81% of Those Age 35 and Younger Have a Netflix Subscription

Try as hard as you can in the next day or two to find a young person who doesn’t have access to Netflix. It’s getting more and more difficult, and a new study shows that there are some pretty clear signals that Netflix has near perfect market penetration when it comes to youthful subscribers.

Michael Nathanson of MoffettNathanson Research published a recent report about Netflix’s current subscriber numbers and found that 81% of adults under the age of 35 have a Netflix subscription. As The New York Times points out, this is over a 9% increase from 2014, when 72% of people under the age of 35 had access to Netflix.

Now one thing we’re curious about, is in this research did they define someone as having an actual Netflix subscription or as someone who had access to Netflix. A subtle difference, sure, but as some research we ran last year found, the younger you are, the more likely it is that you’ll share your Netflix login with friends and family.

In other words, while this 81% number certainly remains impressive, it’s also fairly likely skewed as many younger folks are still borrowing their password, or sharing it with others, meaning Netflix isn’t actually collecting any green from these youthful freeloaders.

Now will these people eventually turn into paying Netflix subscribers themselves? Certainly at some point. Netflix has actually stated on numerous occasions that password sharing is basically the world’s greatest marketing program (ok besides perhaps Netflix and Chill) in helping promote Netflix and encourage new subscriptions. In other words, if someone uses another person’s Netflix login for a while, Netflix must feel confident in the number of eventual conversions to never really tighten their belt when it comes to this loose restriction.