🙈 Half of Subscribers Don't Watch Streaming Services
The Russian streaming market faces a hidden crisis. In the second quarter of 2026, the aggregate subscriber base of domestic services reached 72.3 million people (including 53 million paying users). However, up to 50% of them never even open the media platforms they pay for.
Amid a market slowdown—growth in the paying audience plummeted to just 2.6% year-over-year compared to past spikes of 40%—the industry risks facing a massive churn of “dormant” clients.
According to estimates by TMT Consulting, between 40% and 60% of subscribers do not use the online cinemas available to them. Analysts at J’son & Partners confirm the trend: only 55% to 60% of account holders regularly use bundled packages containing both music and video content.
Audience engagement varies significantly depending on the platform. For instance, at the end of 2025, only 39% of Yandex Plus subscribers used Kinopoisk, whereas Kion achieved a 61% engagement rate among MTS Premium users.
The main cause of this “phantom” audience is bundled selling, where video services are packaged alongside core offerings like telecom plans, marketplaces, or loyalty programs. Viewers do not make a conscious decision to purchase access to a video platform, viewing it instead as a free bonus. Yet, the financial scale of the market is immense: Russians spend around 50 billion rubles monthly on ecosystem subscriptions, a substantial portion of which goes toward unused content.
Unlike cable TV, where customers intentionally pay for a channel package, ecosystem subscribers pay for an auxiliary service. This demographic lacks any brand affinity or loyalty toward the streaming platform: if the terms of their primary service change, they cancel the entire bundle, wiping real revenue off the platform’s balance sheet.
This “zombie subscription” phenomenon is also present in international markets—costing UK households £1.6 billion annually, while nearly 40% of US users cancel at least one subscription per year. In Russia, however, the dynamic is distinct: while Western consumers forget to cancel services they once actively chose, Russian subscribers never chose them in the first place.
Now that the market has exhausted its potential for extensive growth—with subscriptions already covering half the country’s population—customer retention has become the central challenge. To survive, streaming services will have to convert their dead weight of “dormant” users into active viewers before the momentum of ecosystem bundling runs entirely out of steam.
Source: Telesputnik
