Naveen Chopra: Yes. Thanks, Ben. There’s a few questions in there, so I’ll try to hit all of those. First, with respect to ARPU, I think we laid out most of the drivers in our prepared remarks. But just as a reminder, there’s a significant benefit there from price increase, which we will get a full year of benefit in that in 2024. We do also expect subscriber mix to be favorable, particularly in international markets. Our base historically started in some, I’ll say, some lower ARPU markets and a lot of the growth next year will be in higher ARPU markets. That probably explains some of the delta between our ARPU growth rate versus what you may have seen elsewhere. And also advertising. We pointed to the fact that we are delivering very high levels of digital advertising growth.
There’s a significant piece of that is driven by Paramount+, and we expect that to continue to be a driver next year. In terms of the elasticity of the business as we have started to raise price, I’ll share a few things that we’ve observed thus far although keeping in mind, it’s still relatively early days since we implemented the price increase. Thus far, we’ve seen that new subscriber starts have basically been in line with our expectations. And we’re seeing some really encouraging data around engagement, including a double-digit increase in daily hours per sub since we launched the combined product that’s obviously consistent with our thesis for putting these services together. And we’re optimistic about the net churn impact, but it’s probably a little early to have enough data to really measure that.
And all of those metrics are driven by very strong content lineup, which we’ve talked about. So we’re encouraged by what we see in terms of, call it, the consumer value proposition. And then with respect to your question on what it all means with respect to cash content spend, I’d say a few things. First, we’ve historically talked about cash content spend on a total company basis as growing, call it, low single digits. But as you heard in my remarks, we are laser-focused on improving the efficiency of our content spend going forward. And that’s true for both linear and for streaming. We’re accomplishing that goal by leveraging content across platforms more and more by leaning into franchises. And now that we’ve got more data, we’re increasingly able to use analytics to understand how to super serve these key audience segments.
And so we can get away from, call it, a volume-focused game and be more focused on making sure that we have the right content for the right audience at the right time. Financially, that means that there is opportunity to further improve the long-term trajectory of cash content spend. Now keep in mind the strikes, obviously, will create some timing shifts between how cash gets deployed in ‘23 versus 2024, but it doesn’t change our commitment to improving that cash spend over a multiyear period of time.
Kristin Southey: Thank you. Operator?
Operator: Thank you. The next question goes to Rich Greenfield of LightShed Partners. Rich, please go ahead. Your line is open.
Rich Greenfield: Hi, thanks for taking the question. There’s a bunch of major sports rights are coming up, including NBA, WWE, and College Football Playoffs, which I guess saw some pretty dramatic changes to conferences over the weekend. I guess the question sort of is as you look at sort of the balance sheet and even sort of the headwinds facing the traditional media businesses, how are you thinking about what you spend on sports versus what you spend on entertainment programming? Curious like sort of how that mix shifts? And then just – I think if I looked at overall advertising both, if I combine both D2C as well as your media networks, it was down about 6. It sounds like you think – based on – I think your comments that, that’s going to get a little bit better on a blended basis as the year progresses.
