I find the overall economics of subscription TV services like Netflix to be fascinating. Look at this from Netflix's perspective:
- Viewers watching shows costs money to pay for networking.
- Producings shows cost money.
- Consumers pay the same amount regardless of how much they watch.
Sort of like a gym membership, the ideal Netflix customer never actually uses Netflix. But, of course, if Netflix had no shows and someone didn't use it at all, they'll eventually cancel the subscription. If Netflix were the only game in town, then its incentive would be to produce the fewest, shittiest (i.e. cheapest) shows they can and have its customers watch just enough to not bother canceling.
But now that there are other subscription services, they have to compete against them. Customers can and do pay for multiple subscription services, but there is an innate limit to how many it makes sense to have in parallel: your watch time is finite.
I witnessed this in game dev when MMOs first got big. There was a big rush where every game company thought MMOs would be the next big thing. But almost all of them died, because it turns out even gamers who love MMOs can really only afford the time to keep up with one or two. The market was a lot more competitive and limited than they realized.
This is less true for TV shows since there is less social interaction and need to "commit" to a show than to a game. You don't have to worry about leaving your guild behind, etc. But there is still a limit to how many shows a person can watch, which means the marginal value of adding another subscription goes down very quickly.
I think that's the main thing driving Netflix's strategy. They aren't trying to earn customers so much as they are trying to starve competitors and claim territory.
To claim territory, what they want to do is soak up as much watch time as possible. If people are constantly watching Netflix shows—even if they barely enjoy doing so!—it makes their other subscriptions less utilized and thus less valuable.
Given that, I think it makes some sense for them to just throw a ton of shit at the wall and see what sticks. Their main goal is that is to have something just good enough to watch show up in a search result when a viewer is trying to decide what to spend their evening on.
Of course, none of this incentivizes telling meaningful, important, gratifying stories about the human condition. But Netflix, like every large corporation, doesn't care on whit about that. They turn human attention into shareholder value. The fact that they happen to create films ("content" as they say) to do so is mostly incidental, in the same way that cattle ranchers happen to buy a lot of corn.