157 million monthly active users watch ad-supported content

The atmosphere was high at The Row in Los Angeles on May 19, 2022, when the Disney Bundle celebrated National Streaming Day.

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disney The company said on Wednesday that an estimated 157 million monthly active users worldwide watch ad-supported content on its streaming platforms Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+.

The figure includes 112 million domestic users and is the average monthly figure over the past six months.

While traditional TV media has standard ways to measure ratings and viewership, there is still no industry standard way to measure the size of global streaming ad audiences.

The company said its Disney Advertising division has “set out to define globally consistent methods and methods for estimating ad-supported audiences.” The company provided the latest updates and further insights into its ad-supported streaming business at the annual CES technology conference in Las Vegas, the premier event for the advertising and media industry.

“Disney is at the intersection of world-class sports and entertainment content and has the most valuable audience in ad-supported global streaming,” Rita Ferro, president of Disney Worldwide Advertising, said in the release. “We Wants to be the first to provide our industry with a more transparent approach to estimating the global ad-supported monthly active users we participate in.”

Explaining the methodology, the company said the metric is derived from active accounts on Disney’s three streaming services who watched ad-supported shows and movies for more than 10 consecutive seconds. “Each active account is then multiplied by the estimated number of users per account… to estimate the total number of users,” it said. Estimated active users are added across applications without deduplication, meaning users subscribed to multiple platforms may be counted multiple times.

The growth of ad-supported tiers

Media companies are particularly focused on generating profits from their streaming businesses, and advertising has become a key way to achieve this goal. While many platforms began as ad-free subscription services, in recent years streaming platforms have launched cheaper, ad-supported plans for consumers.

Disney CEO Bob Iger said the company was trying to steer its customers toward its ad-supported tiers. Since launching Disney+ with ads in late 2022, the company has increased the price of the ad-free option.

Disney’s Hulu was one of the first streaming platforms to offer an ad-supported option. Recently, Disney+ launched an ad-supported tier.

In November, Disney said it had 122.7 million core Disney+ subscribers, excluding Disney+ Hotstar in India and other countries in the region. Hulu has 52 million subscribers, while ESPN+ has 25.6 million paid subscribers.

The company has not historically reported how many subscribers on each platform paid for the ad-supported option, but executives said during an earnings call in November that more than half of new U.S. Disney+ subscribers chose the cheaper ad-supported option. He added that this “bodes well for the future”.

Disney noted on the call that average revenue per user for domestic Disney+ customers fell to $7.70 from $7.74 due to its cheaper, ad-supported tier and a higher percentage of customers with wholesale products.

Executives also said in November that they believed streaming would “become an important growth area for the company.”

At the time, the company reported that its combined streaming business, which includes Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+, had operating income of $321 million in September, compared with a loss of $387 million in the same period a year earlier.

disney will Report Its first-quarter financial results will be released before the market closes on February 5.