20 Million Users Later, Starlink’s Surprisingly Normal Super Bowl Ad Looks Pretty Brilliant

The results are in: According to industry tracker Advanced Television, Starlink just hit 20 million daily active users. The most recent 2 million customers came in just 81 days, averaging 24,500 new sign-ups per day.

Credit where it’s due: The Super Bowl probably helped. SpaceX aired its first-ever big-game commercial back in February. For context, Starlink was sitting at 9 million subscribers when the spot first aired. It’s now more than double that.

Aside from last year’s T-Mobile/Starlink commercial, the Starlink brand grew almost entirely through word of mouth, Elon Musk’s social media presence, and the kind of press coverage a lot of Musk-related projects have been getting lately.

Buying a SuperBowl slot — one of the most expensive and conventional marketing moves you can even make in America — was a real departure from this attitude. And yet, the commerical was remarkable for how unremarkable it was.

If you missed it, watch here:

Notice how there aren’t any shots of humans living on Mars or Elon Musk cameos — just a simple funnel: fast internet that’s modernized and available almost anywhere → sign up in two minutes → here’s how to get started.

The commercial did the right pitch. Satellite internet has for most of the past 20 years been regarded as a last resort over cable, something you had to get when you didn’t live close enough to wires and cell towers. It was a smart move to ignore that reputation and pitch itself as regular but superior ISP.

The competitors — Comcast, Spectrum, AT&T — weren’t named, nor did they have to be. To be fair, Starlink isn’t cheaper than where cable exists. (It ranges between $50-$120.) Even where Spectrum (satellite) is available, its average download speeds are 285 Mbps, while Starlink’s average is around 65 Mbps.

But when you look at the numbers, it’s clear that the specs are not the pitch.

What may really lure in consumers and SMBs is that Starlink is rewriting the bait-and-switch pricing promo policy many ISPs know and love. Whatever you pay month one for Starlink is what you’ll pay in two years, five years, maybe even 10.

For the 29% of U.S. households with access to only one broadband provider, Starlink offers something many Americans haven’t had in years, which is a legitimate alternative.

Comcast-Xfinity and Charter-Spectrum operate under a “de facto truce,” competing for fewer than 2.1 million customers in the limited areas where both reported service.

Basically, if Comcast serves your street, then Spectrum probably doesn’t. Starlink is the first option in a very long time that has the magnitude and ability to ignore the territorial agreement they have.

Amazon, as usual, is not far behind.

In his April shareholder letter, CEO Andy Jassy made his intentions clear about Amazon Leo — Amazon’s satellite internet service, a direct Starlink competitor — according to Broadband Breakfast:

“First, the performance will be stronger (about six to eight times better on uplink, and two times better on downlink) than what customers have access to now,” CEO Andy Jassy wrote. “Second, this performance will come at a lower cost than alternatives.”

But it looks like AWS may be running behind since it’s already May and Leo has 241 satellites in orbit while Starlink has more than 10,000.

For anyone running a small business, a remote office, or even just a website that needs reliable uptime, Starlink’s mainstream eligibility is great news: More competition in the ISP market (satellite or otherwise) directly means more pressure for traditional providers to up their service quality.

AKA: No more calling to threaten cancellation just to get a normal rate.