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Comment by essem | Hacker News Reader

Racial segregation is a stretch. They do not block you from subscribing if you're not black.

Realistically though, how many white people would pay for a platform with all black content, one that they are told is explicitly not for them?

My understanding is that they may not need to cater to white people, but they also don't need to exclude them either. Black hair often has a texture that requires specialized hair products and the people who make them can make a ton of money. It isn't excluding white people to cater to black people.

I'm not saying they're excluding them. Black hair products are a great analogy actually. Virtually no white people buy them, and virtually no white people will sub to a platform like this. There will likely be slightly more white subscribers to Black Oak than there are white users of black hair care products, but my point is the number will be very small. That's OK. Its not marketed to them.

Black hair products can be a thriving business, just as this potentially can be as well.

You need to justify how "for <group>" is exclusionary, as opposed to it's normal meaning of "focusing on <group>".

It is a big market actually. Kendi has made a lot of money off of the amount of whites that enjoy and pay to be told they are bad ppl with white privilege.

Crunchyroll keeps getting mentioned here, as a success story. Certainly, they focus nearly exclusively on Japanese content.

But they in no way market to Japanese, or Asians in general. I think that is the key.

You should be marketing "black content for everybody", not "content for black people". Sure, the segment that responds will be heavily slanted to certain demographics, but at least you aren't putting up artificial barriers, and you'll stir up a lot less upfront negative reactions.

Unless controversy is part of the marketing strategy, which is risky, but sometimes works.

I am not persuaded those numbers would look better with different messaging but the same content.

No, but the exclusive intent has been made clear with the title "Netflix for black people".

Feels like some kind of "Outrage marketing" strategy, I mean, look how this thread has blown up over the last hour. I'm sure the OP is smart and knew what they were doing when wording this post.

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