Live: Will Netflix Beat Q1 Earnings After the Bell Tonight?

Netflix just took a question about their advertising business and the headline figure is they’re now over 4,000 advertisers, and that advertiser base grew 70% year-over-year.

Spencer Wang Head of Investor Relations

Great. We’ll now shift over to the topic of advertising. And this question comes from Dan Salmon of New Street Research. Can you share more on the growth of your total advertiser base? What proportion of advertisers are being serviced directly by the Netflix sales team and what proportion are buying on Netflix through third-party DSP partners. Are you still largely focused on the top 500 brands? Or is a mid-market strategy beginning to emerge? So about 5 questions in 1 there.

Gregory Peters Co-Chief Executive Officer

We’ll do our best to handle them all. So maybe just start with, as we’ve mentioned before, the biggest benefit we got from moving to our own ad tech stack is just making it easier for advertisers just to buy on our service. And then additionally, we’ve added more and more DSPs, which, of course, are more ways to buy. And we’re seeing through that pretty significant growth in programmatic, which is on its way to becoming more than 50% of our non-live ads business. 

So due to those moves as well as things like improving go-to-market capabilities, more sales force, continue to build out our ads products more attractiveness in those products. Our advertiser base grew over 70% year-to-year in 2025 to be more than 4,000 advertisers. We’ve seen a pretty good expansion of that advertiser base, which, of course, is a key indicator of the health of that business.

Today, we’re still currently concentrating in those top advertising accounts, the largest buyers, which are serviced primarily by the Netflix sales team that could be directly through our stack or basically a sales team driving buying behavior through DSPs, either of those are not separate, let’s say. And over time, we expect continued growth in that number of advertisers, we’re clearly pushing in that direction.

We think we’re going to see percentage of advertisers who buy programmatically increase and therefore, the programmatic share of ad revenue will go up as well. And as we scale programmatic and our advertiser base broadens further, of course, we’re going to be able to follow this pretty fairly standard modern time-tested model of expanding iteratively into larger and larger pools of advertisers.

Netflix’s Q1 ‘Video Interview’, where the company takes questions from Wall Street is ongoing. Here’s a question on how the company measures engagement, and how that performed in in Q1 of 2026:

Spencer Wang Head of Investor Relations

Thank you, Ted. I’ll move this along now to the next topic, which is on engagement. And the question here comes from Vikram Kesavabhotla of Baird. The question is, last quarter, you shared that your primary quality metric for engagement achieved an all-time high in 2025. How is this metric performing so far in 2026? What are some examples of the data points that inform your measurement of quality?

Gregory Peters Co-Chief Executive Officer

Sure, I’ll take this one. First, just to note that volume of engagement is still relevant, and we still track it, we still seek to grow it. I mean, actually, in Q1, view hours were up at a similar rate of growth to what we saw in the second half of 2025. And that’s actually despite having the Winter Olympics 17 days of robust streaming [ competition land ] in Q1 as well.

But as we said and as you alluded to here, while view hours are important, it’s actually just one of several metrics that we look at, and we’re increasingly trying to make that a more sophisticated view. Member quality is an important part of that. Increasing sophistication and measuring our performance, and it’s got several associated signals. And in Q1, that primary member quality metric that you referenced, it hit another all-time high. So we’re making good progress there. We’re excited about that. I am not going to detail how we compose our metrics because they often take quite a time and quite an effort to actually build them and to prove them out. I’m sure our competitors would like to get that cheat sheet, but we’re not going to give it to them. But I will say this that we build confidence in our metrics and specifically this member quality metric, as well as assess how we evolve and improve those metrics over time by evaluating their predictive and explanatory power to really important primary metrics like retention.

So that’s why we are clear that improving that number improves the business. And expanding on this, I would say, as we invest into new forms of content, we also have to learn how the new programming provides different kinds of value. I think live is a really great example of this. It often drives really significant viewing value for our members, albeit with fewer view hours than perhaps a scripted series. It’s also got different acquisition characteristics. So these are all things that we have to continually understand better.

We have to build models for how that programming matters to our members. We’ve got to figure out how that supports the business and then, of course, we can bid appropriately based on that.

We’re embedding it below if you’d like to watch:

Updates will slow down a bit on this live blog until Netflix hosts their ‘Video Interview.’

Once that starts at 4:45 p.m. ET, we’ll post the most important information you need to know.

If you want to keep receiving updates, simply leave this live blog open, and they’ll post automatically. 

Instead of a conference call, Netflix hosts a ‘video interview.’ That’s expected to go live at 4:45 p.m. ET.

We would expect Netflix shares to open negatively tomorrow. After all, the stock is down 9%.

Yet, if there’s one event remaining that could do the most to shift perception of these quarterly earnings, its the video interview.

Netflix grew revenue 16.2% last quarter, but its revenue guide implies a drop to 13.5% growth.

Does that mean Netflix’s growth is decelerating?

Well, as we noted earlier, Netflix’s forecast is likely the reason shares are down so much after-hours. However, it is worth noting that Netflix historically is fairly conservative with their guides.

Another factor to keep in mind, many Wall Street banks have modeled stronger growth in the second half of the year.

This is all to say, if you’re bullish on Netflix long-term, tonight’s pullback could present an opportunity to add to the company in the days ahead if this sell-off continues. ‘Weakness’ in Q2 could lead to a stronger second half of the year.

One of the most important areas investors are watching each quarter is what Netflix has to say about its live programming plans. Here’s what Netflix said in its shareholder letter about recent live events:

“Live event programming is another example of how certain programming can deliver outsized impact. In Q1, we aired more than 70 live events, including our first regional live event with the World Baseball Classic, exclusively for our members in Japan. This massive event delivered 31.4M viewers, becoming 3 our most-watched program ever on Netflix in Japan, and sparked our largest day of sign ups in the country. As a result, among the 190+ countries in which we operate, Japan was the largest contributor to member growth in Q1. Additionally, our March 21st live airing of BTS The Comeback Live delivered 18.4M global viewers , reached the weekly Top 10 in 80 countries and secured the #1 spot in 24 4 countries. We’ll further build out our live events later this year with the long-awaited heavyweight fight in the UK between Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua.”

I’ve bolded the segment that’s the most interesting, which is that broadcasting WBC matches in Japan propelled the country to being the largest contributor to member growth. That metric shows the potential for member growth from adding more sports across the world.

Netflix shares are now down more than 9% after reporting Q1 earnings.

In our last update, we noted EPS guidance is $.78 versus expectations of $.84.

That EPS guidance miss is partially caused by revenue guidance coming in below expectations.

However, the company is also guiding toward a lower operating margin than Wall Street expected. That margin erosion is likely weighing on shares after-hours.

Keep in mind as well that Netflix shares had rallied more than 40% since February 12th, so tonight’s sell-off is likely taking some money off the table after the stock’s rapid rise. 

Netflix reported earnings tonight and shares are down 7%. We’re digging into the reasons and guidance stands out to us.

The company guided to $.78 in EPS next quarter, Wall Street was expecting $.84. That’s a big miss. In addition, revenue guidance of $12.57 is below expectations.

So, the big number to watch is Netflix’s forward guidance is broadly disappointing and likely is the key reason shares are falling. 

Netflix’s earnings included the fact Reed Hastings will not seek re-election to the board. That’s big news since he was responsible for Netflix’s strongest growth in the early 2000s and is an iconic executive.

Netflix shares are plummeting, which might confuse some investors who see their EPS of $1.23 beat expectations of $.76 to $.79.

Once again, this EPS number includes a large one-time payment that will need to be excluded.

Wall Street doesn’t like Netflix’s earnings at first, shares are down 8% immedaitely. We’ll continue posting analysis on this quarter’s earnings.

The market has closed and Netflix earnings are out. Here are the key numbers:

• EPS: $1.23
• Revenue: $12.25 billion

As a reminder, here’s what Wall Street was expecting:

• EPS: $.79
• Revenue:$12.18 billion

As a reminder, these earnings include a one-time payment. We’ll work to remove the impacts from this payment and analyze the Street’s reaction in coming updates. 

Netflix earnings are due any minute after the closing bell.

Keep in mind, we expect their GAAP earnings number to be elevated due to a $2.8 billion breakup fee payment. Watch for their earnings that exclude this number.

We will post analysis on their earnings and why the stock is rising or falling. 

We’re a little more than 15 minutes away from the closing bell. We expect Netflix earnings to release very quickly after the market closes.

Once earnings are released, we’ll begin posting information from the earnings and live analysis. All you have to do to receive them is stay on this page, and they should load automatically. 

We expect to issue 10 or more updates within 30 minutes after Netflix reports. Once again, these updates will come from Eric Bleeker. He’s followed Netflix for more than 15 years, including his time leading The Motley Fool’s Telecom and Technology coverage.

In addition, he hosts 24/7 Wall St.’s AI Investor Podcast. Recommendations from the show have averaged 125% across the past 18 months. So, you’re getting updates from someone with plenty of experience in the technology and entertainment space.

Prediction markets are betting Netflix will beat earnings tonight. Polymarket’s market on Netflix earnings has 96% odds the company will beat GAPP EPS of $.76.

As we noted earlier, Wall Street expects the company to report higher GAAP earnings tonight, partially driven by gains received from the Warner Bros. breakup. So any analysis on tonight’s earnings will start with an ‘adjusted’ number that removes the impact of these one-time gains.

So, we wouldn’t look too much into what prediction markets based on GAAP earnings say about Netflix’s earnings tonight.

In late trading, Netflix shares are up .5% today.