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The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

nytimes.com

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Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#121

Post by jwhitlark »

pwinnski wrote: post #87
djrogers wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It appears that moviepass is mostly an arbitrage play,where amazon is not....

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#122

Post by dsr_ »

supertrope wrote: post #102
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.

My economics professor auctioned $1. Someone bought it above par.

The lesson your class was supposed to learn is that people aren't always rational. Did they?

(And did your economics class then go on to assume everyone is perfectly rational and understands their own utility functions, anyway?)

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#123

Post by walshemj »

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.

But normal people wont they will see 1 or 2

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#124

Post by xkjkls »

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…

Actually the biggest key is a distinction between profitability and cash flow. Amazon has been cash flow positive since 2001. Sure, it spent huge number of years burning cash building it's revenue from $2 billion in 2001 to $200 billion today, but because they have a structure where they don't have to pay their suppliers until close to 3-4 months after the collect from their customers, they can sustain that without needing to raise outside cash.

That's a huge distinction, if you start having to raise more debt or equity in order to fund your growth it's going to negatively impact the long term free cash flow per share of your business and will make it harder for your to generate outsized returns.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#125

Post by lozenge »

blueyes wrote: post #112

Joel Spolsky addressed this, much more insightfully, in one of his early strategy letters: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/12/strategy-letter-i-... There are real reasons why companies like MoviePass exist, why companies like Snap lose money, and why investors back them. It's just a land grab where you have to move fast to establish dominance.

Snap I can understand, but MoviePass not. People can easily switch to another subscription.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#126

Post by xkjkls »

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?

I'm sure they ran a lot of experiments in the earlier wild west days of e-commerce that wouldn't look so great today, but we've learned a lot about what a successful e-commerce business looks like since then.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#127

Post by xkjkls »

Ensorceled wrote: post #25
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…

Exactly, "years without turning a profit" is very different than "years burning through rounds of investor cash without hope of ever turning a profit".

Exactly! Cash flow =/= profit.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#128

Post by ironjunkie »

vinhboy wrote: post #9

> Enjoy It While You Can I love the conclusion of this article. As someone who has participated in the online "deals" community for 10+ years, I have definitely benefitted from many of the opportunities. However, I do spend a considerable amount of time wondering what will happen when this house of cards comes falling down. But you know, I think that for every one person like me taking advantage of these "arbitrage"…

I don't think the house of cards is going to fall. In this case what is happening is that the money made in a few lucky startups (Facebook, Gogole etc) are reinvested into those trials.

In the end, it is the circle of life, A few mega winners are subsidizing those losing experiments. We should be there to take advantages of those as we are usually paying the price to the huge winning ones (indirectly, but still)

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#129

Post by StanislavPetrov »

Veelox wrote: post #111
StanislavPetrov wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This only means that the FED hasn't been increasing its purchases since 2014. It has maintained an over $4 Trillion (trillion with a T) balance sheet, and it continues to roll this money over. Ending QE would mean stopping repurchasing and letting the balance sheet shrink - quite different in substance and effect than tapering. https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren... This also ignores the fact…

If you think the bubble is going to pop you should take out some options and you should be able to make a killing.

There's no question its going to pop - the question is when. It could be tomorrow, or it could be 5 years from now. Certainly central banks are going to do everything in their power to prop up the markets with continued equity and bond purchasing to delay the inevitable as long as possible - which will make the pop that much louder when it does come to pass.

Free markets are based on price discovery. Central bank purchasing destroys price discovery by artificially creating demand. Its simply a matter of basic logic. Either central banks end their purchasing and demand falls to its organic level, or they continue to accelerate their purchases and increase the artificial disparity. In addition, as the share of markets owned by central banks increases the liquidity of markets decreases, meaning that when there is a crash those running for the exit will find the door much smaller.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#130

Post by doingmything »

jwhitlark wrote: post #121
pwinnski wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It appears that moviepass is mostly an arbitrage play,where amazon is not....

I wouldn’t even call it arbitrage. There is usually some gain in the difference in price with an arbitrage
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