MoviePass announced their their new, improved, and unrestricted plans in August. We all knew the $10 a month plan was not going to be profitably by itself. In the last week they have started blocking out specific movies, requiring some users to provide photographic proof of their ticket purchases, and bragged about collecting data outside what is described in their TOS. This is after already locking out customers fro…
> We all knew the $10 a month plan was not going to be profitably by itself. How is this kind of "growth hack" not simply dumping[1]? The only new development here is that dumping is no longer limited to large companies with large war chests thanks to the availability of venture capital. The more interesting question is can healthy, truly profitable technology companies develop in an environment where they have to co…
Investors in MoviePass will likely not make their money back. Or maybe they'll break even on a sale of assets to some major theater chain, if everyone involved is smart.
Afterward, future investors in companies like this will use MoviePass as another example for the fact the times when you could form a business mostly based on collecting user data is over. The stakes have changed, the goalposts have moved; Google/Facebook sized ingestion of user data is still very profitable, but now startups have to compete with that. So MoviePass knows which movies I go see and where I go before and after... Google knows where I am literally all the time.
They really should have started from day 1 trying to play ball with the theater chains. Theaters always made most of their money on concessions; incentivize upsells into that and get subsidies on ticket prices from the chains. Instead, they burned every bridge with the theaters they could have hoped to make. They'll pay for it.