I lead strategy at an agency and we’re being told to prioritize Netflix in next year’s plans. But their numbers are all over the place. First it was 5M ad-tier subs, then 15M, then 40M MAUs, and now it’s 190M MAVs? What the hell is a MAV? And should I believe it?
— Confused in CTV
Netflix just cooked up a fresh acronym, Monthly Active Viewers (MAV), and served it with a side of razzle-dazzle: 190 million global ad viewers. That’s double the 94 million Monthly Active Users (MAUs) they claimed before. So, what’s changed? Not the audience, just the arithmetic.
MAU was already a garbage metric, meaningless, and basically designed to impress investors, not inform buyers. But Netflix didn’t just kill MAU, they frankensteined a new creature. MAV counts any person who watched one minute of ads, then multiplies that by a “household factor” pulled from first-party data. Add in co-viewing, sprinkle in WWE and NFL live streams that show ads to non-ad-tier subs, and voilà—MAV.
From a storytelling standpoint, it’s brilliant. Netflix is shifting the narrative from “ad-tier subs” to “total ad reach.” But the media maths don’t add up cleanly. Real ad impressions don’t scale linearly with co-viewing. If traditional TV inflated like this, the Super Bowl would have 300 million viewers.
To be fair, there’s logic here. Advertisers want reach, not subscriber counts. And co-viewing is real, just underdisclosed. But MAV is built on estimations that Netflix won’t let third parties audit, and conveniently inflates just in time for Stranger Things and NFL Christmas. Perfect timing.
Media is bought market by market. If Netflix wants buyers to trust MAV, they’ll need to disclose how that 2.5x multiplier varies by country and how much of that 190M is actually from their 50M ad-tier base.
Netflix also announced a planning API to help agencies forecast ad inventory across demos and geographies. That’s a step in the right direction. But for now, MAV feels more like a smoke bomb than a signal.
Skip Says
MAU is dead, but MAV isn’t the messiah. Netflix is trying to win the narrative, not just the market. Advertisers should look past household multipliers and demand verified metrics. MAV might sell sizzle, but we still need steak.
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