“Tech” earnings kicked off in the US on Tuesday, when Netflix boasted blockbuster subscriber growth after the bell on Wall Street.

I’ll recycle some familiar language, trusting readers will forgive the repetition. It’s been a very long time since Netflix’s results counted as a major market event. Even trading at record highs, the company’s worth less than $500 billion, which is to say it’s largely irrelevant in a world dominated by multi-trillion-dollar behemoths.

Still, the company matters at the margins, and as alluded to above, Netflix’s results mark the unofficial beginning of “big”-“tech” earnings, so I typically cover them, on Tuesday with good reason. As the figure below shows, the company rang up nearly 19 million new paid subscribers last quarter, a record and by a country mile.

The next-best quarter for paid net adds was Q1 of 2020, when the whole of humanity was confined by a deadly virus to their living rooms (and nobody reads books anymore).

18.91 million counted as a monumental beat. Consensus expected less than half that. Looking back a year or so, Netflix recorded multiple blowout quarters for what, once upon a time, was a crucial metric, not just for the company, but for the whole market. Netflix plans to stop reporting the figure as of this quarter — i.e., beginning with Q1 2025’s results. The company stopped providing paid net adds guidance last year. As Bloomberg noted, “management is trying to get investors to prioritize financial metrics like sales and profits.” How quaint!

It’s probably fair to call the company’s efforts to reduce password-sharing a success. Some — myself included — were skeptical of that push, but it plainly worked. For all of 2024, Netflix added a net 41.36 million subscribers, five million more than it added in 2020, when the pandemic drove a huge influx of paid viewers.

Netflix brought in $10.2 billion in revenue in Q4, the company said Tuesday. That was up 16% YoY. Sales should be $10.4 billion during the current quarter, according to the shareholder letter. That looked a little light, but I doubt it’ll matter in the face of such a huge beat on Q4 adds.

As for ads, with one “d,” it’s going ok. “Slowly but surely” is probably a good way to describe the ongoing rollout. Ad memberships grew 30% QoQ, but that’s a seasonal business and Netflix always emphasizes that it’s going to be a while before ad revenue moves any needles.

Price hikes are apparently being digested well by subscribers. “As we continue to invest in programming and deliver more value, we will occasionally ask our members to pay a little more,” the company said, in the course of announcing price hikes for customers in the US, Canada, Portugal and Argentina. Those increases were already in the company’s full-year guidance.

If you’re wondering what drove the Q4 subscriber influx, Netflix thanked Squid Game season 2 and the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight which was “the most-streamed sporting event ever.”