What Should Investors Make of Netflix's Latest Transparency Efforts?
When Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) and its streaming peers took on traditional pay TV, subscriber counts and legacy TV profits weren't the only things to be upended. Among the collateral damage were traditional measures of TV audiences, including Nielsen's long-tenured and widely respected figures.
Nielsen has since created new metrics to measure ratings for Netflix and Amazon, among other streaming services, and Nielsen also now includes digital TV figures in its famous TV ratings. But that hasn't stopped Netflix and its techy-savvy peers from issuing their own rankings and metrics. Netflix, in particular, has been very proactive about releasing its own figures, which often claim massive audiences. Though Nielsen and other observers sometimes dispute these numbers, Netflix still manages to get plenty of headlines.
Media outlets are starting to catch on, though, and so are investors. We were among those who registered displeasure with Netflix's early 2020 announcement of new tracking metrics so generous as to be all but useless. Last month, Netflix offered an olive branch to investors and observers in the form of a new "top 10 list" -- one that, crucially, is also a customer-facing effort. What should we make of it?
Source Fool.com
