Only 8% of college students don't have Netflix, and that's a great sign for the company's future
In a new survey of college students, commissioned by LendEDU, only 8% of respondents said they didn't have a Netflix account. That means that a whopping 92% have Netflix. That stat jives with recent research on US teens by Piper Jaffray, which found that 37% of them watch Netflix every day. Significantly, Netflix's big competitors, Amazon Prime Video and Hulu, came in way below Netflix at just 3% each for daily viewing.
This all doesn't mean young people actually pay for Netflix, however. 54% of college respondents to LendEDU's study said they use a friend's or family member's account, and 5% said they used an account owned by their significant other or ex.
Only 34% said they had their own account. But that might not be such a big deal for Netflix, which has always taken a hands-off approach to password sharing.
In June, Netflix gave this statement to Business Insider about password sharing: "As long as they aren't selling them, members can use their passwords however they please." (Netflix does limit the number of concurrent streams.)
And in October, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said he had no plans to change the company's lax attitude. "Password sharing is something you have to learn to live with, because there's so much legitimate password sharing, like you sharing with your spouse, with your kids ... so there's no bright line, and we're doing fine as is," he said.
One reason for that is because if you are a young person watching Netflix every day (37%), when you age into a time when you might pay, you're more likely to pony up the cash. You're addicted to Netflix, after all.
Indeed, last year, research on Netflix users by Jefferies found that "almost half of the respondents that share a password to access the service indicated that they would pay for their own subscription if they were no longer able to share an account."