In January 2026 Netflix reported 325 million paying subscribers, and for the first quarter revenue of $12.25 billion, up 16.2% year on year. Net profit rose 83%, and the advertising segment is expected to double its revenue to $3 billion this year. By the metrics Wall Street watches, nothing is missing from the company.
One number moves in the opposite direction. The average subscriber spends roughly 1.7 hours a day on Netflix, compared with 2.2 hours at the peak in 2023. That is a drop of about 23%. The streaming analyst Marion Ranchet, author of the Streaming Made Easy newsletter, pointed this out. “Subscribers and attention are not the same thing,” she writes. For two decades the company perfected the art of winning subscribers. The next chapter is a harder task: building a habit.
Hours per head are falling, total hours are rising
The decline per subscriber does not mean that people watch less Netflix overall. In the second half of 2025, the company counted 96 billion hours viewed, up 1% year on year. Absolute attention holds because the subscriber base is growing. What is being lost is the time of each individual viewer.
Ranchet links this to the way Netflix handles its numbers. “Netflix knows this. That’s why they stopped reporting subscriber numbers, then suddenly brought them back,” she writes. During 2025 the company scrapped its subscriber reporting and, by its own account, no longer publishes the figure quarterly. Yet it published that one big number at the moment when a story about size, rather than frequency of viewing, suits it.
Ranchet calls the response a “four-move playbook”, a bet on routine rather than on events. It consists of video podcasts, children’s content modelled on YouTube, live sport and live television. Three of these four moves share one feature: Netflix is importing formats that have already built habits with audiences elsewhere.
Video podcasts and children’s creators from YouTube
The most visible move is buying video podcasts. Spotify has agreed with Netflix to bring video versions of shows from Spotify Studios and The Ringer to the platform, from The Bill Simmons Podcast to sports and pop culture series. The launch is planned for early 2026, starting in the United States. “As video podcasts continue to grow in popularity, our partnership with Spotify allows us to bring full video versions of these top shows to both Netflix and Spotify audiences,” said Netflix vice president Lauren Smith. Two months later the firm added another 14 video podcasts from iHeartMedia, among them The Breakfast Club and My Favorite Murder.
The children’s section follows the same logic. Ms. Rachel, a show cut from content the creator originally published on YouTube, finished the first half of 2025 as Netflix’s seventh most-watched title, with more than 53.4 million views. Other creators from YouTube joined her, from Blippi to Ryan’s World. In addition, Netflix launched Clips in late April 2026, a vertical feed of short previews, a format familiar to users of TikTok and YouTube Shorts. Product head Elizabeth Stone said the company was not trying to “copy or chase exactly what a TikTok or others are doing”.
For a brand that follows the creator economy as a buyer, this is a readable signal. Creators and their formats are becoming the infrastructure of a habit that a premium platform buys rather than builds from scratch.
Sport and live TV for weekday evenings
Sport and television are moving beyond the on-demand library. Netflix has been adding live sport since the end of 2023. Today it airs WWE Raw every Monday, plus boxing, MMA and selected MLB broadcasts. Seasonal NFL games include Christmas blocks. A weekly show like WWE Raw is exactly the kind of routine that a big film cannot replace once a year.
The furthest step, however, concerns Europe directly. The French group TF1 and Netflix launched an integration in France from summer 2026, through which local subscribers see five free-to-air TF1 channels and more than 30,000 hours of content from its TF1+ service directly in the Netflix app, at no extra cost. Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters speaks of a “first-of-its-kind partnership”. For Netflix, this is the first time it carries linear channels belonging to someone else. Linear television, which streaming spent years pushing aside, is returning as a tool for daily traffic.
TF1 Group chief executive Rodolphe Belmer frames the deal from the other side. “As viewing habits shift toward on-demand consumption and audience fragmentation increases, this unprecedented alliance will enable our premium content to reach unparalleled audiences,” he said. The broadcaster gains reach, and the streaming service gains a reason to open the app on a weekday evening too.
The real rival in the battle for habit, however, is YouTube. People have been watching podcasts, children’s content and short videos there every day for a long time. Netflix is buying these formats and moving them behind its paywall. “The shiny object era is over. The habit war has begun,” Ranchet concludes. For European brands, what matters is that the first battle of that war is taking place in France.
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