The streaming service Quibi has lost 90% of its users after expiration of their free trial.
© Quibi
Presented in 2018, Quibi has finally seen the light of day in April 2020, after several weeks of teasing. The objective was rather simple, namely : to reveal a new streaming platform dedicated to the short format. The department’s strategy was to focus exclusively on its mobile app so that users can watch the series directly from their smartphone —in horizontal format as in a vertical format.
To hope to compete with the large market, Quibi has focused on the creation of original content, bringing together big names, both on the side of the sector of the streaming that the studios (NBC, Universal, Sony Pictures…). However, the results do not seem to live up to expectations —far from it, knowing that the service has also met with difficulties before its launch.
A launch disappointing for Quibi
The company analysis mobile Sensor Tower ensures that Quibi has lost 90% of its users once the free trial period has been completed. In sum, the application of streaming would have converted a little less than 10% of its subscribers.
Quibi would have saved 910 000 users during its launch in April, a figure that has dropped to 72 000 once the three month trial ended, which represents a conversion rate of approximately 8%.
The rate of conversion of new streaming services is obviously never very high, but it still remains higher than 8% of ordinary. If the comparison with Disney+ is to be taken with a grain of salt, it remains interesting. He managed to convert 11% of its subscribers after their free trial, knowing that more than 9.5 million people have purchased a subscription during the first three days of availability of the service in the USA. In sum, the conversion rate is pretty low also, but the number of users is very high since a large number of them have turned to the platform from the beginning.
For its part, Quibi gave no figures except that 5.6 million have downloaded the application. For Sensor Tower, this figure would be 5.4 million people, which suggests that the estimate of the company is lower than the reality.
In this regard, a spokesman for Quibi said to The Verge : “The number of paying subscribers is incorrect […]. To this day, more than 5.6 million people have downloaded the application Quibi. Our conversion rate from download to trial is higher than that of mobile applications, and we are seeing excellent conversion rates to paying subscribers, both for registration to the free trial of 90 days from April for registration to the free trial of 14 days from may and June “.
In all cases, we can only recognize that the launch of Quibi is not very good, a result that the co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg puts it on the back of the pandemic. In may, he said : “I attribute everything that has gone wrong in coronavirus. All “.
