Disney Reveals 157 Million Global Monthly Active Users for Ad-Supported Tiers

Disney is giving advertisers tiers of joy thanks to its latest ad-supported streaming numbers.

Today, at its 5th annual Tech and Data Showcase at CES, the company’s president of global advertising, Rita Ferro, announced that the company reached an estimated 157 million monthly active users globally, including 112 million domestically, on average per month over the last six months. 

The company noted that those numbers are cumulative across its streaming portfolio. In addition to the numbers, Disney also shared its methodology for the calculations.

“Disney sits at the intersection of world-class sports and entertainment content, with the most high-value audiences in ad-supported global streaming at scale,” Ferro said in a statement. “We wanted to be the first to offer our industry greater transparency into the methodology used to estimate our engaged global ad-supported monthly active users.”

According to the company, the ad-supported MAU numbers are derived from active accounts across Disney’s streaming ecosystem (Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+) that have viewed ad-supported content continuously for more than 10 seconds. (The company said that estimated active users are added across applications without de-duplication.)

Additionally, each active account is multiplied by the number of estimated users per account—with the global average being 2.6, though that varies by application and region. From there, Disney estimates the total number of users. 

The company also noted that multipliers are determined by first-party survey data representing subscribers in regions with an advertising tier, and its numbers do not include Hotstar.

With the announcement, Disney’s ads plans are currently ahead of Netflix, which told ADWEEK last year its ad tier reached 70 million monthly active users. Meanwhile, Amazon, which rolled out its ad-supported Prime Video tier to all its users last year, claims its monthly ad-supported audience is more than 275 million in the U.S. across its owned and operated properties and third-party publishers.

Speaking with ADWEEK last month about what to expect in the year to come from Disney Advertising, Ferro noted the importance of transparency around monthly active users.

“Consistency around definition is going to be really important because I think some people use subscriber numbers, and some people use account numbers as monthly active users,” Ferro said. “I think that’s the challenge of making sure that we have consistency across all of our platforms—to make sure that we can define what that is and that it is a valid metric for our marketing partners.”

The ads president also said the company was seeing consistent growth across its ads plans, with more than half of new users regularly opting for the ad-supported tiers.

“We know that over 50% of the people who are signing up for Disney+ are choosing the ad tier,” Ferro said. “The number fluctuates, but it’s definitely over 50% consistently on a month-to-month basis.”