Key Takeaways:
- Average Time Spent per DAU for Netflix hit an all-time high in Q1 2026, corroborating management’s claim that its primary internal quality engagement metric set a new record.
- The 46+ age cohort drove the surge, with engagement up roughly 22% year-over-year.
- The 46+ age cohort is the app’s fastest growing, while the 17-25 cohort continues to shrink.
Netflix [NASDAQ: NFLX] told investors a week ago that its expansion into video podcasts and its showing of the World Baseball Classic helped its “primary internal quality engagement metric” reach a new record in the first quarter. Apptopia’s Average minutes per DAU metric bears that out across several cohorts. Average Time Spent per DAU across all Netflix mobile users hit 77.1 minutes in Q1 2026, the highest reading in the four-year series and up roughly 14% year-over-year. Power Users, the top decile by time spent, averaged 6.5 hours a day in-app; also a record.
Diving into age cohorts, we found users aged 46+ to be the largest single contributor to the record. They jumped to 78.2 minutes per DAU, up about 22% from Q1 2025, and is. That cohort has historically been the lowest-engaged group on the app, so the convergence with younger cohorts is meaningful. Your next question should be if the 46+ cohort is a meaningful percentage of Netflix’s users.
The answer is a resounding yes! The 46+ age cohort is the fastest growing and now the second largest age group for Netflix mobile app users. Older users are showing up, and they are staying longer than they used to.
The 46+ slice of Netflix’s mobile audience has climbed from 19.8% in 2022 to 25.6% in 2026, while the 17-25 slice has fallen from 36.9% to 24.6%. For the first time in the dataset, 46+ is a larger share of users than 17-25. Netflix’s product mix skews toward older audiences: live sports like the World Baseball Classic, video podcasts that over-index in daytime viewing and on mobile, and prestige documentary slates. The data is consistent with that.
“What stands out is who drove the engagement gain,” said Tom Grant, VP of Research at Apptopia. “Netflix added minutes from the demographic with the most discretionary income and the most TV time to give. As Netflix looks to woo advertisers, it can claim these users are higher-quality than the same minute from a 19-year-old splitting attention with TikTok.”
Just to really show off, we also split Netflix’s users into cohorts by year of download. Each year, from 2022, hit an all-time high for engagement in Q1 2026… with the exception of the 2024 cohort.
The 2024 download cohort is engaging at a materially lower rate than other years. Users who downloaded in 2024 averaged 59.9 minutes per DAU in their most recent quarter, compared to 79.0 for the 2025 cohort, 77.8 for the 2023, and 68.1 for the 2022. While the 2024 cohort had been reducing engagement each quarter, it did increase from Q4 2025 to Q1 2026. Note the 2025 cohort of app downloads in 1Q26 had the highest level of engagement of all cohorts.
