As we noted in the most recent Antenna State of Subscriptions Report, Serial Churners–individuals who have canceled three or more Premium SVOD services in the past two years–are a growing and active cohort of U.S. streaming subscribers. According to Antenna data, at the end of 2023 nearly one-in-four streaming consumers qualified as Serial Churners, an increase of 42% YoY.
Antenna originally identified the Serial Churner phenomenon back in 2022, but now that Serial Churners comprise a larger portion of the market we thought it made sense to update our definitions to better reflect observed consumer behavior:
Standard Serial Churner: 3-4 cancels within the past 2 years
Heavy Serial Churner: 5-6 cancels within the past 2 years
Super Heavy Serial Churner: 7+ cancels within the past 2 years
Among all Serial Churners, Antenna found that 42% of these users had canceled a Premium SVOD subscription at least five times in the past two years, and 19% have canceled seven or more times.
Understanding Serial Churners is particularly important because this cohort of consumers drive a disproportionate share of gross additions. Case and point: Serial Churners accounted for all of the acquisition growth in 2023 AND are a major factor in rising churn rates. Serial Churners were responsible for 56.5M Cancels in 2023, up +54.6% YoY, while Cancels by Non-Serial Churners increased 18.5% YoY to 82.8M.
If you’re interested in downloading your own copy of Antenna’s Q1’24 State of Subscriptions Report, you can sign-up to receive it automatically on our homepage.
For more detailed information on Antenna’s methodology and definitions of core metrics, please visit http://www.antenna.live/methodology.
Brendan Brady is a Content Strategy Associate at Antenna, a measurement and analytics company providing insight into purchase behavior and subscription metrics across the new media landscape.
