Report: Prime Day Can Drive Millions of Streaming Sign-Ups, but Fewer than 50% of Those Customers Stay Subscribed
Amazon Prime Days 2023 just ended, and, hopefully, everybody got the deal they wanted on the product they’d been eyeing. There were some truly epic deals on streaming services available, including big discounts on top platforms like Max and Paramount+.
Research performed by analytics firm Antenna is helping to contextualize just how useful promotions like Prime Day are to streamers. The data found that in 2022, there were approximately 1.5 million sign-ups for streaming services during the Prime Day promotional period. Paramount Global was the big winner, as its services Paramount+, SHOWTIME, and BET+ combined to add 700,000 subscribers.
These numbers are impressive, considering it can sometimes take months for a streaming service to compile that many new users. Other promotions like Black Friday sales, Streaming Day events, and simple flash sales also help streamers compile large lists of new customers in a relatively short period of time.
The challenge for providers then becomes keeping those users engaged. No one has perfectly cracked that formula just yet, according to Antenna’s data. No matter which promotional period is examined, less than 60% of users on all services subscribed to during a promotion are converted into paying customers once their trials end. Even worse, none of the streamers surveyed had a retention rate of over 50% in the month after the first subscription payment.
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discovery+ does the best job of retaining promotional users, with a survival rate of 46%. That tracks with data showing that Warner Bros. Discovery's lifestyle platform has remarkably consistent churn statistics, but even its lineup of lean-back unscripted shows can’t keep more than half of promotional subscribers engaged with the service.
The data from Antenna confirms new information released by Parrot Analytics that demonstrates streaming executives have to think creatively in order to keep users engaged. Streamers must show users who sign up for their service during a promotion new and relevant content to keep them engaged and have to do better in terms of leveraging viewer data to show what content a user might enjoy next based on previous selections.
discovery+
discovery+ is a video streaming service that offers more than 70,000 episodes of 2,500+ current and classic shows from several popular TV brands including Discovery, Investigation Discovery, HGTV, TLC, Food Network, A&E, Lifetime, and History.