📡 An easy place to hide 👀

Sniffing at the others who care is a form of virtue signalling. It’s also an ineffective way to create real change.

“My Prius Hybrid gets 140 miles per gallon.”

“My Tesla is solar powered.”

“Really, well I take an electric scooter.”

“We carpool by sharing a horse.”

“A horse? You should walk!”

This misses the real problem: The 1998 Chevy Suburban, with just one person on board, doing a forty-mile commute at 12 miles per gallon.

The same goes for ranking elected officials on who is the most perfect on the issue we care about.

The people who are paying attention are the ones who are trying. And shaming people who are trying because they’re not perfect is a terrific way to discourage them from trying. On the other hand, the core of every system is filled with the status quo, a status quo that isn’t even paying attention.

Focusing the group’s energy on shutting down stripped-mine coal is going to make far more impact than scolding the few who are trying.

From Seth Godin’s blog.

Netflix’s latest quarterly results saw the company bounce back from a Q2 slump in subscriber growth. While the net addition of 500,000 paid users in the U.S. fell well short of its 800,000 forecast, international growth outstripped predictions, recording a net 6.3 million - 100,000 more than expected. In combination with profits which far exceeded forecasts, share prices were up 8 percent in after-hours trading. To Netflix, subscriber growth is what iPhone sales are to Apple: the one metric that Wall Street tends to focus on, because it’s well-known that the company’s strategy of spending billions of dollars on content will only work if its subscriber base continues to grow.

Over the past twelve months, Netflix spent more than $13.5 billion on streaming content. Add to that $4.9 billion in content payments due within 12 months of September 30 and another $3.4 billion due in more than a year, and it becomes clear why the company’s shareholders are itching for new subscribers.

The beauty of Netflix’s gamble on making its own content is that the cost of producing a show is the same regardless of whether 10, 100 or 500 million people are watching it. Once the company reaches a certain number of paying subscribers, the business will carry itself nicely. For now, however, it doesn’t: Netflix burned through $2.9 billion in cash over the past 12 months, which is why its shareholders will continue to keep a keen eye on the company’s subscriber growth.

via Statista.

A lot of the popular online streaming services see their popularity driven by viewers with children – especially those with at least a handful of them. 

Large families are over twice as likely to use the largest streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video on their phones and/or tablets than childless households. Though it is not necessarily a video service, Google Play Games also sees a strong, almost deterministic relationship between household size and reach – further indicating the need for accessible entertainment in a large household. 

With larger households, there is a greater need for entertainment, but there also appears to be more competition for that entertainment as apps/sites like these each see elevated reach levels when households have children.

Read more on VertoAnalytics.

A thread of people trying to buy @chris on Instagram from Chris Messina… and it’s hilarious! ↓

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See you next week! 👋