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The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

nytimes.com

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Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#161

Post by autokad »

namanyayg wrote: post #80
autokad wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

from the article: “The fact that Google and Facebook were able to generate such enormous profits and growth does give hope to some companies,” IF the bubble bursts, companies that seemed profitable might not remain so. companies like Facebook have made a fortune in advertising on things such as mobile (80% of its revenue), which to my knowledge really doesn't work. likewise a lot of desktop adds don't work, but many…

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 get questioned.

What did the add companies have to say about mobile? most of the time, if something gets clicked, its because they were intoxicated and accidentally did so.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#162

Post by kuschku »

dragontamer wrote: post #18
empath75 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will eventually be a pets.com of the tech bubble. Something like Tesla or Uber or Blue Apron going belly up.

Pets.com is probably the wrong example from the 90s. Webvan.com is a bit better: hundreds of millions spent on actual warehouses, trucks and more. Pets.com clearly overspent on advertising, but I don't think they risked too many assets on the line. So when Pets.com eventually died, it wasn't a big deal. Its funny, because they had superbowl commercials and huge outreach. But nothing like like Webvan's huge warehouses…

Or take a look at Cargolifter. They wanted to carry goods with Zeppelins around the world. Their facilities are still the largest free standing buildings on the planet, with an entire tropical resort in the former main hangar.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#163

Post by johnvanommen »

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…

Nearly all of the most profitable Internet companies are platforms:

* eBay is a platform for sellers to connect with buyers

* Many think that Amazon is a online retailer, but it's not; it's a platform. A huge percentage of the items sold on Amazon are owned by small businesses who are leveraging Amazon's platform (website, warehouses, logistics, delivery.) If eBay had been more ambitious, eBay could've replicated what Amazon has done.

* Facebook is a platform for people to connect with other people

* even Google is a platform; it's basically taken the entire Internet and added ads to it. The Internet itself is Google's content, and that content was created by other people

And that's why MoviePass is doomed. If MoviePass had become a platform where movie theaters could unload excess inventory, then it could succeed, but the current model is simply selling movie tickets at a loss.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#164

Post by johnvanommen »

scarface74 wrote: post #158
TylerE wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of? I mean unlike 99.9% of the first wave of DotCom startups they managed to avoid actually going bankrupt.

They got lucky and secured a line of credit right before the bust.

That was a dark time. I was living and working near Seattle, and there were basically seven big employers for techies:

* Microsoft * Boeing * T-Mobile * WaMu * Amazon * Concur * Real Networks

And three of the seven were in severe financial distress. It was like, "hmmm is it time to leave Seattle?"

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#165

Post by johnvanommen »

andrewjrangel wrote: post #4

I am curious if this will end with a "bubble-burst" or a slow burn like twitter has experienced. Surely the money has to dry up sometime? It is too bad that none of these companies create any kind of net good for society like a startup that pays you over minimum wage to clean up a park or sort recycling.

The thing that was different about the Dot Com Bubble is that it felt like the whole Internet thing might have been overrated. There was definitely a feeling of "perhaps we were all wrong about what the Internet can be."

I think that's a big part of the reason that the crash was so deep and epic; there were a lot of people who felt like it might just be a fad.

Keep in mind that when the bubble burst in Y2K, Netscape Navigator was less than six years old!

In a lot of respects, the dot com bubble was similar to the videogame crash of 1983. In 1983, everyone thought video games were a fad that had passed.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#166

Post by johnvanommen »

irln wrote: post #134
arcbyte wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Surely the money has to dry up sometime? Yup, this fall. By the close of 2018 all the world's central banks will be in quantitative tightening after having spent the past 10 years perpetuating an unprecedented level of quantitative easing.

Three data points: Fed Balance Sheet https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WALCL Fed Balance Sheet hasn't been reduced in any meaningful way. Bank credit: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TOTBKCR Bank's have themselves continued increasing the money supply. Worldwide debt: https://www.iif.com/publication/global-debt-monitor/global-d... Random snippet from Q32017

Well that's the stuff of nightmares.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#167

Post by johnvanommen »

acd wrote: post #99

Central banks are pumping out new money in form debt of close to zero interest rates. This is below market rate interest rates if the market would freely choose the interest rate would be higher. The new money flows to automation in startups that makes processes cheaper. Thus the central banks are not creating inflation through salary inflation they are creating deflation through automation. Robots on average replace…

Interesting.

I've long thought that the ZIRP policies of the last ten years had the exact OPPOSITE effect of what was intended. The idea of ZIRP was that the Fed would inflate house prices, and this would keep homeowners from defaulting on their mortgages.

But the truth was that many homeowners only "owned" a tiny fraction of their home. Often as little as 5-10% of what they paid for it. So if their home price dropped by even 15%, they were underwater.

This created a cascade of defaults. Then gasoline was added to the fire, when the government began to forgive the capital gains of walking away from a home that was underwater.

This created a scenario where thousands of people walked away from their homes, and then large hedge funds scooped up thousands of properties for pennies on the dollar.

Naturally, prices recovered eventually, but then the former homeowners were now renters, and the rent was prohibitively expensive. To a large degre because the value of the dollar had been devalued to prop up prices in the first place.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#168

Post by marcosdumay »

namanyayg wrote: post #80
autokad wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

from the article: “The fact that Google and Facebook were able to generate such enormous profits and growth does give hope to some companies,” IF the bubble bursts, companies that seemed profitable might not remain so. companies like Facebook have made a fortune in advertising on things such as mobile (80% of its revenue), which to my knowledge really doesn't work. likewise a lot of desktop adds don't work, but many…

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.

Next time you use some ad supported app, take notice on the share of the ads are are for some other ad supported company.

That is the share of the market that will vanish in a bubble pop. On my experience, it's something around 90%, but YMMV.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#169

Post by ShabbosGoy »

doingmything wrote: post #130
jwhitlark wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s not arbitrage, it’s “let’s burn all our runway til the next round”.
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