The number of new Netflix subscribers rose again during the fourth quarter to reach historic proportions.
The streaming service added 19 million new paid users — "the biggest quarter of net adds in our history," the company said on Tuesday. Analysts surveyed by Bloomberg expected 9.18 million. Netflix gained 13 million paying viewers in the same period a year earlier.
Shares rose as much as 15% in after-hours trading.
Netflix attracted viewers at the end of 2024 by streaming the fight between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul and two NFL games on Christmas Day.
Those live events alone didn't drive the run-up in new subscriptions. Instead, Netflix saw "broad strength across content categories," Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters said during an earnings call on Tuesday.
"No single title really drives a majority of our engagement," Peters said.
"We really have built the business on variety and quality," co-CEO Ted Sarandos said.
Netflix also released season two of "Squid Game," which broke its record for premiere week viewership, during the quarter.
The company ended 2024 with 302 million paid subscribers.
Netflix raised its revenue guidance for 2025 to between $43.5 billion and $44.5 billion. The company previously expected revenue of between $43 billion and $44 billion for 2025.
It also said it was raising prices on most of its subscriptions in the US, Canada, Portugal, and Argentina. A standard subscription in the US will now cost $17.99, up from $15.49, the company said.
The company had included the benefit from those increases in its previous guidance for 2025.
Quarterly revenue reached $10.2 billion, up 16%. Analysts had expected $10.11 billion, per Bloomberg.
The streaming service spent much of 2024 cracking down on password sharing, which pushed some users to become new subscribers. Analysts have said that they expect the boost from that effort to wane over time, though.
It will stop reporting quarterly subscriber numbers starting in 2025. Instead, Netflix will publish two engagement reports each year, it said on Tuesday. It will release the first report with second-quarter earnings later this year.
Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the price of a standard Netflix subscription.
