The atmosphere at the Disney Bundle Celebration National Streaming Day at The Row in Los Angeles on May 19, 2022.
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Disney said Wednesday that it has an estimated 157 million global monthly active users who watch ad-supported content on its streaming platforms – Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+.
That number includes 112 million users domestically and is a monthly average over the past six months.
While traditional TV channels have a standard way of measuring ratings and viewership, there is still no industry standard methodology for measuring the size of the global streaming advertising audience.
The company said its Disney Advertising unit “sought to define a globally consistent approach and methodology to estimate ad-supported audience.” It provides the update and further insight into its ad-supported streaming business at the annual CES technology conference in Las Vegas, a key event for the advertising and media industries.
“Disney is at the intersection of world-class sports and entertainment content, with the most valuable audiences in ad-supported global streaming at scale,” said Rita Ferro, Disney's president of Global Advertising, in a press release. “We wanted to be the first to provide our industry with greater transparency into the methodology used to estimate our engaged, global ad-supported, monthly active users.”
In explaining the methodology, the company said the metric is derived from active accounts on Disney's three streaming services that watched continuous ad-supported shows and movies for more than 10 seconds. “Each active account is then multiplied by the number of estimated users per account… to estimate the total number of users,” the report said. The estimated active users are added to the apps without deduplication, meaning users who subscribe to more than one of the platforms can be counted more than once.
Grow in ad-supported levels
Media companies have begun to focus on generating profits from their streaming activities, and advertising has become an important way to do that. While many platforms were initially ad-free subscription services, streaming platforms have introduced cheaper, ad-supported tiers for consumers in recent years.
Disney CEO Bob Iger has said the company is trying to steer its customers toward the ad-supported tiers. The company has increased prices for ad-free options since the launch of Disney+ with ads in late 2022.
Disney's Hulu was one of the first streaming platforms to offer an ad-supported option. More recently, Disney+ introduced an ad-supported tier.
In November, Disney said it had 122.7 million Disney+ Core subscribers, excluding Disney+ Hotstar in India and other countries in the region. Hulu had 52 million subscribers, while ESPN+ had 25.6 million paid subscribers.
The company historically hasn't reported exactly how much subscribers on each platform pay for the ad-supported option, but executives in the November earnings call said more than half of new U.S. Disney+ subscribers opted for the cheaper ad-supported tier , adding this “bodes well for the future.”
Disney noted on the call that average revenue per user for domestic Disney+ customers fell from $7.74 to $7.70, due to a higher mix of customers on the lower-priced ad-supported and wholesale offerings.
Executives also said in November that they were confident streaming would be “a significant growth area” for the company.
At the time, the company reported that its combined streaming businesses, including Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+, posted operating income of $321 million for the September period, compared to a loss of $387 million in the same period the year before.
Disney will report its fiscal first-quarter results before the bell on February 5.