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Quibi reportedly lost 90 percent of early users after their free trials expired

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Re: Quibi reportedly lost 90 percent of early users after their free trials expired

#111

Post by S33V »

sulam wrote: post #21
crazygringo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exact benchmarks are going to vary per product, but yeah it's bad. For free trials where you don't provide billing info in advance (e.g. a lot of software 30-day trials) 8% would be a great rate. Because the default do-nothing action is nothing. But for subscription services where you do provide billing info in advance, 8% retention is pretty terrible. If 92% of people are taking the effort to cancel, when the defaul…

The largest cohort with these premium services take the free trial and then immediately cancel. Then you have to earn them back.

Do you have a source with that? Based off of the majority of my family members it seems like that would be the opposite. I wouldn't be surprised that there's a correlation between tech-savvy individuals and those who cancel straight to subscription trials right away.

Re: Quibi reportedly lost 90 percent of early users after their free trials expired

#112

Post by JadoJodo »

root_axis wrote: post #110
thiagocesar wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple, Quibi, Amazon are trying to plan the perfect breakout show. It doesn’t work like that. A lot of the networks’s and Netflix’s breakout shows were not planned to be great. That’s why they just greenlight a bunch of random pilots and see what sticks to the wall. It’s extremely hard to create hits.

HBO seems to be able to consistently churn out hits, and not just "hits" but cultural touchtones that ripple throughout pop-culture.

But they also have a history of original programming that dates back to the early 90s (and earlier). They've had time to perfect those ripples.

Re: Quibi reportedly lost 90 percent of early users after their free trials expired

#114

Post by JadoJodo »

Obviously this is anecdata but: I've not been drawn to Quibi at all because I've tried to be MORE purposeful in my entertainment choices ("I feel like watching that new Funny Movie tonight"), not less ("Eh, I've got 10-minutes until the dentist calls me in. Better fill that with a random thing on Quibi").

Re: Quibi reportedly lost 90 percent of early users after their free trials expired

#115

Post by marrone12 »

Elidrake24 wrote: post #70

I really wanted to like Quibi. I enjoyed the Most Dangerous Game romp, I really loved the daily updates from the BBC, and overall the idea of content specifically made for ~10 minute sprints work perfectly for me. The rest of the content though... Pretty bad, at least to me. One daily show isn't enough to keep me around. Anyone know of a solid, ~15 minute daily news report similar to what the BBC was offering on Quib…

Reuters used to have a short form news update at https://reuters.tv but it seems like they shut it down earlier this year.

Re: Quibi reportedly lost 90 percent of early users after their free trials expired

#116

Post by sixothree »

jm4 wrote: post #105
mikeryan wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in this industry and generally agree with your assessment. However a few things, the general industry perspective went like this: 1. David Katzenberg and Meg Whitman were creating a consumer service targeting a demographic they don't fit in a field they've not worked in. (Consumer apps for a younger demographic) 2. They got 1.8 Billion in funding. For fuck's sake you should get one breakout hit piece of conten…

Their mistake is they're trying to do something that all the other established players could essentially replicate overnight. Their big innovation is the shows are shorter? On top of it, their execution is poor. They put out the standard shows you would see anywhere else except edited so that a single episode turns into a half dozen shorter ones. They pretty much positioned themselves out in no man's land between Net…

I remember the early days of podcasts going commercial the group think was that they should be short. I believe companies like Discovery put out podcasts that were maybe 4 minutes tops. That thinking was just as oblivious.

Re: Quibi reportedly lost 90 percent of early users after their free trials expired

#117

Post by gimmeThaBeet »

ObsoleteNerd wrote: post #14

8% is not a terrible conversion rate at all, and they’ve only just started. I’m not a Quibi user and have no vested interest in them either way but this is the third different article I’ve seen in the last week or 2 talking about how terrible they’re doing and now they’re about to crash and burn, because of an 8% conversion? Comparing them to Disney is ridiculous too, it’s Disney! With multiple generations obsessed w…

I guess that's fair enough, it is admittedly difficult to separate that I am personally not interested in Quibi vs I don't see why it could succeed.

I guess the two things it boils down to is their place in the market, and who their customers are?

- I think Netflix speaks for itself. - Disney+/Hulu has the power of the catalog, generations of IP, and creatives to leverage it. - HBO is HBO if ATT can manage to keep it that way. - Amazon has quite a few good things going on imo, and it helps a lot that its just attached to prime.

So now with these players, we're very much at the point of marginal overload. Why do I want your service? What do you have that no one else does?

So I guess what I'm really interested in is who that 8% is? In what ways does Quibi work, because I already feel like I have an idea/opinion of how it doesn't work.

Re: Quibi reportedly lost 90 percent of early users after their free trials expired

#118

Post by evanelias »

qwe098cube wrote: post #65

I never understood their pitch in first place. Why pay for quick bites when I get decent content (~10min) for free on youtube? Generally, I would assume people watch netflix/amazon/disney content for entertainment and expect their originals to be of the usual or slight longer duration. That's content to enjoy watching over a longer period of time. People like this format, hence binge watching is a thing. I can't see…

Verizon attempted a similar content/audience strategy to Quibi several years ago, with their content platform called go90 [1]. Their pitch centered around the lack of 15-20 minute video content with high production values, and the assumption that this type of content would be successful with millennials and commuters.

They burned over $1B and it was a colossal failure -- apparently so forgettable that none of the coverage on Quibi even mentions it.

One major difference: go90 was a free service, and it was even zero-rated for Verizon Wireless customers (i.e. didn't count against subscriber data caps). Yet it remained a failure across several attempted pivots before Verizon threw in the towel completely.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go90

Re: Quibi reportedly lost 90 percent of early users after their free trials expired

#119

Post by reedwolf »

thiagocesar wrote: post #59
mikeryan wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in this industry and generally agree with your assessment. However a few things, the general industry perspective went like this: 1. David Katzenberg and Meg Whitman were creating a consumer service targeting a demographic they don't fit in a field they've not worked in. (Consumer apps for a younger demographic) 2. They got 1.8 Billion in funding. For fuck's sake you should get one breakout hit piece of conten…

Apple, Quibi, Amazon are trying to plan the perfect breakout show. It doesn’t work like that. A lot of the networks’s and Netflix’s breakout shows were not planned to be great. That’s why they just greenlight a bunch of random pilots and see what sticks to the wall. It’s extremely hard to create hits.

>Apple, Quibi, Amazon are trying to plan the perfect breakout show.

Apple is making a series out of Isaac Asimov's Foundation books. [0] :-D

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgbPSA94Rqg

Re: Quibi reportedly lost 90 percent of early users after their free trials expired

#120

Post by strgcmc »

thiagocesar wrote: post #59
mikeryan wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in this industry and generally agree with your assessment. However a few things, the general industry perspective went like this: 1. David Katzenberg and Meg Whitman were creating a consumer service targeting a demographic they don't fit in a field they've not worked in. (Consumer apps for a younger demographic) 2. They got 1.8 Billion in funding. For fuck's sake you should get one breakout hit piece of conten…

Apple, Quibi, Amazon are trying to plan the perfect breakout show. It doesn’t work like that. A lot of the networks’s and Netflix’s breakout shows were not planned to be great. That’s why they just greenlight a bunch of random pilots and see what sticks to the wall. It’s extremely hard to create hits.

There's a not-very visible but nonetheless real amount of planning and "portfolio management" that goes on behind the scenes into choosing which ostensibly "random pilots" to produce. Yes it's kind of a "reptilian" strategy by design (as opposed to "mammalian", focus-on-one-baby-at-a-time), but there is a lot of careful selection done, even if the results look random. More and more, this is a data/ML-driven space, and less and less reliant on human expertise (with human insights but also human blindspots and biases).
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