Netflix

Netflix is the standalone benchmark the rest of the streaming industry is priced against. The company ended 2025 with 325 million paid memberships and $45.2 billion in full-year revenue, per its January 2026 10-K, and entered 2026 having walked away from an $83 billion deal for Warner Bros. Discovery — collecting a $2.8 billion termination fee from Paramount Skydance in the process and authorizing a $25 billion share repurchase six days after a $12.25 billion Q1 print.

The advertising business is the part of the story most relevant to this publication’s audience. Co-CEO Greg Peters told analysts on the April 16, 2026 earnings call that Netflix expects roughly $3 billion in 2026 ad revenue, double 2025, with programmatic on track to exceed 50 percent of non-live ad inventory. Netflix Ads Suite, which replaced Microsoft as the primary ad-serving backbone in April 2025, now runs against a multi-partner programmatic stack: The Trade Desk, Google DV360, Magnite, Yahoo (added June 2025), and Amazon DSP audience targeting (added March 2026), with Microsoft retained as a programmatic partner. Amy Reinhard, Netflix’s president of advertising since October 2023, inherits an ad business that is now structurally different from the Microsoft-only white-label of the 2022 Basic with Ads launch.

Two governance signals frame the next 12 months. Reed Hastings, co-founder and the executive who insisted Netflix would never carry advertising, will not stand for re-election at the June 4, 2026 annual meeting — closing the founder era. The $25 billion buyback, signed by CFO Spencer Neumann and stacked on the December 2024 program, signals that capital return rather than M&A is the default use of excess cash after the WBD walk. The disclosure ask the sell side is now putting in writing, surfaced in TVREV’s April 24 column by Alan Wolk: the geographic mix behind the 60-percent ad-tier sign-up share Netflix has chosen not to publish.