Quibi Lost 92 Percent of Early Users Following the Expiration of Free Trial

Mobile streaming service Quibi has seen a staggering loss of 92 percent of its early users. In April, the service began offering free trials to its early users. Following the three month trial period, Quibi only saw a conversion rate of roughly eight percent.

When Quibi launched on April 6th of this year, the company managed saw a respective 910,000 users sign up within the first few days. As reported by The Verge, of those 910,000 users, roughly 72,000 stuck around. Mobile analytics firm Sensor Tower provided the user numbers, which indicate the service has obtained an eight percent conversion rate during the time of its advent.

Sensor Tower has estimated Quibi has been downloaded roughly 4.5 times on mobile devices. While the firm has been accurate in its reports in the past, Quibi claims that the number comes up short. A representative of the company spoke to The Verge to dispute the total paid subscribers, the representative said: “the number of paid subscribers is incorrect by an order of magnitude.” The representative continues, “To date, over 5.6 million people have downloaded the Quibi app. Our conversion from download to trial is above mobile app benchmarks, and we are seeing excellent conversion to paid subscribers — both among our 90-day free trial sign-ups from April, as well as our 14-day free trial sign-ups from May and June.”

While Quibi has yet to officially report subscriber numbers, the stats provided by Sensor Tower don’t exactly paint the service as a knock out success. As other mobile and streaming services are seeing a surge in usage, such as TikTok which roughly 800 million users. Disney Plus, another relatively new streaming service, has over 50 million subscribers.

Another major factor that plays into Quibi’s success is content and accessibility. Quibi currently doesn’t have the service-selling piece of content that many other tentpole streaming services have. Going back to Disney Plus, the service saw an increase of 72% app downloads in the US upon the release of Hamilton. As of now, Quibi is designed solely for mobile phones. While there are workarounds to view content on tablets and TVs, they aren’t official facets offered by the company.

These points of contention will likely have to be addressed if Quibi wants to keep up with the other big dogs in the streaming ecosystem.