This week has been a tough one for Netflix, with the streaming platform announcing that it would be letting go of 150 employees amid slowing growth.

While the culling of its workforce is not good news, it is exacerbated by the fact than many of these employees worked in divisions of the company that focused on niche content and specifically that of LGBTQ subscribers.

On top of this week’s announcement, a survey conducted by The Information (paywall) shows a worrying trend for Netflix, with an estimated 13 percent of long-term subscribers choosing to leave the platform. Long-term according to this survey is three years or longer, so opting to leave after that amount of time is quite telling.

The Information adds that this percentage also represents the largest segment that is leaving unsubscribing from the streaming service.

The survey, which leveraged anonymised data of 5 million subscribers from analytics firm Antenna, says that there were 3.6 million cancellations over the last quarter. This in stark contrast to the fact that the platform only had 2.5 million cancellations over the past five quarters, indicating that there has indeed been a mass exodus from Netflix in recent months.

As for why this is happening, we have posited our own theories in recent weeks, but the combination of routine price increases, a difficult to discern content strategy and growing competition are likely all contributors. An example of the latter is Disney+, which launched in South Africa this week to much fanfare.

It therefore remains to be seen if future plans and features for Netflix will help course correct, but for right now, it looks like the streaming platform will need to do something radical to claw back the ground it has lost and retain its long-term subscribers.

[Image – Photo by Venti Views on Unsplash]