92% of the people who signed up for free trials of Quibi in April decided not to become paying subscribers, new report claims
- Analytics firm Sensor Tower issue a report documenting Quibi’s difficult launch
- Just 8% of the people who downloaded the mobile streaming app at launch became paying subscribers according to Sensor Tower
- Quibi disputes Sensor Tower’s numbers but hasn’t released subscriber numbers
The overwhelming majority of people who signed up for the mobile video streaming service Quibi quit after their free trial period was over, according to a new analytics report.
Some 92% of the 910,000 users who initially signed up for Quibi when it launched in April chose to not convert to paying subscribers after completing a free three-month trial.
Just 72,000 users, or 8% of the total, chose to convert their accounts to either a $4.99 monthly subscription with ads, or a $7.99 monthly subscription with no ads.
A new report from mobile analytics firm Sensor Tower claims that just 8% of the users who downloaded the mobile video streaming service at launch converted to paying subscribers
Quibi has disputed Sensor Tower’s findings, saying its figures are ‘an order of magnitude lower’ than the real number, but the company has not said what its actual subscriber numbers are.
For comparison, Disney Plus converted 11% of the 9.5 million users who signed up for free trials during the first three days of its November 2019 launch, according to a report in The Verge.
Sensor Tower’s report also claims that Quibi has been downloaded by 4.5 million users total since launching, but a company spokesperson said the figure is actually 5.6 million.
Quibi did not disclose how many active subscribers were among those 5.6 million, but said the conversion rate has so far exceeded internal benchmarks.
‘Our conversion from download to trial is above mobile app benchmarks, and we are seeing excellent conversion to paid subscribers,’ Quibi’s spokesperson told The Verge, ‘both among our 90-day free trial sign-ups from April, as well as our 14-day free trial sign-ups from May and June.’
The company had initially hoped to attract 7.4 million paying subscribers in its first year, but a Wall Street Journal report in June claimed the company’s internal projections for the year had been adjusted downward to just two million.
The $1.75billion company co-founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman intends to become a mobile equivalent of Netflix, offering a range of original series conceived specifically to be viewed on smartphones and tablets.
Quibi has disputed Sensor Tower’s numbers, saying they are ‘an order of magnitude’ off and claims that so far 5.6 million users have downloaded its app, though it still hasn’t reported subscriber numbers
The company has funded 46 original series with targeted runtimes of between seven and 10 minutes or less for each episode.
The company made a number of high-profile production deals with stars like Chrissy Teigen, Reese Witherspoon, Kevin Hart, Steven Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro, and others.
After its high-profile launch, signs of stress quickly emerged, with the app falling out of the Top 50 most downloaded listings on Apple’s App Store less than two weeks later.
In June, rumors circulated about some Quibi employees being unhappy about lavish fees paid to stars like Witherspoon, who reportedly earned $6million to narrate the nature series Fierce Animals.
According to the Wall Street Journal, there had also been growing tension between Whitman and Katzenberg, who was described by unnamed sources as ‘dictatorial’ and a micro-manager.
In an interview with the New York Times, Katzenberg assigned blame for the company’s struggles on the COVID-19 pandemic.
‘I attribute everything that has gone wrong to coronavirus,’ Katzenberg said. ‘Everything.’