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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

#171

Post by sudosteph »

CedarMills wrote: post #22

Quibi has the problem that other platforms like it have: thinking celebrities are the right way to entice people. Luminary Podcasts has the same issue. Majority of gen Z / millennial folks that I know, don't care about Trevor Noah or any of the late night comedians. They care more about famous YouTubers and TikTok stars.

Millenial in the slightly under 30 crowd: There actually are still a few celebrity comedian types that could still pull me (and everyone in my millenial friend group) to subscribe to a new network with original content (Jon Stewart, Dave Chapelle, Dan Harmon), but those guys don't come cheap. Most of my friend group couldn't even name famous Youtubers / TikTok people though, that must be a Gen Z / borderline-Gen-Z millenial thing.

If quibi was actually interested in making stuff to suit millennial taste, they should have focused on absurdist comedy, which is usually short-form anyhow. Stuff like Eric Andre or Adult Swim's "Infomercials" series ("Too Many Cooks", "Unedited Footage of a Bear" + many others that vary from amazingly memorable and funny to unwatchably awful) is exactly the kinda of stuff that I wont invest over 20 minutes in (absurd humor tends to get boring when it loses it's novelty), but whenever I find one that's really good - I'll show it to all of my friends. Having a decent budget, cast and production quality also really makes a big difference with what can be accomplished, so random absurdist youtubers usually can't provide the same experience. The fact that the Reno 911 reboot is the only thing on quibi doing well sort of confirms that the "weird comedy" genre is still underutilized.

Edit: Apparently someone has already written about this trend far more eloquently than I did: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/aug/13/how-did...

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

#172

Post by johnvanommen »

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.

> 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.

There's a great interview with Bryan Cranston, where he's talking about the origins of "Breaking Bad."

Basically AMC wanted to compete with HBO, but they didn't have HBO money. So they gave the creators a limited budget but a lot more creative freedom. AMC basically created an environment where creative people who had a passion project could get it off the ground if they were willing to work for less money.

In particular, Vince Gilligan had to go to the mat for Bryan Cranston, because AMC wanted Gilligan to cast someone else.

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

#173

Post by johnvanommen »

rdlecler1 wrote: post #165
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…

I never understood the fascination with Meg Whitman. The PayPal acquisition did not generate nearly as much value as it could and eBay is terrible, could have been what Amazon is today. I see Meg as greatly benefitting from a rising tide, not great leadership. Maybe her lieutenants have a different take but this is what I see from the outside.

> I see Meg as greatly benefitting from a rising tide, not great leadership. Maybe her lieutenants have a different take but this is what I see from the outside.

I worked at HPE, when Whitman was CEO.

The impression I got, was that she's a bit of a wizard when it comes to finance.

For instance, the organization that I was a part of, we lost a pile of money. But despite that, HPE was able to sell the org off to SuSE.

IE, if Whitman wasn't a wizard, the entire venture may have been a 100% loss. But she was able to flip that organization to another buyer.

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

#175

Post by andreilys »

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…

8% is terrible.

Imagine what the Customer acquisition cost ($10-$20?), that means the customer conversion cost is $125-$250.

With a $5-$8 trial you can see how the economics of this simply do not work.

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

#176

Post by phodo »

mikeryan wrote: post #52
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 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…

Lessons from segway.

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

#177

Post by dwighttk »

bobthepanda wrote: post #149
catalogia wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair point, but both those shows initially found popularity before the streaming era. Is NBC still capable of producing content that people will binge-watch 10-20 years later for a nostalgia kick?

SNL is still fairly popular, as are Brooklyn Nine-nine, Late Night, The Tonight Show, etc. And 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation wrapped up not that long ago. They also do have a major ace up their sleeve as the official American broadcaster of the Olympics.

Do people binge-watch Late Night or Tonight Show episodes from 15 yrs ago? Or even SNL besides individual sketches?

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

#178

Post by thiagocesar »

1123581321 wrote: post #107
baddox wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It doesn’t work like that. A lot of the networks’s and Netflix’s breakout shows were not planned to be great. That might be true for a lot of breakout shows, but not all of them. House of Cards was arguably Netflix' first breakout show, and Netflix outbid other networks for House of Cards when they were just starting to focus on original programming. That was always painted in showbiz media as a very deliberate pla…

We know now that they didn’t really have that data at the time. They just heard Fincher was available and bought his idea unseen for a lot of money so no one else could get to propose to him.

And as soon as they got data involved, the plot quality decreased immensely. By season 3, most people had given up on the show already.

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

#179

Post by thiagocesar »

strgcmc wrote: post #120
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.

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, an…

Absolutely, but that process is absolutely not data driven.

“Feeling” about a show, and connections to the people running are the two major factors driving those decisions.

Data driven shows tend to be forgettable and ignored by newer generations, who are the ones holding their parents’s credit cards, and therefore, a major audience for hit shows.

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

#180

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

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 think it’s a mistake to treat this like a conversion experiment. Trialers at the very first possible release of a service, heavily incentivized by a very lengthy free trial, are not similar to a steady state flow of trialers experiencing more transient promos or test experiences, which is a situation where conversion modeling makes sense.

This is not a funnel experiment. This is a huge pile of people specifically seeking out a special event at a launch, so the composition and intent of that is expected to be way, way, way more favorable than general steady state.

It’s like if concert tickets went on sale and everyone is camping in tents to buy them on the first day, and then when the booth opens and people listen to the free sample, 90% of them just pack up and go home.

That’s a much, much worse situation than if only 1/10 people who see an ad for the album choose to buy it on iTunes, whole different ballgame, funnel composition, intent model, everything.

10% conversion on a massive launch promo is drastic failure. This is not at all like getting 10% conversion on a funnel with low intent.

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