You and I run a subscription streaming platform. Get ready, I’ll explain.
Featured Image Courtesy: The New York Times
The data we’ve been collecting about our customers is invaluable to us in decision making. We’ve found that people quit watching most series before episode four, but if they make it past episode three, they’ll likely finish. Now episode three or most adult series is now a little more “adult”. When we noticed that people who watch foreign show X also watch a lot of movies with actor Y, we licensed the IP and remade it with him in the lead role. Even something simple like streaming minutes watched helps us with make/buy decisions and content acquisition. The best part is we get to keep all of this to ourselves, unlike those cavemen who run TV networks and answer to advertisers. Our competitors don’t get access to our proprietary information.
When Nielsen started collecting TV ratings in the 1950’s the customer base was obvious. Advertisers wanted to know the programs that their prospective customers preferred and what the real value of that airtime was. TV Networks wanted to make sure what they were broadcasting was sellable. Over time, as computing power increased, the ability to collect data increased as well and more information could be extracted. These days a data analyst can microtarget ad-buys to maximize the promotional budget.
On an ad-based or hybrid streaming platform it also makes sense to collect that sort of information and sell it to advertisers, as a verification of the viewership numbers being self-reported by the platform. Why would it matter to the general population how many minutes of a movie or TV show have been watched?
Why on earth are we seeing media CEO’s retweeting reports about the number of viewed minutes on their subscription only platforms?
If that sort of information is published and if the aim was to serve the public (who are ultimately the customers of both the platforms and the reporting outlets), then it would be more interesting to know how many times a movie was started by how many people, then how many finished. Readers might also like to know the common time indexes where people dropped out when they didn’t finish. Then again, it’s also possible a story like that gets Variety or Deadline disinvited from a press junket or two, and maybe a reporter’s goodie box for Witcher season 3 gets lost in the mail.
Let’s say for our streaming platform we produced a $150,000,000 movie and told our investors the number of minutes watched, they would either politely wait for us to make our actual point or start peppering us with questions about how we use those numbers to apportion revenue, if based on those numbers the project was profitable, how the return on investment for that project compared to other projects, and when they can expect a detailed breakdown of viewership numbers across the platform for their quantitative analysts and to review.
This whole game is just an appeal to the crowd (argumentum ad populum if you’re really fun at parties). Those CEO’s are tweeting about this nonsense for the same reason marketing is putting together advertisements about “The whole world watched as…”. They want to create a fear in us that we are missing out on some experience that everyone else loves. The stories are planted and the tweets are prewritten just to advertise by yet another avenue.
It’s a crummy commercial.
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