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Until recently, Netflix charged $9.99 for a combined DVD/streaming service. This was officially billed as $7.99 for streaming and $2 for DVDs, but really, it was just a $9.99 package deal for two services that cost $7.99 separately. So when they got rid of the package deal, I immediately canceled my streaming service. It looks like I’m something of an outlier, though:

Fewer customers than expected are opting to take Netflix’s DVD-only subscription package. Netflix now expects to have 2.2 million such subscribers, down from the previous forecast of 3 million. The company also cut its forecast for streaming-only subscribers, to 21.8 million from 22 million.

In other words, DVD subscribers went down by 27% while streaming subscribers only went down 1%. Most people who responded to the Netflix price increase did the exact opposite of me.

Along with the much higher raw numbers for streaming subscribers, I guess this demonstrates that my consumption of video is just fundamentally different from most people. Basically, I think of something I want to watch and then go look for it. Usually it turned out that my choice wasn’t available on streaming, which made the service pretty worthless to me. Apparently, though, most people don’t work that way. They just dive into the streaming library and browse around until they find something that looks good. If that’s the way you work, then the streaming service is a pretty good deal.

Anyway, I’m just curious if I have this right. Those of you who subscribe to and like the Netflix streaming service, is this more or less the way you use it? Or am I missing something?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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