That's my guess. I think a lot of people signed up to finish whatever they were in the middle of watching when they were suddenly cut off. Maybe this will even work out for them in the long term, but in terms of customer growth it's also a trick that only works once. This quarter they can make every person in a family pay for their own accounts, but where do they go after this?
I think they've reached a point where just about everyone who would use netflix has it already, or at least had it for a while and would sign up again if there was something there they wanted to watch. Netflix can improve their library to try to keep folks around a little longer, or entice them back sooner, but then what? Wait for the birth rate to go up? This stunt was either going to cost them subscribers because they pissed people off by changing their policy, or increase their subscribers because some of the people who "had netflix" were using someone else's account and would sign up for their own, and so far it looks like they're coming out ahead, but we'll see how long that holds.
My concern is that netflix is going to get worse and worse once they stop finding ways to inflate their subscriber numbers, because the only people they'll be able to squeeze more money out of at that point will be the people already signed up. Maybe it'll mean more ads (and their ad-free plans already have an annoying number of ads now!) or maybe they'll sell off our data, or jack prices way up, who knows, but I doubt we'll like it.
Netflix adding targeted ads and changing their policy on passwords makes me think that the "enshittification" of Netflix is well underway. They're already notorious for ignoring what their customers want. For example, it took them four years to give users an option to disable autoplay while browsing, and they've ignored people asking for a simple A-Z list of every available title since day one of their streaming service. Netflix was the outsider at a time when we were held hostage by Cable TV providers. Netflix got people to cut the cord. Nobody wants Netflix to suck or to fail, but there's also nothing we can do to keep it from getting worse as netflix grows greedier.
