The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now • Hacker News Board

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#211

Post by Shivetya » Thu, May 17, 2018, 10:33 AM UTC

I do not accept putting Amazon and places like Moviepass in the same comparison. I would not even accept Moviepass is comparable to Airbnb/Uber/etc.

I never understood the allure of Moviepass to the investor. So basically you want to buy another companies product and resell it to another party and expect the source company to cave to your demands of partnership? What service are you providing and to who? It is similar to all those attempts to deliver groceries but they mostly failed because they were buying from a source who could care less who bought their product at full price as long as they were paid.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#212

Post by namanyayg » Thu, May 17, 2018, 10:37 AM UTC

autokad wrote: post #161

namanyayg wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have talked to CEO's of ad companies. They use to try and prove how much ROI their adds where. What they found was their large clients didnt want to know. An exec at a large firm would be given a huge add spend budget, and they got that no matter what. Getting numbers that their add spend didnt work would = budget cuts, but a fancy power point presentation with an arrow pointing up so long as sales are good doesnt…

I agree, many companies do not care. I know a guy who does online advertising for a Middle Eastern airline. Many of his campaigns do not work out, he's blown large budgets due to simple mistakes and no one cares, and he's given a budget that he just _has_ to spend. However, campaigns do work; many of the viral content you see has been carefully engineered and propogated by clever ad agencies.

I have to disagree on your opinion about mobiles. Mobile e-commerce is very intuitive and fast for many users (see Kim Kardashian). Consuming and sharing of media on mobile has led to clickbait and some brands have earned big money from that (see Buzzfeed). People scroll through mobiles addictively, and the invention of the "feed" by Zuckerburg combined with targeted advertising has users doing exactly what ad companies have want them to do, whether it be sharing, consuming, or purchasing.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#213

Post by ada1981 » Thu, May 17, 2018, 10:58 AM UTC

Non-paywalled: http://outline.com/ctYCuP

Perhaps this is the redistribution of wealth we’ve been waiting for.

Can I look forward to the AptPass Startup that will pay my rent in Park Slope so they can study my consumption patterns?

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#214

Post by slivym » Thu, May 17, 2018, 11:01 AM UTC

cornholio wrote: post #199

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.

> You can't lose money on every transaction and make it up in volume, as the old joke says. You actually can. It's the oldest trick of the industrial age, mass production and economies of scale. A good rule of thumb is that increasing production of a physical good by a factor of 10 will drop the unit cost by half. For non-tangible goods the effect is even more pronounced. The fist copy of Microsoft Windows might cost…

MoviePass and Amazon Prime aren't the same, because Amazon Prime produces a lot of its own content, and is the consumption point for the other content it serves. Amazon buys the rights to shows, and produces shows - so it has a fixed cost. It then sells access which has practically 0 marginal costs.

MoviePass sells subscriptions and then buys tickets. For each extra subscriber they've got an increase in marginal cost. You might argue they can make a profit by charging more for the subscription than they pay for the tickets, but there's lots of factors working against that:

1. When they IPO their suppliers will know their revenue and can demand high prices to match, seriously threatening their marginal cost.

2. Their suppliers already have scale and so will be difficult to leverage - further hitting marginal cost.

3. Their suppliers are extremely capable of producing a competing product undercutting them- destroying the lock-in component. The suppliers control access to the content not MoviePass.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#215

Post by slivym » Thu, May 17, 2018, 11:10 AM UTC

JansjoFromIkea wrote: post #210

What exactly happens the entertainment industry when MoviePass fails? When Netflix stop deciding to lose colossal sums of money each year and their competitors get to scale back as a result? When a large number of people don't have enough disposable money to justify paying $10 a month on Patreon to a podcast they can get for free? I do feel like the free movie ticket business in general is a bit of a mad bubble that'…

It's not really all straight forward though. Whilst it's true that it's cheaper to get a MoviePass for a month than to buy 2 tickets in that month I can't remember the last time I paid full price for a movie ticket anyway. The cinema industry is basically a chaotic experiment in price discrimination. The most successful Cinema is the one that can get the 50 people willing to pay full price to pay it whilst also giving heavy discounts to the other 200 people to make sure the cinema is full.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#216

Post by rhizome » Thu, May 17, 2018, 11:13 AM UTC

dingo_bat wrote: post #182

reboog711 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Moviepass subscriber, they create a lot of value for me. I can go to any movie I want at any local theater. That is a lot better than subscribing to five different plans, one for each theater.

Well you can just subscribe to the theater closest to you. Why would you want to go to the ones across town?

Different movies.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#217

Post by pcr0 » Thu, May 17, 2018, 11:54 AM UTC

pwinnski wrote: post #94

nraynaud wrote: post #46

Yeah, I am a bit sad to see those Ofo, limebike, Bird going all out in the streets, they are trying to outspend each other for the winner to raise the price. I just want a sustainable shared transportation system.

Ofo has been free to use for many months now, at least in Dallas. Are they counting on the competitors to all fold and leave them the sole market owner? Such weird economics!

1. Yep, they're funded by Alibaba and they've been buying out bankrupted bikeshare companies.

2. Alibaba and Tencent both own competing bikeshare services, so it's a cash-burning contest.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#218

Post by thatthatis » Thu, May 17, 2018, 12:13 PM UTC

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…

In the state of Washington you pay Business tax on revenue.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#219

Post by delecti » Thu, May 17, 2018, 12:46 PM UTC

vasco wrote: post #202

delecti wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They would have profits if they stopped reinvesting the proceeds from retail into new businesses. They wouldn't need to increase their margins or reduce costs, just stop willfully adding new costs.

Stopping adding costs is effectively increasing margins.

They wouldn't need to increase their marginal margins, or increase their margins in existing business ventures. However you'd like to view it.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#220

Post by kgwgk » Thu, May 17, 2018, 12:53 PM UTC

maoistinquisitr wrote: post #131

xkjkls wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

Amazon makes weird non-GAAP claims. In terms of GAAP, Amazon had negative free cash flow of $4.2 billion in Q1.

Free cash flow is a non-GAAP metric. Amazon provides three different free cash flow calculations (depending on how leases are accounted for). In 2015-2017 the corresponding figures are $26.4bn (7.5+10.5+8.4), $14.8bn (4.9+6.5+3.4) and $5.8bn (2.6+4.7-1.5).