Quibi’s launch hasn’t gone nearly as smooth as expected, and it seems initial hiccups have impacted the service. Because the short-form streamer launched right in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, people were forced to stay at home, making it’s mobile-only viewing model a point of contention for users.
Not only that, the company was (and still is) in the middle of a patent infringement and misappropriation of trade secrets legal battle with Eko over the Turnstyle technology.
Now, a new report from analytics company Sensor Tower is stating the streamer is not retaining as many users as they originally sought to retain. During their launch period, Quibi offered customers free 90-day trials. However, according to the report, only eight percent or 72,000 of those users are opting to stay with the service as the free trials begin to expire. At this rate, the streamer is looking at a paying base of 360,000 customers from the current group of user signups, Variety noted.
In comparison, when Disney+ launched back in November, the service managed to retain approximately 11 percent of initial free-trial app users to paying customers, Sensor Tower revealed.
A spokesperson for Quibi reached out to The Streamable with this response: “The number of paid subscribers is incorrect by an order of magnitude. To date, over 5.6 million people have downloaded the Quibi app. Our conversion from download to trial is above mobile app benchmarks, and we are seeing excellent conversion to paid subscribers — both among our 90-day free trial sign-ups from April, as well as our 14-day free trial sign-ups from May and June.”
The report from Sensor Tower is congruent to other reports that have come out about Quibi. Last month, The Wall Street Journal, reported that the short-form streaming service is in danger of missing its one-year subscriber goal. The company was projected to be on track to sign-up 2 million paying subscribers by April 2021, a far cry from the 7.4 million subscribers they expected to garner after year one.
According to Apptopia, Quibi was downloaded four million times in the period between its launch day, April 6, through May 28. Of those four million, the analytics company says only 30 percent are active daily users, with the most popular show being the reboot of Comedy Central’s “Reno 911!”
A previous report from Sensor Tower also revealed Quibi was the fourth ranked app based on number of downloads for iPhones at launch. However, that number tanked, placing the app at 284 as of June 9, well below Disney+, which was at 50 and HBO Max, which was at number 67, according to The Los Angeles Times.
Editor’s Note: This post was updated after it was published to include a response from a spokesperson for Quibi.