Netflix institutes new viewer-based metric as ads reach 190 million viewers worldwide

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-Netflix said on Wednesday that ads on its platform have reached over 190 million monthly active viewers (MAVs) globally, as the streaming giant instituted the new metric to measure its ad reach in terms of people instead of accounts.

Netflix has expanded into advertising and video games, two areas that have contributed little to revenue so far, according to analysts and investors.

The company defines MAV as the number of users who have watched at least one minute of ad-supported programming and multiplies that by the average number of people in a household, based on Netflix’s internal research, it said in a statement.

The move will allow Netflix to have a “more comprehensive count of how many people” are actually watching content on the platform, it said.

With Netflix moving into live-streaming, it began testing dynamic ad insertion (DAI) with WWE Raw and SmackDown during the quarter.

It will now offer the technology across the U.S., Brazil, Canada, Germany, Mexico and the UK for the upcoming NFL Christmas Gameday.

DAI lets Netflix swap in specific ads for each viewer in real time during a live stream. It will scale the offering across more live titles in 2026.

Co-CEO Greg Peters said Netflix recorded its best ad sales quarter ever in the third quarter, adding that it is on track to more than double ad revenue this year, on the company’s earnings call last month.

He noted that while advertising is still small compared to subscription revenue, Netflix has now “established the fundamentals” of the business and sees plenty of room for growth.

Netflix Ads Suite, its in-house advertising platform, went live in the U.S. and Canada in May and has since been made available in all 12 ad-supported countries.

(Reporting by Juby Babu in Mexico City)