On Thursday, Netflix announced it will begin deactivating long-dormant accounts. The amount of customers that will lose access is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.
The company claims it’s helping customers who no longer use the service on a regular basis, more importantly in over a year, by canceling their subscriptions.
Director of Product Innovation Eddy Wu released the news and also responded by saying “the last thing we want is people paying for something they’re not using.”
“Anyone who cancels their account and then rejoins within 10 months will still have their favorites, profiles, viewing preferences, and account details just as they left them,” Wu’s post explains. “In the meantime, we hope this new approach saves people some hard-earned cash.”
Ask me is this crazy and I’ll tell you yes. Netflix is a subscription-based service, and I bet close to 30-40 percent of those individuals were still paying their fee which was their own prerogative. Canceling hundreds of thousands of accounts is going to the extreme as they might not ever come back. I do believe it is a risky move.
Netflix explained the deletion of their ‘zombie accounts,’ is sort of like that “sinking feeling when you realize you signed up for something but haven’t used it in ages? At Netflix, the last thing we want is people paying for something they’re not using.”
Netflix says they have sent notifications to alert these subscription-based individuals and given them the choice to keep their accounts or don’t respond and the accounts will be removed permanently.
According to Netflix, inactive accounts represent a few hundred thousand users, which is less than 1% of its overall member base.
This piece was written by Wayne Dupree on May 23, 2020. It originally appeared in WayneDupree.com and is used by permission.
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