Recent comments in /f/nottheonion

CloakerJosh t1_j5t0q4i wrote

Reply to comment by ricnilotra in Ted Sarandos says that Netflix has “never canceled a successful show” by avery5712

Right, of course. Sorry.

It's because they hate money, right? How stupid of me.

Has nothing at all to do with the luke-warm test audience reception, or the fact that they determined based on their analysis that they'd get a better fiscal gain by writing it off than the money it would have made them by them releasing it commercially.

I'm the moron. Everyone is wrong except you, you see The Matrix. Share some red pills with the rest of us so we can be as enlightened, please.

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CloakerJosh t1_j5syqnj wrote

Reply to comment by Screamingholt in Ted Sarandos says that Netflix has “never canceled a successful show” by avery5712

I don't have the stats, obviously. Nor do I know directly how Netflix measure "success".

But, if I were to hazard a guess, I reckon it'd look something like this:

  • Netflix knows how much a series cost them to make and/or license/distribute
  • Netflix knows the overall produced runtime of these shows
  • Netflix knows how much of the show was watched, and by how many unique users

Based on these types of stats (and many others), they'd basically be able to boil down the "success" of a show by creating a measure that expressed Dollars Spent Per Minutes Watched.

Suppose that when you look at the economics of some of these brilliant shows (I loved The Expanse), you find out that the Dollars Spent Per Minutes Watched puts it in the top 10%. Suppose they decide this means this show is "Unsuccessful".

I'm just a random internet dickhead, but I figure it is basically an advanced application of this or something similar.

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Familiar_Pea_9345 t1_j5sxdlo wrote

Reply to comment by marioquartz in Ted Sarandos says that Netflix has “never canceled a successful show” by avery5712

Oh yeah? It’s not like the writing hasn’t been on the walls for years. The joke used to be that they were so desperate for content that they’d greenlight anything. Now their quantity over quality strategy is backfiring and they’re known for canceling anything before it has a chance to become popular. The executives at Netflix are misunderstanding their customers’ behaviors, which is obvious if you’ve ever read through any posts about shows that are canceled. Who wants to invest in watching a show when it might be canceled before it’s conclusion? Sometimes they don’t even adequately market shows. How can a show become “popular” when too few people know it exists?

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CloakerJosh t1_j5sweul wrote

Reply to Ted Sarandos says that Netflix has “never canceled a successful show” by avery5712

A lot of people seem to be taking that headline at face value with some bad hot takes, in my opinion.

The full quote is this:

> We have never canceled a successful show. A lot of these shows were well-intended but talk to a very small audience on a very big budget. The key to it is you have to be able to talk to a small audience on a small budget and a large audience at a large budget. If you do that well, you can do that forever.

I don't have the data to know for sure whether he's speaking truth, but why wouldn't he? Be critical in your assessment of that. What could he possibly gain by being misleading about that?

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pingveno t1_j5st13n wrote

Reply to comment by Cahootie in Ted Sarandos says that Netflix has “never canceled a successful show” by avery5712

Wheel of Time, for all its flaws, made another interesting choice. They started out by dropping three episodes, then switched to one per week. That got people started with the story (which starts a little slow), but then trickled in with the rest. Then again, WoT has a different fan dynamic because the book series has been finished for ten years already. There's not much guessing to be done.

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