Netflix: The Content Machine That May Be Destroying Quality
Netflix is one of the most extraordinary financial machines ever created in the entertainment industry.
But financial success does not automatically mean product quality.
In 2025, Netflix generated $45.18 billion in revenue, compared with $39.00 billion in 2024. Net income reached $10.98 billion, operating income $13.33 billion, and operating margin 29.5%.
These are exceptional numbers.
And precisely because Netflix is such a powerful company, it deserves to be judged more critically.
The real question is not whether Netflix is profitable.
It obviously is.
The real question is:
How much real value does the subscriber receive for the money paid?
And that answer is considerably less impressive.
$45 billion in revenue. Where does the money go?
Netflix has transformed content into a gigantic industrial machine.
In 2025, its cost of revenues was approximately $23.3 billion, with content amortization representing the largest component, alongside production and licensing costs, talent, music rights, distribution and other expenses.
Netflix also had approximately $24 billion in content-related contractual obligations at the end of 2025.
The company expected to spend around $18 billion in cash on content during 2025.
Think about that number.
$18 billion.
The obvious question is:
Does spending more necessarily mean producing better entertainment?
No.
And that is the central contradiction in the Netflix model.
Netflix has developed an extraordinary industrial capacity to produce, acquire, distribute and promote content.
But industrial-scale production creates an unavoidable problem:
when you have to constantly feed a global platform serving hundreds of millions of subscribers, quantity becomes a strategic variable.
And when quantity becomes strategic, quality can become secondary.
The great illusion: more content = more value