Disney Sees 157 Million Monthly Viewers For Ad-Supported Programming

Disney said its three streaming platforms have attracted roughly 157 million monthly active users worldwide.

The entertainment giant announced those figures for Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ Wednesday (Jan. 8) as part of its presentation at the CES showcase in Las Vegas. The company said that figure includes 112 million domestic users, and is an average per month for the last six months.

“Disney sits at the intersection of world class sports and entertainment content, with the most high-value audiences in ad-supported global streaming at scale,” Rita Ferro, Disney’s president of global advertising, said in a news release. “We wanted to be the first to offer our industry greater transparency into the methodology used to estimate our engaged global ad-supported monthly active users.”

The release noted that — compared to linear advertising — there’s no industry standard for determining the size of the global streaming audience.

Disney said it arrived at its numbers from active accounts across the three services who have watched “ad-supported content” continuously for more than 10 seconds. From there, each account is multiplied by the number of estimated users per account (global average is 2.6 and varies by application and region) to gauge the total number of users.

The release added that multipliers are determined by first-party survey data of more than 13,000 people aged 18 to 64, “representing subscribers in regions with an advertising tier.”

The company’s findings come at a time when consumers are suffering from “streaming fatigue,” as PYMNTS wrote late last month.

“As streaming platforms continue to raise subscription fees, many consumers say they are dissatisfied with the quality of content being offered,” that report said. “Recent surveys, such as TiVo’s 2024 report, suggest satisfaction with both ad-free and ad-supported services has declined, sparking concerns that the golden age of high-quality, original programming might be over.”

In fact, research from PYMNTS Intelligence has shown that cost is the prime factor leading consumers to cancel their streaming services.

Still, things may not be as dire as they seem, with several experts telling PYMNTS that the surveys don’t tell the full story.

For example, industry analyst Dan Rayburn argued that consumer dissatisfaction was a natural part of the trial-and-error process for the streaming landscape.

“If consumers feel that the value isn’t there, they’ll jump from service to service,” he said, adding that streaming platforms don’t share churn rates, and content quality is subjective.

Rayburn cautioned against putting too much stock in survey data, as it often can’t capture the full scope of consumer behavior, such as things like subscriptions and cancellations.