Pluto TV Falls to 75 Million Users as Tubi and Roku Surge

Pluto TV has dropped to about 75 million monthly active users, Skydance told shareholders on Monday, down from 89.6 million in 2025 — a loss of roughly 14.6 million users in a year that coincided with a major interface overhaul and a backend technology migration.

The decline lands directly at the feet of CEO David Ellison, who merged Paramount with Warner Bros. Discovery last month with the stated goal of building a streaming business capable of competing with Netflix and Disney.

What do the numbers show?

The user trajectory, drawn from company announcements and internal documents viewed by Business Insider:

• 2023: 80 million monthly active users (company announcement, May 2023)
• 2024: 84.2 million monthly active users (internal slide deck)
• 2025: 89.6 million monthly active users (internal slide deck)
• 2026: 75 million monthly active users (company announcement, November)

The 2024 and 2025 figures come from a town hall presentation by Paramount streaming finance chief Elizabeth Wright, reported by Business Insider in April. Employees were told Pluto TV grew by 5.4 million users in 2025. The slides did not specify whether the numbers were fiscal-year averages or year-end totals — a distinction that matters when comparing them against the 75 million figure Skydance just disclosed.

Did the redesign cause the drop?

In September, Pluto TV refreshed its interface to put on-demand content front and center, replacing its signature always-on live channels as the default landing experience. Skydance's shareholder letter said the change and upgrades such as improved personalization are "already improving the user experience."

Two Paramount streaming employees said they believed the layout change could have contributed to the decline in monthly active users. The company has not confirmed a causal link.

The interface shift sits atop a larger technical transformation. Paramount spent years merging the tech platforms for Paramount+ and Pluto TV in a process known internally as convergence. That first phase is now "largely completed," the CEOs told shareholders, with Pluto running on the same tech stack as Paramount+ across all major streaming platforms.

Ellison and co-CEO Ynon Kreiz said the unified platform "lowers our cost to operate, speeds up product development, and gives us shared personalization and monetization capabilities across our free and subscription offerings."

The tradeoff is visible in the user numbers: operational efficiency gained while engagement metrics, at least temporarily, lost. The failure mode is familiar to any product manager who has shipped a redesign that improved architecture but disrupted habitual usage patterns.

How far behind are Pluto's rivals?

Pluto TV was an early entrant in free ad-supported streaming television, known as FAST. It launched in 2014, around the same time as Tubi, and was bought in 2019 by Viacom, which later merged with CBS and eventually became Skydance.

The competitive picture has deteriorated on Nielsen's monthly streaming charts, which measure share of total US TV viewing:

• Pluto TV first appeared in July 2022 at 0.8% and peaked at 1% in February 2025, after which Nielsen began reporting it combined with Paramount+. Paramount's streaming share stood at 2.3% in August, level with March 2025.
• Tubi, owned by Fox, rose from 1% of US TV viewing in February 2023 to 1.9% in August, and grew from 74 million monthly active users in September 2023 to 110 million as of August.
• The Roku Channel climbed from a 1.1% share in May 2023 to 2.9% in August, ranking fifth behind YouTube, Netflix, Disney's streamers and Amazon's Prime Video. Fox said Friday, after buying Roku, that the platform reaches over 100 million households.
• YouTube holds a dominant 15.8% share as of August, up from 5.7% in May 2021. Netflix sits second at 7.7%.

Pluto TV has lost users in the same period its two closest FAST competitors nearly doubled their television-viewing share. Whether the September redesign's on-demand pivot can recover that ground, or whether the convergence-driven cost savings simply cushion a structural slide, is the question Skydance's next several quarters of disclosure will answer.