GOT WOKE, GOING BROKE: Netflix Stock Price Drops 35%, Posting Biggest Fall Since 2004.
Netflix Inc. shares recorded their worst day since 2004 after the streaming giant reported that it lost subscribers in the first quarter.
The shares shed more than a third of their on Wednesday, finishing down $122.42, or 35.1%, to $226.19. The stock was the S&P 500’s worst performer of the day. Investors had expected that the company would add new users in the quarter. Instead, Netflix said it ended the first three months of the year with 200,000 fewer subscribers than it had in the fourth quarter and said it expected to lose two million global subscribers in the current quarter.
The fall represented Netflix’s biggest single-day percentage drop since Oct. 15, 2004, when it fell 41%. It slashed $54.3 billion from the company’s market capitalization, its largest one-day market cap loss on record.
It is the second time the shares have tumbled this year. In January, Netflix shares slid more than 20% when the company said it expected to add a much smaller number of subscribers than it did one year prior.
The stock is down 62% this year including Wednesday’s fall.
Several other streaming stocks fell Wednesday. Paramount Global finished down $3.12, or 8.6%, to $33.16, and Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. was off $1.48, or 6%, to $23.01. Walt Disney Co. retreated $7.33, or 5.6%, to $124.57, while Spotify Technology SA lost $14.92, or 11%, to $122.49.
More than 100 million Netflix shares traded hands on Wednesday, the first time it had crossed that milestone since 2015, according to Dow Jones Market Data. Some individual traders appeared to be buying the dip: The company was by far the most-purchased stock on Fidelity’s brokerage platform, according to the firm’s website. Buy orders for the stock far outpaced the number of sell orders tied to the shares.
As Western Journal notes: Elon Musk Diagnoses Netflix with a Fatal Disease as Stock Plummets on News of Subscriber Loss.
Gadfly Elon Musk on Tuesday waded into the troubled waters of Netflix as it appeared to be going down the drain.
The company announced Tuesday that its streaming service had lost about 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter of 2022, with the crepe-hanging prediction that 2 million more would flee in the second quarter, according to CNN.
Netflix had been predicting it would gain 2.5 million subscribers in the first quarter.
The news sent the company’s stock down 25 percent in after-hours trading.
Enter Musk, who took time from his playful courtship of Twitter to serve as culture doctor and diagnose what’s ailing the streaming service.
“The woke mind virus is making Netflix unwatchable,” he tweeted.
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In 2020, its show “Cuties” was accused of sexualizing preteen girls, leading many to sever ties with the service.
Last year, Netflix revealed “Q-Force,” a cartoon about LGBT spies. “We’re the first queer agents in the field ever,” a character said in the trailer.
“Dear White People” also turned away viewers who perceived it as racist against white people.
And this week, Netflix subscribers will be treated to “He’s Expecting,” whose synopsis reads, “When a successful ad executive who’s got it all figured out becomes pregnant, he’s forced to confront social inequities he’d never considered before.”
The streaming giant isn’t just driving away subscribers with divisive and offensive “woke” programming. Some say much of the content is just plain bad.
“Netflix spent more than $13 billion on original content last year, and people apparently aren’t watching it all that much,” Kevin Dugan wrote in New York Magazine on Tuesday.
Via I Hate the Media, who writes, “Netflix discovers the truth of Get Woke Go Broke.”
Then there’s the massive amount of product all of the various streaming services, and the cable networks are cranking out. As Sonny Bunch, then of the Weekly Standard (before their own digital demise) asked in 2018: Overload: Will any shows from the Golden Age of TV endure? “The flood of television programming from Netflix et al. since 2013, and the shotgun-blast manner in which new seasons are released, have combined to make it virtually impossible to keep up with everything worth watching. As recently as 15 years ago, a discerning TV watcher only needed to keep tabs on a handful of shows—a Sunday-night drama from HBO or AMC or Showtime; a Tuesday-night drama and a Thursday-night comedy from FX or maybe a broadcast network. But now it feels like there are nigh on infinite offerings from a nearly limitless number of channels. With thousands of hours of new TV coming out every year and an increasingly fractured marketplace demanding customers keep track of several different streaming services, how do we keep the truly excellent programming from being lost in the flood of mediocrity?”