reasons that people stayed on the platform.

They had 14 years to put together their own dynasty series, shows that people could connect with over the years that would become their comfort shows that they could return to again and again, fully owned by Netflix and completely locked in their walled garden.

Instead they pursued a strategy of starting a thousand promising ideas but if they didn't instantly take off, done. No room for a show to grow and mature and develop, you better have a great first season and you might get a second.

And I think everyone I know has at least one show on Netflix that they got invested in only for it to get axed with a dozen unresolved story threads. I think the one that made me go "why bother?" was Santa Clarita Diet. A funny dramatic show with star power, Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant, interesting character development, a 3 season run and then just killed.

It wasn't the first series they killed with a dozen loose threads dangling, but it was the last one I watched. At first I told myself, "I might watch another series after it goes the distance and I know they won't just leave it half-finished" but that quickly just turned into "I don't watch netflix produced series" and as they lost more and more of their licensed content "I don't watch netflix" and this month I realized I was still handing them nearly $30 a month for nothing and canceled.

I think about a lot of the most popular shows and how bad their first seasons are. But audiences like to see characters grow and that's a big part of what causes people to connect with a show and want to come back to it again and again.

This was one of the big reasons I quit using Netflix or following new releases. Why bother investing my time into something that's only going to get killed off not because it didn't make money, but because it wasn't profitable enough?

Netflix put me off of TV as a whole category, which is a pretty great thing, really.

Also what really annoys me as a viewer is that even on a good series that has already been renewed, the waiting between seasons has crept up from 1 year (already bad) to multiple years. Then when the new season finally comes out (in two parts!) I already lost most of the context and am not nearly as interested.

The article actually cites the opposite - reported users going down at many media sites, including Facebook for the first quarter ever, and Netflix now refusing to report user counts until 2027 when they used to proudly report user count increases. With that change of behavior, Netflix users are definitely NOT going up, and are likely declining