In March 2022, Netflix announced changes to its pricing policy, starting in several Latin American countries: Users sharing accounts with people outside their home would now incur extra charges. Subscribers in Latin America protested vocally. In Argentina, they posted screenshots confirming they’d canceled their subscription.
Despite the initial outcry, Netflix’s new pricing scheme appears to be working. The company has reported that subscribers are once again signing up across Latin America. New data from piracy intelligence firm EtherCity, shared with Rest of World, also shows that restricting password sharing seems to have stifled account resales. The practice, in which account access is sold online at a reduced price, is a popular way of pirating Netflix in Latin America.
Netflix reported 1.2 million additional subscriptions in Latin America during the second quarter of this year, reversing the loss in the previous quarter and marking its best second quarter in the region since 2020. The service is forecast to gain another 930,000 Latin American subscribers in the third quarter, according to data shared by industry research firm Ampere Analysis.
The crackdown also correlates with a marked decline in black market sales of Netflix accounts, which either belong to the seller or are created using stolen credit cards.
“It’s not easy money anymore.”
“In the Argentine case, anyone looking to acquire passwords for Netflix or other streaming platforms through Facebook Marketplace or MercadoLibre can find a large number of options,” Ezequiel Rivero, professor at the University of Business and Social Sciences in Buenos Aires, told Rest of World. Login credentials to these accounts often cost half the price of a Netflix subscription.
According to EtherCity’s data, the volume of these credentials — sold across Latin America on marketplaces like MercadoLibre, Facebook Marketplace, and AliExpress — has decreased by 51% since October 2022, after the new password-sharing charges were initially trialed. EtherCity used a custom machine-learning tool to identify and analyze over 1 million marketplace posts that mentioned a streaming service — over 20,000 of which were labeled by the tool as likely reselling access to streaming accounts. A Netflix spokesperson declined to answer questions about their efforts to curb account reselling.
Some black market resellers remain after Netflix’s crackdown, but the new restrictions have changed the way they do business. “The countermeasures have made the business less profitable or not of interest to mid-level and small players,” EtherCity CEO Rodrigo Arrigoni told Rest of World. “It’s not easy money anymore.”
EtherCity compared the number of unauthorized resale posts in countries where password sharing policies were rolled out in 2022, against countries in the region where the policy only went into effect earlier this year. The former set of countries had far fewer posts, suggesting the policy may have taken a bigger chunk out of their respective black markets over time.
Reselling accounts for profit goes against the terms of use of each major streaming service. According to EtherCity’s data, the market for account resales has declined across Max, Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon Prime Video since the end of 2022. Arrigoni said this suggests other factors are contributing to the trend, not only the Netflix policy change. He credits, in part, the pressure that streaming companies are putting on illegal marketplaces.
More sophisticated password resale operations continue to slip through the cracks — especially those sold to single users, such as accounts bought using stolen credit cards, which rarely trigger Netflix’s out-of-home sharing restrictions. Diego López, who sells access to Netflix accounts on Facebook Marketplace from Mexico, told Rest of World he hasn’t had any login issues even after the crackdown. “Sometimes [Netflix] asks you to update your home device, but if that happens, I send [the buyer] the confirmation code,” he said.