Jessica Reif Ehrlich: Right. So Spence, I guess this one’s for you on margins. But could you elaborate on areas like ad tech content spend? Well, you did talk about content spend in your letter, but any other meaningful investment areas, something that that maybe we’re not thinking about?
Spencer Neumann: Sure. So let me step back a bit with some quick context. So first, Jessica, we set margin targets. They’re our best judgment of how kind of best to grow the long-term value of Netflix, and we’re trying to balance investment for future growth with near-term profits. So for instance, after investing heavily to launch Global in 2016, global Netflix, we wanted to take a disciplined approach to building profitability as we grew revenue because we felt, one, it was a good way to build that profit muscle across the company. And two, we understood that investors were – they’ve been pretty patient with us, so we wanted to demonstrate the scalability and the health of the business model. And so that took us from – it was like 4% OI margin to operating income margin business in 2016 to our current roughly 20% margin.
So we think a pretty good indicator that ad scale streaming can be a quite good business. Now stepping back, there’s no change in our financial objectives and also no change in our long-term margin expectations, including the fact that we see a – and we don’t think we’re anywhere near a margin ceiling. We’ve got a long runway of margin growth. So again, no change in our objectives, no change in our long-term margin expectations. But our current profitability and scale, we think it’s prudent to balance that historical pace of margin improvement with growth investments. So you asked about growth investments. We think we’ve got a lot of places where we can continue to invest, plenty of room to invest further in our existing content categories, we’re a small share of viewing in every country in which we operate.
Plus building out those ads capabilities that Greg talked about our live offering and new content categories like games. So there’s plenty to do. But all that said, we’ll continue to drive healthy margin expansion. We expect roughly 22% to 23% operating margin in 2024, assuming no material swings in FX. So that’s up from our current expectation of 20% this year, which is at the high end of the range that we targeted in the beginning of the year. So again, Jessica, just like we did in the past, going forward, we’ll take a disciplined approach to balancing margin improvement with investing into our growth. We actually put a chart at the end of the letter that shows how we managed that balance historically, growing content investment, profit margins and cash flow.
And you should expect that we’ll carry that same discipline going forward as we invest and grow into that big opportunity ahead.
Jessica Reif Ehrlich: How does licensing content from third parties play into your overall content strategy? It seems like you’ve had incredible success with third-party content in – I mean you always have, but in the last year, things like Suits or Band of Brothers, and you mentioned it in the letter. But if you could just talk about the third-party licenses?
Theodore Sarandos: Yes. Yes. Licensing third-party content has always been part of our strategy, and we’ve – something we’ve been really great at being able to do is match that audience. I think Suits is a great example of the impact of the Netflix effect that we can have because of our distribution footprint and our recommendation system, we were able to take Suits, which had played on cable and had played out in other streaming services and pop it right into the center of the culture in a huge way, not just in the U.S. but all over the world. According to the Nielsen charts then, Suits was the number one watch streaming series for 13 straight weeks. That’s like – that is a record for Nielsen. So this continues to be important for us to add a lot of breadth of storytelling to our consumers of a wide range of tests.
And we can’t make everything, but we can help you find just about anything. That’s really the strength. And I do think that looking – you mentioned Band of Brothers, but in that HBO deal, we had Insecure, we had Ballers, that came out and they were very successful in Netflix, and they popped into the top 10 on their originating network for the first time. So that was just on their streaming service, which is really powerful. And I think we have more to come with Six Feet Under and True Blood coming and not just on the TV side, but we’re also proud to be able to bring movies like Super Mario Bros and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse from our other suppliers. And in one way or another, we’re in business with nearly every supplier, including our direct competitors.
And I think that we bring a ton of value to them. And I think when you think about what happens when that show runs in and becomes a huge success on Netflix, it has lasting value. I mean look at the value we created that still continues today for shows like Friends, and The office and Fuller House and Gilmore Girls and all these other shows that really found an audience on Netflix even after they have more or less played out through traditional models.
Jessica Reif Ehrlich: Spence, one more on margins for you, but you said in September that long-term margins will be I think the way you said it was similar to other networks, which historically have been in the 40% to 50% range. Could you help us think through the ramp in margins over time?
Spencer Neumann: Jessica, I’ll probably disappoint you as I have in the past on this. We’re not going to put a long-term number out there. As I said, we don’t see any ceiling – any near-term ceiling to our long-term margin potential. We’ve talked in the past about how we’re going to feel our way through to those kind of long-term steady-state margins, but we think we have a lot of things working in our favor. We have a very scalable business model. You see that you see that play out over the last handful of years and continue to do so as we produce content all over the world for big local impact, but also with the ability for those stories to through great subs, dubs, discovery to reach more and more people and to be enjoyed around the world.
So it’s a very scalable content model. It’s a global network at scale that has, in many ways, has not been seen with legacy entertainment networks. So we think we’ve got a long way to go. As I just talked about, we want to balance those increasing profits in the near term with investing into that long-term opportunity. So still a lot of runway that’s a set of benchmarks you can look at it. There’s others as well. But suffice to say, we think we’ve got a long and healthy runway in terms of growing margins.
Spencer Wang: Only thing I would add to that, Jessica, also I totally agree with what Spence said, which is, again, a lot of opportunity to grow margins, but profit dollars also matter, too, right? So as we expand into big new addressable markets like advertising that Greg alluded to or gaming also, right? So those open up big new sort of areas for us to expand into. And then we intend to grow margins, too, but we also want a lot of profit dollars as well. So we’re not narrowly optimizing just for a percentage margin.
