CLARKSBURG, W.Va. (WBOY) — Following Netflix’s announcement in May that it would be changing its policy on account sharing, people took to the internet to voice their (mostly negative) opinions on the change. West Virginians were no exception.
According to a recent study by ProjectorScreen.com, West Virginia was ranked #1 among the states most unhappy with Netflix following the change. The data was gathered through geotagged Twitter data and took tweets that featured phrases such as “boycott Netflix” and “#CancelNetflix.”
The top 10 states for this criteria can be seen below:
- West Virginia
- Pennsylvania
- Ohio
- Maryland
- Virginia
- Wisconsin
- New York
- Mississippi
- Louisiana
- Washington
According to Netflix’s website, under the new policy, customers who wish to keep sharing their account with households other than their own will have to pay an additional $7.99 a month per household. Over the past two weeks, several users nationwide were likely notified of the change when they tried to log in to the service.
This change for Netflix originally leaked onto social media in January, but in the following days, Netflix released a statement via Twitter saying: “We know there’s been a lot of confusion about sharing Netflix. A Netflix account is intended for one household, so we’re rolling out new features in Canada, New Zealand, Portugal, and Spain (and more broadly in the coming months) to give you more control over your account…”
Regardless, the current change has seen a large amount of negative reception on social media. Twitter user @bennykins78 wrote: “I’ve been a subscriber for 10 years. I’m now married with kids and have homes in multiple countries. For this reason, I upgraded to Premium. Netflix used to be convenient, even if they were overpriced and had mediocre content. They just lost that edge. #CancelNetflix.”
The data for this study was collected using geotagged Twitter data. This method takes tweets with certain hashtags or topics and sorts them based on the location of the user by state. With all of this together, it was determined that Twitter users from West Virginia sent the highest volume of tweets about their displeasure with Netflix’s decision. To learn more about geotagged Twitter data, click here.
