By coinnews 
00:00 Josh Lipton
Netflix topped earnings expectations for the first quarter, the streaming giant also maintaining its 2025 revenue forecast. More on the road ahead for Netflix. Let’s get to Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Media Analyst Geetha Ranganathan. Geetha, it is good to see you on the show, as always. So Netflix reports, Geetha. Stock is up now 4 and 1/2% in the after hours, but walk us through your reaction to the results. What What do you make of the print?
00:34 Geetha Ranganathan
Yeah, thank you so much, Josh. So this is the first time that Netflix has actually not reported any subscriber numbers, which is really, you know, very, very different. Feels very different. But financial targets came in well above expectations. This was really, again, one of their blockbuster quarters, I would say, because one of the things we were thinking about, you know, as we kind of approach this quarter was they did have a lot of price hikes that were implemented in January and so the concern was whether there would be a revenue slowdown if people were, in fact, churning and canceling subscriptions. But looks like revenue growth actually came in higher than expected. So that’s pretty good news. And what they said is that they’re actually implementing more price hikes. I think they mentioned France and some other markets. So, again, gives you confidence in kind of their pricing power and their strategy going forward. And again, if you look at some of the, the guidance that they’ve issued for revenue growth in Q2, uh, you know, again, more than 15% growth, really strong. And then they reaffirmed full year financial targets which, you know, in this environment with so much of uncertainty, uh, you know, with an impending recession, is really, really good news and just gives you a lot of confidence in the momentum and the way that the management team is executing.
02:18 Josh Lipton
So obviously a great quarter when it comes to continuing to raise prices. Uh, any perspective on how the advertising segment of their revenue is going?
02:32 Geetha Ranganathan
Yeah, so they did say that they still So they They’ve taken a lot of steps. Advertising is still a very, very nascent business for them, but they are taking steps to ramp that business up pretty significantly. Uh, so, you know, the targets for this year is that they are going to, uh, double their revenue from last year, which we estimate was about, you know, one 1.2 to 1.5 billion. Uh, but more importantly is the fact that they’ve actually laid out targets in, you know, a 5-year plan. So for 2030, uh, they expect to hit, uh, $9 billion in advertising revenue which would be almost 12% of their total revenue, up from about 3 to 4% today. So advertising is definitely going to become a more and more important part of the whole, uh, you know, Netflix business model. Uh, they’ve They’ve they’re doing a lot of different things to really build the business. So one is investing in programming that really plays well to advertising. So you look You talk about sports, you talk about live content like WWE Raw, like, you know, some of those NFL games, and they’re investing in that and they’re going to continue to do that, I think, in a pretty big way. And then the other thing is really kind of building their own infrastructure. So, uh, in, on April 1st, they actually launched their own Netflix ad exchange, um, within the US, and that’s going to help them sell more ads and do it in a very, very efficient way as they improve and open up their ad inventory across to many, many, uh, different platforms. So they’re really taking steps to build the business, and I think it’s going to become a major revenue driver starting in 2026.