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Disney reportedly lost 1.7 million paid subscribers in the week after suspending Kimmel
(www.engadget.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2025
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So 317.000 users would have cancelled anyway and the actual protest was 1.3 million. If my googling is right, in total there are ~207 million subscribers.
Summarizing, they lost the 0,6%. Much more that what I expected, but hardly noticeable. I'd love to know how many already subscribed back.
It’s noticeable when you look at the price of the subscription. That’s almost $300 million.
Calculate the 0.6% of your wage: that’s what $300M is for them.
That loss affects their stock price, their future outlook, what things they choose to fund, and how much they spend on advertising and trying to recover from this PR disaster.
I’m sure that lots of managers are having lots of meetings to discuss what happened, and that’s probably the hardest hit they had: noise.
The revenues will be slightly impacted but they will hardly notice it on quarterly reports.
Does that impact the company value? I don’t think so.
My wage doesn't have a cost of goods sold line item. If I take in $5b and make $5.5b in revenue, $300m is > 1/2 of my net profit
True, but if you stop working your income drops to 0, while if Disney stops working, it still owns billions in assets.
This is flawed thinking. There is no "them" with a huge salary. The people making decisions are salaried or invested employees, and their livelihood depends on the stock regardless. There isn't "one guy" that this hits, like it would with a salary, there's thousands of investors which must be appeased.
Also, it's likely many of those canceling were people who didn't use the service as much as power users, which means they're losing the cheapest to maintain customers (industry insight, no research to back this up, to be clear).
If we had boycotts and cancelations even a quarter this big across other media giants, our media would be a far better place.
A previously-posted Gizmodo article said
Which I thought was very useful.
Kabas is the reporter and I still haven't seen where they got that number.
I suspect they'd have lost a lot more if this dragged on longer, he was back in a few days.
This says 128M, which seems far more plausible. https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/disney-stop-reporting-subscriber-numbers-disney-plus-hulu-espn-1236480413/
Yes, but I looked up Disney+, Hulu and ESPN combined.
I don't think those numbers are additive like that - you'd be double-counting people.
They pay more than once as well?
True - I guess it depends on whether we're defining "subscribers" as people or total paid accounts.
Corporate says the biggest number.
Total paid account is the number that gets counted. That's what a subscriber is after all.
Should cable subscribers be counted 200 times, once for each channel?
Consider that the full number is world wide. How many of them are US based or US involved?
No idea, but of Disney+, Hulu and ESPN, only Disney+ is available in the EU and it gets only a small fraction of the market.