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Netflix's Annual Reports (10-Ks) used to be a work of art. What happened?

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Re: Netflix's Annual Reports (10-Ks) used to be a work of art. What happened?

#51

Annual Report: A corporation's annual report is usually a colored, professionally presented, and marketable document intended for an audience of shareholders. 10-K: The 10-K report is submitted to the SEC in a generic format, with no pictures or charts. The SEC has very strict guidelines on what information must be included and how it must be organized. Source: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/102714/what-are…

Like the ideas of reading 10K more efficiently. But to me, the text interface of Last10k could not deliver this promise. Visualization is IMO a much better way to quickly grasp information.

Re: Netflix's Annual Reports (10-Ks) used to be a work of art. What happened?

#52
Why not doing two versions of the annual reports? One in plain text to meet the regulator’s requirement and the other one, shorter but more creative for the general audience and building of brand awareness? I believe it’s totally worth it.

Re: Netflix's Annual Reports (10-Ks) used to be a work of art. What happened?

#54
I think it was honestly just a trend. Back then you used to have design students making annual reports for fun so they'd have something to pad out their portfolios. I'd wager that sort of thing is now towards the bottom of the list for most.

Re: Netflix's Annual Reports (10-Ks) used to be a work of art. What happened?

#55

Annual Report: A corporation's annual report is usually a colored, professionally presented, and marketable document intended for an audience of shareholders. 10-K: The 10-K report is submitted to the SEC in a generic format, with no pictures or charts. The SEC has very strict guidelines on what information must be included and how it must be organized. Source: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/102714/what-are…

Does this mean that Netflix produced two documents that they both called 10-K's? One pretty and one generic?

Re: Netflix's Annual Reports (10-Ks) used to be a work of art. What happened?

#56
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like the newest buzz in biz - "Business Intelligence".

Not new anymore, that started with the "Big Data" craze back around ~2012/2013. But at the core it makes sense - it's just businesses making better use of the tons of data their systems are generating.

I was about to dispute this because of my experience using the term widely in late 2008-2010 range but Google Trends shows you are probably more accurate on timing. I work in corp finance and BI was pushed on us early.

Re: Netflix's Annual Reports (10-Ks) used to be a work of art. What happened?

#57
One of the reasons might be, that the SEC mandated all filers to submit the reports in XBRL Format starting in 2009 (foreign private issuers using IFRS followed 2017). It’s called Interactive Data by SEC and requires to tag each and every value with an XML element to give it an accounting meaning. The XBRL tools have not been able at that time to convert PDF or InDesign files, so all reports look rather ugly since then. I’m head of development team that invented a PDF Tagger; we sold it like warm bread during last month, because all EU listed companies are also mandated to submit iXBRL now. Btw, the cover page always looks that ugly because it must be the „form“ template from SEC.

Here is a link to a more pretty report, also having XBRL tags: https://www.gleif.org/assets/components/xbrl-viewer/gleif-an...

Re: Netflix's Annual Reports (10-Ks) used to be a work of art. What happened?

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adobe used to do these designy annual reports as well [1], and it looks like they stopped in 2003. I wonder if something in that era encouraged them to knock it off. Edit: for Adobe, it may have coincided with significantly cutting back their Marketing/Communications department, which had a huge staff of really great artists in the 90's. I believe this became viewed as an extravagance to have a stable of really talen…

SarBox came out around that time. No one was in the mood to be cute at that time.

What is impressive to me is, it still shows there is demand from accountants/investors and offer from authors for artistically pleasing documents.

It dwindled out, but it is similar to corporate websites like SAP which were boring to death and made life in corporate a bane (we should study suicide and boredom-from-boring-documents in corporates), until all layers of management were naturally attracted to software created by little startups, even if it didn’t track time correctly, but it was cuter and nicer and didn’t require IE7.

Boredom-from-documents-and-websites is a key factor for people’s choice of employment...

Re: Netflix's Annual Reports (10-Ks) used to be a work of art. What happened?

#59
post #46
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you have to mail them back when you were done reading?

Nah, sending them out was required [0] and the web wasn't the defacto medium for invesetor info not that long ago. They were all pretty fancy [1]. [0] https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/investing-ba... . [1] https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2334524.m...

Hint: Netflix used to require subscribers to send the bytes of the video back to Netflix.

Re: Netflix's Annual Reports (10-Ks) used to be a work of art. What happened?

#60

Annual Report: A corporation's annual report is usually a colored, professionally presented, and marketable document intended for an audience of shareholders. 10-K: The 10-K report is submitted to the SEC in a generic format, with no pictures or charts. The SEC has very strict guidelines on what information must be included and how it must be organized. Source: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/102714/what-are…

Possibly not the exact problem here, but it’s a general one I have with citizen journalism: writing up the “scoop” instead of reaching out for comment.
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