Quibi, the recently launched, mobile-focused streaming service led by Jeffrey Katzenberg and CEO Meg Whitman, has slowed to the extent that the short-form is projected to fall well below its first-year subscriber goal, according to a Sunday report from The Wall Street Journal. The app, which launched in early April with about USD 1.75 billion in funding, will receive fewer than 2 million paying subscribers within its first year, reported The Wall Street Journal over the weekend, more than 5 million short of the 7.4 million targets the company had set for itself.
Quibi received 379,000 downloads on 6th April, the day it launched, according to app data company Sensor Tower. By the first week of June, downloads weren't surpassing 20,000 on any given day. Through 7th June, the app had reached 3.8 million downloads, Sensor Tower said. Quibi told the Journal that its numbers show 5 million downloads. the company offered a 90-day free trial that ends in July, costing USD 4.99 for ad-supported streaming and USD 7.99 for ad-free streaming.
The company attributed some of the decreases in downloads to its scaling back on marketing during the anti-racist protests over the past few weeks. An executive said that it can't forecast how many paid subscribers it will have by end of the year because it's only working with one full month of data so far.
The economic shutdown that resulted from the Covid-19 pandemic led to the company’s attempt to renegotiate its deals due to lower than expected viewership. The app sold out its entire USD 150 million ad inventory for its first year, including deals with Anheuser-Busch (NYSE: BUD), Google (NASDAQ: OOG), PepsiCo (NASDAQ: PEP), Progressive (NYSE: PGR) and more.
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