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The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

nytimes.com

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Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#71

Post by allenu »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #26
empath75 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will eventually be a pets.com of the tech bubble. Something like Tesla or Uber or Blue Apron going belly up.

Tesla and Uber aren't going anywhere. There's way too much invested for them not to secure another tiny drop in the bucket to keep going. That doesn't necessarily mean it's a good idea ("throwing good money after bad"), but that's the reality of what will happen, especially since it will probably be someone else's money as they dilute.

This reminds me of the quote that the four most expensive words in investing are "this time it's different".

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#72

Post by ryanwaggoner »

adventured wrote: post #59
_bxg1 wrote: post #44

I wonder if this is a bubble that's going to burst eventually. With so many ships sinking and so much optimism being for naught, investors might grow tired of the game and stop investing so aggressively, perhaps shifting things too far to the other side of the spectrum.

The article implodes when you actually start comparing the scale of what the article is basing itself on to anything else. The US economy will hit $20 trillion in GDP this year. The article is built heavily upon a few dozen IPO listings for just one year. With US business profitability at essentially record highs for all sizes of business, the article is going to comical lengths to present a false headline. If we had…

Looking at the original analysis, it looks like 108 IPOs, where did you get 30?

https://site.warrington.ufl.edu/ritter/files/2018/01/IPOs201...

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#73

Post by TylerE »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #57
tribune wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus Amazon is Amazon. They've essentially been saying to investors for years "sure, we could make more money for YOU, or give YOU dividends, but WE can do better with your money than YOU could." It's worked, of course, enabling them to grow into the gargantuan enterprise they are today. A smaller company without that proven track record wouldn't get such a license from investors for long.

Wasn't Amazon doing that in their early days, when they didn't have a track record?

Sort of?

I mean unlike 99.9% of the first wave of DotCom startups they managed to avoid actually going bankrupt.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#74

Post by wvenable »

mabbo wrote: post #16

> The king of money-losers, of course, is Amazon, which went years without turning a profit. Instead, it plowed billions of dollars back into its business The key difference with Amazon is that Amazon could choose to be profitable at any time- just raise prices ever so slightly, reducing growth in customer demand, and the stop building out its enormous logistics empire and new businesses. Amazon could have had profit…

I also think there is a key difference between re-investing in the business and simply bribing customers. I'm sure Amazon sold plenty of products at a loss but they also ruthlessly cut costs and found places where they could truly make money.

I feel like a lot of startups are simply using investor money to give unreasonably inexpensive products to customers.

For software companies, there is often a point where growth simply makes you profitable because your costs are relatively fixed. For my own B2B startup, we had plenty of graphs that showed at exactly the point where we no longer subsidizing our customers businesses and instead making a profit. Sadly we ran into a few road blocks and ran out of cash before hitting that golden mark. But, when your costs rise linearly to the number of customers you have, then you can never achieve profitably through growth alone.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#75

Post by walshemj »

Mindwipe wrote: post #47
worldsayshi wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But MoviePass "could also choose to raise prices ever so slightly". It seems very likely it would not work. What's the categorical difference between the two business models? Guess it's the fact that when MoviePass tries to change prices it will force every user to opt in all over again. Opting in is part of the everyday user interaction for Amazon.

MoviePass doesn't have to raise prices ever so slightly to be a viable business. It has to raise prices by significant integer multiples. (And heck, Amazon don't even need to raise prices, they could be very profitable just by investing in growth less. But their investors are clearly happy with the current state of affairs).

Not really could just have tiered prices 6.99 for weekdays before 5:30, 9.99 after - and say 12.99 at the weekends/holidays.

For example my local VUE in the UK I can get a ticket on Mondays for less than $6 full price is $16

I suspect that its the paying up front for a year when a substantial majority of its customers wont goto the cinema

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#76

Post by theNJR »

dalore wrote: post #65

Hmm you laugh, but if you could sell dollar bills at $0.75 but you limited the amount any person could buy. And you made them look at advertising, and collected all sorts of personal info on them. You could easily quite a bit of money off them. More then what you lose in selling the dollar bills at a loss.

They did this in the 90s. I remember I had the All Advantage tool bar running at all times and made like $20 a month.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#77

Post by TylerE »

Mindwipe wrote: post #47
worldsayshi wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But MoviePass "could also choose to raise prices ever so slightly". It seems very likely it would not work. What's the categorical difference between the two business models? Guess it's the fact that when MoviePass tries to change prices it will force every user to opt in all over again. Opting in is part of the everyday user interaction for Amazon.

MoviePass doesn't have to raise prices ever so slightly to be a viable business. It has to raise prices by significant integer multiples. (And heck, Amazon don't even need to raise prices, they could be very profitable just by investing in growth less. But their investors are clearly happy with the current state of affairs).

Raising prices may even make things worse, as it will just narrow their customer base to those that are most expensive to service.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#78

Post by skinnymuch »

empath75 wrote: post #8
andrewjrangel wrote: post #4

I am curious if this will end with a "bubble-burst" or a slow burn like twitter has experienced. Surely the money has to dry up sometime? It is too bad that none of these companies create any kind of net good for society like a startup that pays you over minimum wage to clean up a park or sort recycling.

There will eventually be a pets.com of the tech bubble. Something like Tesla or Uber or Blue Apron going belly up.

Blue Apron stock is barely holding on. It going away won’t do much really. Not compared to the other huge examples.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#79

Post by TylerE »

walshemj wrote: post #75
Mindwipe wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MoviePass doesn't have to raise prices ever so slightly to be a viable business. It has to raise prices by significant integer multiples. (And heck, Amazon don't even need to raise prices, they could be very profitable just by investing in growth less. But their investors are clearly happy with the current state of affairs).

Not really could just have tiered prices 6.99 for weekdays before 5:30, 9.99 after - and say 12.99 at the weekends/holidays. For example my local VUE in the UK I can get a ticket on Mondays for less than $6 full price is $16 I suspect that its the paying up front for a year when a substantial majority of its customers wont goto the cinema

I think you are misreading the business model.

The MoviePass price is per month. There is NO cost per viewing.

You could in theory see up to 31 movies for your single $10 payment.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#80

Post by namanyayg »

autokad wrote: post #55
andrewjrangel wrote: post #4

I am curious if this will end with a "bubble-burst" or a slow burn like twitter has experienced. Surely the money has to dry up sometime? It is too bad that none of these companies create any kind of net good for society like a startup that pays you over minimum wage to clean up a park or sort recycling.

from the article: “The fact that Google and Facebook were able to generate such enormous profits and growth does give hope to some companies,” IF the bubble bursts, companies that seemed profitable might not remain so. companies like Facebook have made a fortune in advertising on things such as mobile (80% of its revenue), which to my knowledge really doesn't work. likewise a lot of desktop adds don't work, but many…

I am curious, why do you believe that ads do not work? Why would large entities continue spending on them otherwise?

I ask because I operate a few businesses that have ROI > 1 on FB ads. I assume larger corporations, especially those like Amazon, Newegg, Fashion Nova, etc would be profiting off of them too.

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