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The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

nytimes.com

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Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#81

Post by michaelt »

dragontamer wrote: post #18
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.

Pets.com is probably the wrong example from the 90s. Webvan.com is a bit better: hundreds of millions spent on actual warehouses, trucks and more. Pets.com clearly overspent on advertising, but I don't think they risked too many assets on the line. So when Pets.com eventually died, it wasn't a big deal. Its funny, because they had superbowl commercials and huge outreach. But nothing like like Webvan's huge warehouses…

Advertising seems like a good description of the subsidy applied by Uber and Blue Apron?

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#82

Post by __jal »

dragontamer wrote: post #18
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.

Pets.com is probably the wrong example from the 90s. Webvan.com is a bit better: hundreds of millions spent on actual warehouses, trucks and more. Pets.com clearly overspent on advertising, but I don't think they risked too many assets on the line. So when Pets.com eventually died, it wasn't a big deal. Its funny, because they had superbowl commercials and huge outreach. But nothing like like Webvan's huge warehouses…

I recall Webvan well. Still have a few of their crates holding stuff in my attic[1].

No idea what it looked like elsewhere, but their spending blitz in the Bay Area was incredible. Everywhere you looked, there was their name. For a little while...

[1] When they first launched, they used really high-quality, solid crates for deliveries that were well worth the too-cheap deposit.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#83

Post by adventured »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #72
adventured wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

In that PDF it breaks out the number of tech and biotech IPOs.

66% of the "other" category (ie everything else) reported being profitable. Something the article goes out of its way to not mention.

The 30 tech IPOs and the 32 biotech IPOs dramatically tilt the number of unprofitable listings as a percentage.

If you only have 108 IPOs and 32 are biotechs, which are almost always unprofitable, you start with an extreme tilt.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#84

Post by samfisher83 »

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…

Building out warehouses does not hurt earnings. The whole point of accounting is to try to match revenue with cost. If you build a warehouse you don't expense it one time. It gets expensed over time.

If they develop software than that is treated as expense or buy movies that gets expensed.

Their core retail business is not that profitable. It goes from 0-3%. Its pretty much the same as walmart or any other retailer.

AWS is more profitable than their entire retail business.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#85

Post by jessaustin »

TylerE wrote: post #79
walshemj wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can't think of a month in which I wanted to see three movies in current release...

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#86

Post by privexpert5 »

This business model makes sense for some products, like Snapchat. Get as many users as possible and maybe eventually the advertising revenue will pay off.

Focusing on monetization early makes for successful businesses, but good products happen because they fix or solve a problem --not because they make money.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#87

Post by pwinnski »

djrogers wrote: post #70
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…

No, I think the key difference with Amazon is that they aren't losing money on each individual transaction - ie selling everything at a loss. Amazon's non-profits were due to aggressive reinvestment, not pricing.

Exactly! It's the difference between losing money on a macro-level and losing it on a micro-level. You can't lose money on every transaction and make it up in volume, as the old joke says. But you can make money on every transaction and choose to invest it in expansion, so that you lose money overall.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#89

Post by stcredzero »

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…

> 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

Because Amazon isn't about making short term profits. Amazon is about becoming the middleman for as much of the economy as possible by facilitating the transformation of the economy into its network/computation intermediated version. Amazon isn't so much a money loser as it is an economy absorber. It has been that since before day zero. That idea predated the notion that Amazon would sell books.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#90

Post by Apocryphon »

nerfhammer wrote: post #5

thank goodness so many people are smarter than those darn goofy VCs. Businesses competing for customers! It's flagrant hubris. Those Silicon Valley guys who became billionaires doing this still have no idea what they are doing. I am pretty sure they have a big comeuppance due to them.

Making big money through unsustainable business models is not a sign of healthy capitalism. Remember CDOs?
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