Netflix saw its stock rise nearly 10% on Thursday soon after unveiling details about its new ad-supported tier that suggested the business model is starting to pay off.
The streaming service this week said it had 5 million monthly active users for its cheaper, ad-supported option and that 25% of its new subscribers were signing up for the tier in areas where it’s available.
The update came at Netflix’s inaugural pitch to advertisers on Wednesday, the first time Netflix took part in the industry’s so-called Upfront presentations. This year top media companies including Comcast‘s NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. Discovery highlighted their ad-supported streaming options at their presentations.
Netflix stock rallied on Thursday soon after the company offered new details about its ad-support streaming tier.
Netflix launched its ad-based option in late 2022, following quarters of stagnating subscriber growth that sent its stock tumbling.
The company posted mixed financial results in its most recent quarter, but said it added 1.75 million subscribers. Netflix is also preparing for the broader rollout of its password-sharing crackdown, another move to boost its revenue.
Media companies, once focused on subscriber additions for their fledgling streaming services, have now pivoted their attentions toward making the businesses profitable. To do so, some have been cutting costs on content-spending as well as leaning on advertising models.
Last week, when Disney reported earnings, CEO Bob Iger noted the company viewed the ad-supported option of its Disney+ streaming service as another way to help the streaming business reach profitability. Disney+ lost 4 million subscribers during the quarter.
Netflix’s ad-tier, which costs $6.99 a month and features commercials of 15 or 30 seconds in length before and during content, marks a reversal for the company’s management, which had long said it wouldn’t put ads on the platform.
Netflix launched the ad option in partnership with Microsoft. Its content will be rated by Nielsen later this year to help advertisers better understand its reach.
Soon after the launch, Netflix founder and former CEO Reed Hastings, admitted he was slow to come around to advertising on the platform. When Netflix launched the ad tier in November it was $1 cheaper than Disney+ and Hulu’s ad-supported options.
Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos has said the company is likely to offer multiple subscription plans with ads in the future, highlighting the potential to add more subscribers.
Peter Thiel, president and founder of Clarium Capital Management LLC, holds hundred dollars bills as he speaks during the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami, Florida, U.S., on Thursday, April 7, 2022.
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The current wave of interest in Ethereum and related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, and a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s wildly successful IPO and ongoing progress in Congress on the Senate’s proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act.
The price of ether itself also continued its rally, up more than 4% Wednesday. The coin has doubled in price in the past three months.
Thiel is a venture capitalist and hedge fund manager best known as a cofounder of both PayPal and Palantir and an early investor in Facebook. Founders Fund was an investor in Tagomi, the crypto brokerage acquired by Coinbase in 2020, and Polymarket, the prediction market built on Ethereum.
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NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang speaks during the NVIDIA GTC Paris keynote, part of the 9th edition of the VivaTech technology startup and innovation fair, held at the Dôme de Paris in the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 11, 2025.
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sold another 225,000 shares of the chipmaker, totaling about $37 million, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
The sale comes as part of a plan adopted in March for Huang to sell up to 6 million shares of the leading artificial intelligence company. Huang began trading stock last month. His most recent sale, disclosed last Friday, totaled 225,000 shares, or about $36 million.
Since he began selling stock this year, Huang has unloaded 1.2 million shares, totaling about $190 million, according to InsiderScore. In last year’s prearranged plan, Huang cashed in over $700 million.
AI demand and the need for graphics processing units powering large language models have spiked Huang’s net worth and propelled Nvidia past a $4 trillion market capitalization, making it the most valuable company.
That surge in value has put Huang above Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett in net worth on Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index.
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In another significant win, Nvidia said this week that it plans to soon restart sales of its H20 chips to China after the Trump administration indicated that it would approve export licenses.
Earlier this year, the administration said Nvidia would need a license approval to ship the chips, designed specifically for China.
“The U.S. government has assured NVIDIA that licenses will be granted, and NVIDIA hopes to start deliveries soon,” the company said in a statement Tuesday.
Huang said during a press conference on Wednesday in Beijing, China, that he wants to sell chips more advanced than the H20 to China at some point.
Huang wasn’t the only stakeholder to unload Nvidia shares. Board member Brooke Seawell sold $16 million worth of stock.
Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., speaks to members of the media in Beijing, China, on Wednesday, July 16, 2025.
Na Bian | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Nvidia is looking to ship more advanced chips to China than its current generation, CEO Jensen Huang said on Wednesday, as he looks to revitalize sales in the world’s second-largest economy.
The comments come after Nvidia said on Monday that it will resume sales of its H20 artificial intelligence chip to China, reversing a previous ban. The H20 is a less-advanced semiconductor designed for AI workloads that comply with U.S. export restrictions to China.
“I hope to get more advanced chips into China than the H20,” Huang said during a press conference in Beijing, China, in response to a CNBC question.
“And the reason for that is because technology is always moving on … today Hopper’s terrific but some years from now we will have more and more and better and better technology, and I think it’s sensible that whatever we’re allowed to sell in China will continue to get better and better over time as well,” he said referencing Hopper, Nvidia’s chip architecture that the H20 is built on.
Nvidia has been caught in the crosshairs of U.S.-China tensions over trade and technology. The tech giant has faced several rounds of restrictions that have forced it to restrict access of its most advanced chips to China. In response, Nvidia has developed semiconductors that comply with export restrictions, such as the H20.
Nvidia took a $4.5 billion writedown on the unsold H20 inventory in May and said sales in its last financial quarter would have been $2.5 billion higher without any export curbs.
Huang has trod a fine line between praising U.S. President Donald Trump’s policies regarding reshoring chip manufacturing to America while also lobbying for change on curbs to China.
The Nvidia boss has argued the Chinese AI market could be worth $50 billion in the next two-to-three years and that it would be a “tremendous loss” for American firms not to be part of that. Huang also told CNBC this year that Nvidia’s Chinese rival Huawei has “got China covered” if U.S. firms can’t participate in the market.
“Export control are things that are outside of our control and they can be quite disruptive to our business. It is our job only to inform the governments of the nature and the unintended consequences of the policies that they make,” Huang said during his visit to Beijing.
Nvidia has also laid out a roadmap to release more advanced chips, though it remains unclear if the U.S. government would allow Nvidia to sell more advanced products to Chinese companies. However, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested on Tuesday that the government would continue to allow chip sales to China so that companies in the market rely on American technology.
“The idea is the Chinese are more than capable of building their own,” Lutnick told CNBC. “You want to keep one step ahead of what they can build, so they keep buying our chips.”